Hydra!

(Spoiler warning for the Abandoned Sewer Trial)

Tonight I spent some time soloing in PI. I didn't put my flag up because I knew I still needed to go exercise and I didn't want to waste my evening on another radio mission team. But just as I'm thinking it's time to log off, I get an RP tell from someone who's forming a team to take on the hydra in the Abandoned Sewers. Could I help?

The Abandoned Sewers Trial is one of the few things blue side that I've never tried before. I remember the days when it was the most popular thing to do in the game -- a PLer's paradise before anyone had heard of AE or Winterlords or before even warwolf farming was a big thing. But for some reason I never joined a team doing it. People rarely attempt it these days.

I decided that I could skip exercise for one day. ^_^

So I joined this team. The leader is someone I've teamed with before, but not on this toon. He knows what he's doing though and explains in great detail what we're supposed to do. He gives very clear instructions. He gets an A+ for leadership.

We kill rikti until we have the key to the trial itself, then make our way down. We have an hour and a half to complete the trial. We gather the special weapons needed, with the leader telling each person when it's their turn to get one. We get down to the chamber with the hydra in it and carefully clear it. He warns us to kill the rikti but to not destroy the shield generators. Then, when we've taken out enough of the tentacles, we position ourselves with 2 players at each generator, and we take them down all at once.

At this point, we have just under 40 minutes left. I knew from what the leader said and from what I'd heard in the past that it would require more than one round of clearing and destroying the generators, so I'm a little concerned about the time -- but it took us a while to get down there and take out tentacles and the special kraken, so maybe a second or third round won't take that long.

We rush in and those of us with particle cannons blast the hydra. Everything goes smoothly, and we get it down to nearly half health. Then the shields come up.

We clear rikti again. We position ourselves. Go! the leader yells. "Down!" I call out as soon as our shield drops. "Down!" another calls. "Down!" calls a third. "Down!" calls a fourth. "Go, go!" someone yells, and we rush back in for a second round.

I think I fired first -- I was on a well-IO'd broadsword scrapper, and our generator was always down first and so I think after the first round I always was the first to fire on the hydra. I got hit hard, and then suddenly rikti were teleporting in from everywhere. People started freaking out, and several went down. I died once, but managed to clear most of the rikti in my area and fire my particle cannon several times. The hydra was at about 25% health when the shields went back up.

"What happened?" everyone wanted to know.
"I think we didn't have all four generators down," someone else said.
"No, they were down," the leader insisted, "otherwise we wouldn't have damaged it."

So we clear again. Time is becoming an issue, we're under twelve minutes left. We get into position, take out the generators -- four people call out that generators are down, and we rush in.

Instantly we're swamped by rikti again. This time nearly everyone dies -- all save the leader. While we're lying there dead you can hear the sound of rikti teleporting in constantly -- it sounded like the entire planet was beaming down to crush us. One person reportered that there were "a ton" of rikti near the hydra, then changed his mind. "There's two tons," he said.

I'm out of inspirations. I'm lying there, listening to the sounds of rikti porting in, and we all know we've lost.

We conclude that two people on the same team had called out that their generator was down, so we had attacked again before all the generators were down. This time we make very clear who on each team is responsible for calling when their generator is down.

Our dark defender rezes. He ports everyone to him, lures some rikti over and does the howling twilight magic. He dies, but we rez him and start clearing again.

Less than 4 minutes to go. The generators are clear. Everyone to positions! Two players get too close to the mass of rikti in the middle and die. Oh no, they're part of the same generator team!

3:30. We're running out of time! The two downed players rez themselves.

Less than 3 minutes! The rez'd players are stumbling about dazed.

2:30! They're still scrambling to get into position.

2:15! Go! Go!

We take down the generators and rush in a fourth time. Rikti swarm us. We blast away, and suddenly the hydra is dead, with less than a minute left.

Everyone starts cheering and congratulating the team. Someone says to kill the other rikti, and I start attacking them. Then time runs out. I get a loading screen, and...

Mission failed. You're supposed to completely clear the room. With all of those rikti that we'd spawned, there was no way we had enough time to accomplish that.

"This trial will forever elude me," the leader says. Up to that point I hadn't realized that all of his experience came from failed attempts.

He vowed to try again tomorrow night. He's a man on a mission.

Anyway... even in failure I was amazed we managed to pull together after 7 of 8 team members had died, and we actually took the hydra out with seconds to spare, if not the full room.

Also, it was really fun. I like the whole map. It's too bad people don't run this thing a little more often. ^_^

Hydra picture 1

Hydra Picture 2

Hydra picture 3

Hydra picture 4

Hydra picture 5

I've only run the sewer trial a couple of times. You're right it is a lot of fun, it also tends to be a close run thing. Even with a good team you tend to be short on time before you finish which I suspect is why it's so rarely run (at least for PuGs, no doubt someone will come in and explain that their SG canconsistently run it in 25minutes ).

