The imminent return of Trials of Osiris was met with widespread enthusiasm, followed swiftly—as is the way in the Destiny 2 community—with furious outrage. The reason players were so upset was because, as part of this week's announcement, Bungie noted that power levels would be enabled. Essentially that means that a player of a higher level will deal more and take less damage when facing an opponent of lower level.
Power was enabled in the original incarnation of the mode back in Destiny 1, but because levels worked differently back then, the maximum amount you could outlevel your opponents in the 3v3 PvP mode was effectively capped. However, that's not the case in Destiny 2 today, thanks to the presence of the seasonal artifact.
This doohickey enables you to grind past the hard power cap to a potentially infinite level (which resets every season when artifact is swapped out and reset). Confirmation that the seasonal artifact would apply to Trials caused uproar among the playerbase, because it effectively meant anyone willing to grind PvE content interminably for power levels would have an advantage over players in PvP who are—to put it bluntly—actually better.
In a marquee mode with a focus on high skill play, it's an understandable concern. One reddit user put it rather succinctly: "The world championship in chess decides that 'Hey, fuck it, let's add a new rule to the game. We'll make it so that you are allowed to stand up, whenever you want, and knock the fuck out of your opponent. And if he becomes unconscious, you win!'"
In short: if you've got hundreds of hours to spare grinding bounties, you could be a below-average player with a huge Power benefit able to trounce much higher skilled players. And that goes against the whole point of the mode.
Thankfully, and somewhat surprisingly, Bungie has walked the idea back before the mode has even launched. "We will be disabling the Artifact for Power-enabled PVP (Iron Banner & Trials) until we can implement a Power Cap feature," game director Luke Smith wrote on Twitter. "This cap will allow us to weave Artifact and Power Pursuit together while preventing unbound Power growth in PvP." He also added that Bungie will go into more detail about how Power affects PvP combat at a later date.
In other news, Bungie has issued its weekly update which goes into a bit more detail about the upcoming Trials debut, as well as spelling out some changes to subclasses.
