Trials: My Two Cents

The forums may not really need another thread on the topic of these two trials, but hey. Here it is. I haven't really seen such a heated topic since, I don't know, probably the launch of AE. Since my own feelings on the trials are a bit more complicated than 'these are [good/bad] and everybody who disagrees with me wants the game to fail,' I figured that maybe there would be some value in putting my opinions out there. If nothing else, it will give me a list of my opinions to point back to the next time I wander into the middle of the firefight.

Behavioral Adjustment Facility
BAF was the first trial I ran, and my first run of it didn't really give me a good impression of the trial system. It took about 20-30 minutes to get the league together in one zone. We went in, watched the cutscene (which was only mildly entertaining the first time), cleared the spawns without problem, and went to the tennis court, where we spent several minutes watching tanks and brutes try to pull Nightstar and die. We finally grabbed her and killed her without much effort. Team leader told us all to grab doors, and then the time dilation started. Or hami lag, or lag hill lag, or power lag, or whatever you darn kids call it these days. We scraped through this section, followed by Siege/Nightstar. This is where things got rough: Team X was directed to handle the adds. Except, either Team X didn't know where they were or were just illiterate. A minute or two into the Siege/Nightstar fight, people realized there were +3/4 boss robots running around killing all of the squishies and yelled at Team X to go do their job, but by that point, it was too late. We got into a sort of rolling team wipe situation where half of us were in the hospital at any given point, and there were enough death robots around Siege and Nightstar that even semi-coordinated attempts to attack them failed.

Thankfully, I've had plenty of good runs since then, enough to unlock my Judgement and Lore slots. Point by point:

The much-hated cutscene
I don't really have a huge problem with it. It's a nice chance to check my e-mail and figure out what I want to slot next. It kinda makes me wonder why it's there, though. Compare it to, say, the Marauder cutscene or Rommy in the ITF. Those two serve to go 'oh, it is ON now,' whereas the BAF cutscene just sorta says, 'so those guys you came here to beat up? They are totally going to collect some intelligence and disseminate propoganda if you fail.' This is something my heroes are against and my villains should theoretically care about inasmuch as they care about Praetoria, but it just feels like an entirely different level from the other cutscenes. Also, I am informed that Mother Mayhem has cleavage. Thanks for pointing it out a thousand times, everybody. I never would have noticed.

The runners phase
Hate hami lag so muuuuuuuuuch. It takes what would probably be a fun phase and makes it a pain in the butt. I'm one of those masochists who actually runs Stop 30 Fir Bolgs for fun, but Stop Mezz Resistant +3 Lieutenants While All Of Your Powers Say They're Recharged But Actually Aren't is not as entertaining.

The individual AV fights
These are kinda lame, and help to highlight why I dislike huge teams. Everybody dogpiles the AV and mashes 123412341234 (or 3232 in my case) for about three minutes. Every so often, a group of bosses run up. I've never seen even a hint of failure at this point, even on the most uncoordinated teams with near-zero support. I enjoy myself a bit more when I can ignore the AV and focus on the bosses.

The Siege/Nightstar Fight
I enjoy it when I'm on boss detail. Part of that has to do with stuff I'll get into later (Controls Are Nice) but a big part of it is, as I mentioned earlier, dogpiling an AV has never been my idea of fun. Plus, in the dual AV fights, there often seems to be nobody attempting to tank, which results in my poor Dominator getting randomly one/two-shotted by Siege through the defense cap. Boy hits like a train full of anvils.

Overall
BAF is in a weird position. If it were designed for about 4-8 players, it would probably be one of my favorite pieces of content in the game. As it is, the lagginess and the unreliability of teammates (see The Unreliability of Teammates) knocks it down about five notches to just 'this is kinda nice.'

Lambda Sector
I didn't run Lambda at all until I'd already gotten my Lore level shift. It just seemed to be put together about a quarter as much as BAF, and the few times I tried to join all fell apart before we even set foot in the mission. My first Lambda was almost as smooth as can be--we cleared around it and the courtyard, took out the turrets, smashed the EB, got all the acid and grenades, then fought Marauder. We ended up a little short on grenades for one reason or another, but somebody got a few in time to finish him off with time to spare. While I've run the BAF quite a bit, I have a whole two Lambda runs under my belt, so I'll have a bit more guesswork in here. Again, point by point:

The clearing phase
Is okay, I guess. I mean, it boils down to 'there are a bunch of dudes standing around. Go beat them up!' If I didn't like that, I probably would have left the game about six years ago. It kinda confuses me why every team I've been on leaves the turrets for last, since those things were far more dangerous to me than any of the spawns (and seemed harder to avoid, too) but hey.

