Had a blast playing Trials of Osiris with TheeChaos and Cody last night. after a few warm up games we started a fresh ticket and steamrolled our way to the Lighthouse in 7 straight wins. Not going to do my usual Trials write up (not yet, at least) but I thought it might be helpful to post a few tips and suggestions based on our run last night.

This week's map is Black Shield. Definitely an interesting map for Trials of Osiris. It is probably one of the more "flankable" maps in the game; no matter where you are, there are multiple ways for you to flank or be flanked. Because of this, I found that staying together as a team is even more important here than on some other maps. We rarely found success splitting up, and we constantly punished enemy teams who attempted to spread out and hit from multiple angles.

There are 3 basic ways that rounds tend to shake out on this map:

1) Long-range gunfights outside

2) Short-range clusterfuck inside

3) Standoff between a team outside and a team inside

This video is a great example of all 3 situations. It begins with an outdoor gunfight, moves to a couple standoff rounds between the inside and outside, another outdoor round, then ends with a couple indoor clusterfuck rounds.

Notice how dangerous snipers are during the standoff rounds, and how effective grenades are when battling the enemy team indoors.

Another important thing about Trials on Black Shield: matches can be very long. With so much potential for standoffs, we had many rounds reach or get close to overtime. With the average game lasting between 10-15 minutes, it is important to stay focused and patient. Don't get sloppy just because you are in a hurry to wrap things up.

Here's a great example of a long match with plenty of back-and-forth between both teams. After a couple failed attempts holding the outside, we turned things around by pushing hard indoors and holding the center room. We ended up winning 5-4 because the enemy team got reckless trying to pick us off.

Another great, long match with lots of flanking and counter-flanking:

Finally, an example of how not to approach this (or any other) map. Both teams rushed the middle indoor room. We stomped the other team. But they just kept doing the same thing, round after round. It was quite funny, and a nice way to end our tickets for the night.

Good luck to everyone jumping into the final Trials of Osiris of year 1! Hope this helps a little bit.