I enjoy the trial, and generally the teams I am on are sucessful, but they are almost always predominantly SG/coalition teams.

It requires a little bit more co-ordination that a typical TF or Trial, and having people familiar with each otehr is a big help.

Mind you last time I ran it, we had The Ocho on the team (a prize for some event or other) and it was great fun.

I'm not sure if you're looking advice on how to complete it in time, but if so here are some pointers:

Stealthing to the glowies and then down to the bottom saves time.

You only need the particle cannons really.

You don't have to kill the rikti around the generators.

You don't have to kill the hydra tentacles.

You do have to kill the rikti that teleport in as the hydra starts getting low on health.

Clever use of jump-attacking allows you to use the particle cannon without the hydra being able to attack you or the rikti noticing you.

We did fight our way down to the particle cannons and thermite whatevers, then teleported down once everyone had one. In hindsight that took way too much time.

We were also spread out during each hydra attack and unprepared for the rikti ambushes. Thus people were easily picked off or overwhelmed by them. Knowing that those happen automatically makes me feel better, we didn't really screw up except to take far too long to get there and to be unprepared to deal with the ambushes. If I do it again, I'll know better, thanks,

Also, the shield was invisible. We never saw anything.

And I would like to do it again. ^_^ I suppose if I don't manage to join the same team tonight, I might have to organize my own run at some point.

I run this trial infrequently, the last time was about a month ago.

Yah, the Sewer Trial was a victim of Statesman being prone to heavyhanded nerfs.

they should've backloaded the XP you used to earn killing multiple baby krakens into the a Trial's completion reward hit. Instead he just nerfed Monsters so hard nobody but Badgers bothered with them ever again until Merits got put in, and the Trial got forgotten because it's pretty much the hardest thing in the game to pull off since they got rid of cheese tactics (like you used to spam Holds onto the head to disable the force field and not even worry about the generators if I remember right). Master runs? Just require the right combination of ATs with the correct primary/secondaries. Cmon, there's absolutely nothing hard about "lf granite tank/blasters/emp for MoSTF". But the Abandoned Sewer? That requires actual group coordination since you'll keep costing yourselves time if you don't blow the generators together, if you take too long to grab the anti-Hydra rifles.

A really slick team that works well together might end up with plenty of time to spare. Last time I ran it we did it back to back because we aaalmost finished it but the counter ticked off as we were mopping up rikti, like you guys . Then we went back and whupped it with time to spare. Always suspected one of the guys that got a hydra zap gun instead of a tentacle zap gun wasn't using it on our first run...

Good luck on your next run! I've been on two hydra trial teams and both times were... eventful but not very fruitful. One of them had a couple members who I'd swear were over-caffeinated monkeys. My personal favorite was one guy who'd run off on his own on the catwalks (despite being told to stay together), get himself swamped by Rikti and then decide the best course of action was to teleport me to him so we could both die.

I never see them come up on Victory since my last attempt several months ago though. I suppose the answer would be to lead my own except I have little clue on how it all goes down and people tend to take "let's just experiment this out" less than enthusiastically.

I accepted random PUG invites to do this trial on two occasions recently. The first time failed, frustratingly; and the second time we gloriously took the head down with a few minutes to go -- and the trial did not end!

We realized we needed to clear the Rikti ambushers and set to work. My Axe Tanker had several AoEs, so I tried to get masses of them bunched up, but a lot of Rikti resist lethal damage pretty well, so I did moderate damage to many at once. I converted as many Inspirations as I could into reds for more damage, and gave my sole wakie to a downed Scrapper and led the Rikti off his body so he could rez. (It often baffles me that some players will get tunnel vision and not try to help teammates when the team really needs every able body.)

We got them cleared with 1:02 left on the timer, and won.

That was pretty dramatic, and I enjoyed it a lot. I added a few names to my friends lists too.

Hydra had been my white whale until I did a successful run a couple of weeks ago. It was completed with about 2 minutes left. One thing I dig about this is that it's a task that has some degree of probability of failure.

It's also the task that seems to cause the most temper flaring.

Good Story, Organica! I enjoyed reading that, now I wanna try this trial!

Yep. It just means the leader should have the combat tab open so he/she can see when the weapons start doing zero damage.

It use to be so much easier to get when the Trial didn't level past 41 and you could bring a whole bunch of 50's along and wipe out everything and anything and get the badge as easy as pie. Then they 'fixed' it and it's now more of a pain in the *** as ever

This brings back some memories.
The Hydra Trial is one of the toughest challenges in the game (and totally worth running it), imho. Probably because it requires more coordination and teamplay than most other TFs/Trials. Master of Hydra Trial anyone?

Maybe it's time to run it again.