The EB
Seriously? Seriously? It's... he... why? I'm just not sure what purpose an EB is supposed to serve against a league of 50s except for as a speed bump. Maybe the lobby of the building just felt empty without it. That EB really ties the room together, man.

The smash-and-grab
Uuuuuugh. Uuuuuuuuuugh, you guys. This is where my ignorance comes into play: Every time I've done this trial, the leader has basically gone, 'okay, we run in to the spawns with boxes, then blow up the boxes! Ignore all the enemies!' Which leads to the more durable Scrappers/Tanks/Brutes charging through the mission, while most of the squishies trail after them and get horribly maimed to death over and over. My own quasi-main, my Earth/Fire Dominator, has PFF and is invisible, so it's not a huge inconvenience for me personally, except that it usually ends up with about three people trying to do this entire phase alone as a result. For all I know, you get extra time every time you kill a spawn and my leaders are just ignorant, but if this phase is best handled by stealthing, that's kinda bad design in my opinion. This isn't a standard glowy hunt; the boxes are surrounded by level 54s.

Marauder
Doesn't seem too bad when people follow directions (see The Unreliability of Teammates). I'm not sure why he needs Unstoppable, except to make you think you're going to win with three minutes left only to start seeing Your Blaze burns Marauder for 0 points of fire damage!

Overall
I'm still making up my mind how I feel about this one. It seems much more reliant on your teammates being able to follow simple directions than the BAF is, and as I said before, if the smash-and-grab phase is best handled by charging through the mission and blowing up crates while being shot at, I consider that to be bad design. On the other hand, BAF is pretty darn near a cakewalk if everybody follows the standard strategy, whereas it seems to me that Lambda would be a little more challenging even then. Which I hold as a good thing.

Both Trials
The Unreliability of Teammates
I don't know if you guys were aware of this sad fact, but a substantial portion of CoH's playerbase were dropped on their heads as children. On both Lambda runs I've been on, we collected most or all of the grenades and acids, only to have a third of them mysteriiiiiously disappear because some people couldn't follow the repeated, simple instruction to check their trays and power windows for Pacificiation Grenades and Molecular Acid. And oh, if only that were the worst of it.
[League] LeaderDude: Those of you with acid, toss it on the doors. Everybody else, stay here for now. Do not pull Marauder until the doors are down, and once we start fighting him, only hit him with grenades when he's raging.
Somebody immediately charges forward and hits Marauder with a pacification grenade. Two people who have acid are confused about whether it goes on Marauder or the doors. Three doors don't get hit with acid, partly because one of the guys with acid got killed repeatedly in the ensuing Marauder rampage, and as far as I can tell, because two other people just didn't check their power menu. We proceed to spend the next several minutes trying to blow up crates until people who can read get acid grenades. For a good amount of this time, about half of the team was zerging Marauder and dying repeatedly, despite the leader repeatedly telling them to ignore him and focus on getting more acid. Since those people were using grenades, by time the team was ready to focus on Marauder, we didn't have enough grenades. While my experience with the trials is limited, as far as I've seen, the leader's plan was generally sound.

Being majorly set back in my goals solely because some random dudes I've never played with before can't follow directions is one of the more frustrating things that's happened to me in the entire time I've played this game. This isn't the first time it's happened (I once ran a STF with a Defender who was so dumb I was never sure if he wasn't just griefing us) but the trials are a lot more prone to it than the rest of the game. I'm sure a well-coordinated group could pull off some fun things here, but I don't really do the SG thing and 90% of my friends have left the game, so I'm not going to be seeing that any time soon.

On the upside, this should get better as the trials become old hat for people.

AT Balance
Of the trials I've failed (which is thankfully a pretty low number), most of the ones that weren't due to my teammates acting like a bunch of five-year-olds seemed to fall under this. A loooooot of people seem to have gone for Scrappers, Tanks, and Brutes for their Incarnates. I can't really blame them. None of the Alpha options really seemed as revolutionary for my Defenders as they were for my high-damage/durability characters, and Defenders and Corruptors are comparably scarce anyway. But the result of this is that the capability of teams varies widely. I was on a queue PUG BAF this weekend that was my Dominator and a whole bunch of meleers. Everything went okay up until Siege and Nightstar, at which point we got repeatedly threshed because there weren't enough buffs flying around to keep 90% of the team on their feet when facing down two +3 AVs and a whole bunch of scary bosses. Which isn't to say that you NEED A HEALX0RZ, but going in without any Defenders, Corruptors, Controllers, or even MMs definitely takes more coordination if nothing else. Once my Dom is slotted to my satisfaction, there's a good chance I'll be grabbing one of my Defenders to run through the trials while they're still popular.

