Last night, Ottermack, Cyber and I teamed up to enter the Trials of Osiris. Ottermack was already a ToO veteran with a couple 9-0 runs under his belt. Cyber and I were going in for the first time.

Wow. SO. MUCH. FUN.

The Trials are intense, nerve-wracking, stressful, exciting, and thrilling.

Before we entered our first match, Ottermack inspected our gear and gave us a few tips. There are a few loadout-related things to consider; armor that speeds up revives is useful, Rockets seem to be a better choice than machine guns in the heavy weapon slot, pick a primary weapon that you're most comfortable with, since you'll get the majority of your kills that way. But the most important advice he gave us was to focus on communicating and maneuvering as a team. At the end of the day, your gear is secondary to your ability to move and position yourselves better than your enemy.

With that in mind, we went in and ripped through the opposition for a flawless 9-0 record.

It wasn't easy. We had several intense matches, including this near-blowout that resulted in the comeback of the night:

Ottermack's advice rang through my head as we completed that nail-biter. Despite the fact that I personally felt thoroughly out-gunned by the enemy throughout the match, we were able to out-maneuver them and secure the win.

Our final match wasn't quite as close, but still delivered some fantastic back and forth as 2 evenly-matched teams fought hard right to the end:

Completing a flawless victory wasn't quite as exhilarating as our successful Flawless Raider runs, but it was the closest I've come while playing Destiny (far more rewarding than beating Prison of Elders).

I was worried going in that Trials of Osiris would prove too frustrating for me, but strangely enough I found it far less frustrating than vanilla Destiny PvP. The fact that we were winning certainly helped, but even when we lost rounds there was a sense of "fairness" to the whole thing. I think the secret ingredient is that the shorter rounds and overall lack of heavy ammo mitigate the prevalence of insta-death baloney runs so rampant in most crucible matches. There's 1 round where heavy ammo is on the table, and it becomes the central focus of that round. In most matches, each player will likely only get 1 chance to use their super, almost always during the final round. It's exciting because everyone involved is pretty much on an even playing field; you don't have enemy teams chaining supers for half the game while your teammates walk in to golden gun after golden gun.

With all that stuff minimized, Destiny's core combat (gunplay, melee, grenades) become the focus. And it makes the game so much better.

The icing on the cake is of course the hidden location on Mercury that is made available to you upon completing a flawless victory. Beautiful area with some of my favorite music in the game. I can only hope the Lighthouse is made available to everyone at some point.