Flawless. It’s the single most elusive word in the Destiny lexicon, one indicating either an immense amount of PvP skill, luck or something else entirely.
My flawless run in Destiny 2’s Trials of the Nine was in the third category.
I’ve never been to the Lighthouse. In Destiny 1, after a few attempts at Trials of Osiris, I realized that the ultra-competitive PvP mode was just never going to be for me. A raid is one thing. Even if it’s hard, you can overlevel it, learn the hell out of the mechanics, and get together a team to run almost any raid seamlessly at some point. But Trials? Either you’re stellar at PvP or you’re not, and even if I can be kill leader in a few games of quickplay, that does not translate to approaching a flawless card in Trials, one of the hardest things to achieve in the entire game.
When Trials of Osiris returned as the 4v4 Trials of the Nine in Destiny 2 last week, my buddy and I recruited two of my Twitter followers to play and we promptly bounced off the mode. I think we went 0-4 before finally calling it a night, as we were in pursuit of just one win to unlock the new Trials social space and get that nagging quest indicator off our maps.
This week was a different story.
I got “carried,” as they say. A carry is when you’re paired with anywhere from 1-3 better players with you who do all the heavy lifting as you reap the rewards. My fellow Chicagoan and friend Jedi_Gill has been hounding me about a Trials run, and as a PC-building tech wizard, has a lot of streamer contacts he can hit up for favors. He asked if I wanted to do a “proper” run, and I said yes.
“Alright I've got Mtashed and IFrostBolt on our team.”
Oh god.
Both of these guys are pros. IFrostBolt is a streamer and an incredibly talented player. Mtashed, who I’ve interviewed for Forbes a few times, might literally be the best Destiny PvP player I’ve ever seen. And Gill, though not doing this for a living, is extremely good in his own right.
There’s been a lot of talk about journalists being bad at video games lately, so I was immediately nervous that I’d end up embarrassing myself, as most of these guys would be streaming the run. I’m certainly not bad at Destiny, but boy, have I not been great at Trials. I didn’t really know what to expect.
The run was a breeze.
We went 7-0, never coming close to losing any match, dropping only a few rounds total, and even winning one game 3v4 when Mtashed was disconnected for 90% of it because of streaming issues.
At first I was dramatically underperforming, as expected. In an effort not to die, I was staying with my team but playing ultra-cautiously in order to not immediately get picked off and look stupid. That worked, as my team was killing everyone for me, but I was ending the first few games with 1-3 total kills, which was embarrassing in its own way.
No one cared, of course. These guys carry lesser players all the time, so it’s no skin off their back, but I wanted to do better.
I think it was game four when I finally started to make actual plays. I snuck around the beach side of the map as most rounds started and picked off unaware players with my trusty Last Dance sidearm, a favorite in Quickplay, but I was surprised to see Mtashed using it as well, meaning it must actually be as good as I thought. That game I got two five-kill streaks and ended up going 10-0, my best performance yet and one that made me feel like I was actually doing something to contribute.
Of course, I was far from the most impressive player overall. Gill, despite not being a pro streamer, was kill leader in a few games. Mtashed casually makes insane plays while joking with viewers on stream. IFrostBolt has the play of the night where he took down three members of an opposing team with a hilarious “bubble the bomb and stand in there with a shotgun” strategy that worked to perfection.
About an hour later, it was done. We’d gone 7-0 with little trouble. It seemed like clear evidence of connection-based matchmaking, not skill, as our final games were some of our easiest, while our hardest was probably our second game where we were tied for a brief two rounds.
(Flawless reward spoilers)
What follows is a trip to a social space that looks like something out of a Salvador Dali painting, a trippy landscape that warps you around the map to a teleporting woman called “The Emissary” who mumbles nonsense about The Nine and showers you with loot. The more wins you get, the more you get to teleport and the more loot bundles you’ll receive. The final flawless reward is a trip down a black hole into a star-filled void with the looming visage of the Emissary herself. Destiny 2’s version of the Lighthouse.
I was drowning in loot, picking up three weapons and three pieces of armor from the Trials set. Since I was playing on my Titan, my preferred PvP class, I once again have accidentally outleveled my main Warlock with this new avalanche of gear, but I’m starting to realize maybe I’ve found a new main after all.
I am extremely grateful to my team for carrying me through that run, and hopefully I didn’t shame game journalists everywhere. I am still trying to process what I feel about Trials and going flawless. It’s created a system where fans often beg streamers to carries to the point of annoyance, or good PvP players may sometimes actually charge money for Trials runs. The idea of Trials in Destiny seems odd to me because it’s so reliant on absolutely top-notch PvP skill, yet this is a game that doesn’t even have ranked play. I don’t really see how those two things go together. If Destiny wants to have a fun-for-everyone PvP experience, making a flawless Trials run nearly impossible to achieve for the vast majority of players in the game seems opposed to designing a game that doesn’t even have a ranked PvP ladder.
For me, I know I will only be able to do this again if another super team is assembled for me. Otherwise? No way. That’s kind of an odd place to be, and while I liked my run, it saddens me a bit that many players will never get to experience what I just did. I guess that’s fine, as some content is just hard and exclusive. But if that’s how Bungie wants PvP endgame to be, ranked play and more competitive modes seem like a no-brainer. And above all else, is this really even an achievement? This team could have carried a toddler to flawless, and it's weird to "achieve" something in a video game when you really had...not all that much to do with it at all. It's hard to think of equivalents across other games. It felt a bit like putting in a cheat code, rather than something I actually deserved to be proud of.
I will treasure my flawless horse head emblem for the rest of D2, but it’s probably always going to always have a little “1” underneath it, indicating the one time I was able to do this. I had a blast, I got some awesome gear, and I hope others may find similarly generous carries to make their own lighthouse dreams come true.
Watch VODs of my run on Mtashed's stream here and here.
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