Controls Are Nice
This is a big personal upside to the trials for me. Controls... are nice to have. I mean, controls are okay during the normal content, but let's face it--on about 90% of teams I've been on, the tank/brute or whoever's taking the alphas isn't in any real threat from that x8 spawn, once you factor in all the buffs layered on them. If those x8s are held, it barely makes a difference. A lot of the times in normal content, I just switch my Dominator over to semi-blaster mode, since nobody's under any threat from the mobs anyway. The trials, though, were the first time where I faced enemies that I could reliably mezz (which is to say, not AVs) who were still really nice to have reliably mezzed. A few Victorias loose behind the lines can wreck havoc on the squishies, and some well-placed controls stop them cold pretty well. And while the mezz-resistant runners in BAF initially annoyed the heck out of me, layered Quicksand + Earthquake + Volcanic Gasses is beautiful for the situation otherwise. Stick me on the adds team, baby, because I have a date with some purple bosses who can kill me in three seconds. And I mean that in a good way.

The Grind
Hold on, don't flip out and strangle me because I said the word 'grind.' As I said before, I'm not fond of having to do something ten times for the basic rewards. BUT. Lambda and BAF are quick and mostly painless. They're tiny. Fun-sized if you will. I swear on my honor that I've never done more than a few ITFs in a month max (and usually more like a few ITFs a year), and other than the ITF, LGTF, and low-level villain content, I probably haven't done anything else more than ten times in the past few years. I'm not exactly salivating at the thought of doing another BAF run, but I'm not astoundingly bored with them yet, either.

The Rewards
... are kinda screwy. I've seen people saying everything from 'it should take one or two trials to open each slot' to 'it will take fifteen.' For my personal experience, it took maybe ten BAFs to get Judgement and Lore open. It would have taken more, but on that last BAF, we kept Siege and Nightstar alive as long as we could while killing their boss spawns for XP, which was surprisingly good. Each Lambda run seems to be around 25-30% of my Interface XP, which is nice. Thread levels have fluctuated wildly between them, and while I'm still not sure what the deal with the salvage is, I have enough Uncommons for a lifetime and am reaching that point on Rares, but still haven't seen a single Very Rare. If they can only be crafted, that's gonna annoy me.

The Powers
Okay, technically, the new Incarnate stuff isn't part of the trials, but I'm lumping it in here anyway.

Judgement: PCHOOOOO! Pyronic Judgement is so slick that it should be illegal. I'm a mushroom cloud-laying... nevermind. Judgement helped a ton with the trials for me. Gets rid of stuck-on runner minion piles in seconds! Cuts through Victorias fast! And really nice for those awkward situations on normal maps where you can normally handle x8, but two spawns are right next to each other so you can't really fight one without aggroing the other and it's more like x16. Why pull when you can explode everything forever?

Lore: This slot really, really needs some kind of summary in the power descriptions. Not just 'you summon a Clockwork Hoozywhatsis and a Clockwork Thingymabobber,' but 'This is the most defensively-oriented Clockwork tree' would be nice. Having to read all the pets' power descriptions to know which ones are good for damage output and which have defense powers isn't my idea of fun. That said, my new pet Clockworks are juggernauts of woe fueled by my enemies' tears. I thought I'd be underwhelmed by Lore, but these boys are alright. They'd be more alright if they weren't robot ghosts.

Interface: Haven't gotten to use it yet, but reading up on the numbers, they kinda don't excite me. But, again, this is on my Dominator. I don't really need more DoT damage, and I don't have a lot of AoEs to smack entire spawns with debuffs. Reactive's -res would be nice, Diamagnetic's -ToHit would probably improve my survivability against enemies I can't easily mezz, since I'm already near the softcap. But compared to being able to throw a giant fireball and summon robot minions, it's kinda underwhelming.

Destiny: Destiny took the 'kinda underwhelming' prize from Interface. If the numbers I've seen are correct, the Core Epiphany gives nice, but not really overwhelming, buffs for 3/4 of its duration, and averages out to a pretty nice buff. Yeah, a team of eight rocking Barrier will probably trivialize RSF, and once a lot of people have these and are using them often it will probably make the trials a lot smoother. I just can't get very excited over AWW YEAH I'M GUNNA GIVE MY TEAM A BUFF THAT AVERAGES OUT TO 'PRETTY NICE.' (Maybe it's because I play a lot of Defenders. This buffing thing is so passe, but nuking entire spawns is fun and exciting.) On the upside, it's nice to have a defensively-slanted incarnate slot, since almost all of Judgement and Lore are more offensively focused.

