Max is 30 this year. Assuming you have at least 20 silver leaves and max ignitions you’ll net 20 ash per piece of solstice gear equipped. So if you have all 5 on you’ll get 100 silver ash. You can just equip all 5 pieces once the final boss spawns in, you don’t have to have them equipped.

Sticking together is generally the best strategy, especially playing with randoms. Once you get the throws down there’s only two spots where you can’t throw the ignition charges from where they drop (the alleys to the left and right of where the boss spawns) so when I’m playing with my friends we’ll sometimes split up a bit and I’ll clear an area by myself when I know I can throw all 3 in myself before rejoining them

Wearing all 5 I seem to get a few more silver leaves than my friends wearing one. For a full altar of sorrows I was getting between 3-6 more leaves than my friends just wearing one.

The big difference is when converting the leaves to ashes in the bonfire bashes at max ignitions you get 20 ashes per piece of solstice armor equipped.

FYI For really quick silver leaves with a fireteam and some weapon leveling you can load into the first lightfall mission from the classic replay icon and go all the way to the end. When you get to the drop pods have no one get in and one person switch characters and rejoin and then everyone get in the drop pods and you hit the ground the person that left can reload the checkpoint and everyone rejoin. you’re at the drop pods and can repeat. 15 silver leaves per run wearing 5 pieces + 12% weapon level per run. Won’t be surprised if Bungie eventually patches that or disables it somehow

I think the zoom changes address a lot of issues even beyond the smg dominance. Rangefinder is currently a best in slot perk for like every weapon type except scouts and pulses. On handcannons, smgs, and fusion rifles it results in so many weapons that are head and shoulders above the rest. I think smgs definitely make it stand out the most because of their ease of use and the fact that the high zoom ones had so much more range than other options. I’m certainly excited to see how it shakes up the sandbox.

As for gutshot and slickdraw I feel like they’re still going to be insta shard perks. I feel like they’d need reworks to be useful. Like flip how gutshot works so you have less AA/accuracy firing from the hip but more body damage and it might not be terrible. Probably still better options but at least it would have situations where it might be useful. Slickdraw a rework so the accuracy penalty is only for a second or two after swapping might make it interesting. I just feel like perks like gutshot and slickdraw were introduced without really thinking about practical situations where they’d be useful over other perks and just end up diluting the perk pool making it harder to get decent rolls

I ran it solo and only got tier 5 and got it, so there might be a chance to get it from the chest that gets higher as you get higher tiers

Every roll I’ve gotten so far is offhand strike and mostly encore/kinetic tremors.

I’m not sure it feels much different since the changes, I still get a lot of really laggy matches, I think the bigger issue is the player population is just tanking so regardless of what kind of matchmaking they do it’s kinda a bad experience. And since they removed the flawless pool they made it so you can farm drops on wins on a 7-win card once you’ve been flawless right away but because now there’s an extra 2 days to farm that way they lowered the drop rates. Other people have been saying the get one roughly 1 out of every 4 wins, but I’ve got 0 to drop after 32 wins

Yeah I’ve found lately that late Saturday afternoons tend to be the most consistent time of the weekend but Fridays have been hit or miss. I’ve been busy and haven’t played much the last couple trials weekends so I don’t know too much about how sundays have been feeling. I wonder how many people still wait until Sunday to even play not knowing that the flawless pool isn’t a thing anymore

Yeah, it’s the messenger this weekend. I’m going to be grinding hard for a solid crucible roll. Also if you’re interested in getting into trials more you’d be more than welcome to play with my friends and I. I’m not the greatest, but I manage to go flawless playing in PC lobbies pretty consistently so I’m not bad. I end up playing with a mix of people ranging from very good to very PvE mains.

I’ve been coaching a few friends for awhile now so I usually have at least 1 really solid player to play with but there’s generally a lot of times where I have an open spot or two in my fireteam.

If you or anyone else is interested I could get people in my clans discord where I usually casually organize playing trials with people each weekend. I usually organize fireteams by whether or not people are only wanting to play console lobbies too for those that play on console and are opposed to playing MnK players