The Hospital
I'm a little uncertain why the hospital restricts you to only leaving every so often. I guess the intent is to stagger people returning from teamwipes to give you a higher survival chance. Having an inspiration vendor there is nice, but with the way it's kinda off to the side, I didn't even notice it until somebody pointed it out to me.

In The End
I'm not really the most receptive person to this sort of content. A huge part of why I joined CoH is that I was told it has no raids; I enjoy small teams and I very, very rarely run things more than a few times a year. That I've managed to play these trials enough to unlock things without being filled with utter revulsion probably counts as some kind of victory on the devs' side, and the bits I don't like are partly balanced out by the fact that I enjoy the varied goals found inside of them more than I like charging forward and blowing up spawns in warehouses. It's like one of the newer TFs chopped down to just the actually-interesting final mission.

Honestly, I'm probably getting more entertainment out of these than I would have gotten from anything less than a mechanically interesting new powerset for an AT I enjoy, even if I do think they could use some heavy reworking. (Anything we could have realistically gotten in a single issue, that is. I mean, if we got a full heroside revamp, I'd ditch the trials for a few years.) For content that's aimed about as far from my preferences as you can get without making an all badge issue or an all SG base issue or something, that's alright.

This is a fantastic post. Really. Most reasonable, fair, criticisms that I've seen in weeks. I'm really glad I took the time to read the whole thing. Only thing I'll say to you Kelenar, is give Interface another chance. It's frikken awesome. The other slots seem really underwhelming to me compared to it. I plan on getting two full trees to very rare on my main.

Just a comment (apparently a long one...).

I think the stagger-exit at the hospital is, in fact, to intended to penalize players for dying and not getting resurrected on the spot. The taking roughly 30 seconds to get back into the action can be an inconvenience, and one which can hurt a team. If there was no delay, most people could be back in the actions in 10 seconds or so, and there would be little point in coordinating a rez power.

Also, I personally find the teammate interactions to be the major value of these task forces. Having to work together in larger and smaller groups within the trials is a great time, and really are the make-or-break moments (as they should be!). There will always be bad players who don't (or don't want to) pay attention. Despite this, a team which is predominantly made of attentive players will do just fine.

These trials are only going to get easier with time as experience and player power increases. Personally, I really like the idea of having more similarly sized trials, dependent as much as possible on player interaction and moments of brief planning and proper execution of said planning. That said, I think there is always room for additional bash-them-in-the-head-until-they-stop-moving content a la the ITF.

To me, the only grind of these trials has been the ixp output from the BAF. That said, it's not like i could fully utilize the lore slot, so I am just being impatient. Also, I have been sticking exclusively to my main for these so far, which adds to the feel of grind a bit. Once I am +3 I will more fully enjoy my alts.

My only suggestions to ease the grind would be:
1) to increase the shard drop rate in trials, so that we can still work on the alpha in the trial setting.
and/or
2) to make all 54's drop threads, not just our buddies in the trial setting

Also, I love all of the slots I have tried so far (ie. not including lore), but perhaps especially my destiny pbaoe heal.

I'm pretty much more or less in agreement with the OP, but allow me to clarify with a rambly mess of text.

In my case, I'm still fairly displeased with both options given: Either I can enter the LFG queue and likely be placed on a too-small team with bad AT balance (also a higher chance of people not knowing what to do, considering the star will be randomly given to someone), or I can sit around and wait to get invited to a pre-made team, which is far more prone to bugginess, but more importantly has a higher wait to get stuff rolling, since you have to play zone tetris (why can the queue zap people together from anywhere in the game, but pre-made leagues have to be in the same zone?) and get the teams sorted out. On the other hand, good teams tend to stick together for multiple runs.

Bizarrely, I find myself asking why the LFG queue doesn't use an Arena-style interface.

I'm also a bit annoyed since I have so many threads and components of every type other than Rare, including Very Rares. I don't even care about Very Rare Incarnate powers in most cases, but I'm still waiting on at least two more Tier 3 powers. I wish there was a way to break components down into lesser components without dealing with the godawful Thread conversion costs.

Also my enthusiasm is a tad sapped due to finding Diviner + Invincible Seeker to be incredibly underwhelming. This is the one circumstance where I'm considering working towards Very Rare as a priority, as Augur + Invincible Seeker sounds a lot better.

Very good post Kelenar I laughed at several parts of it thinking back on my experience.

I think the problem with the warehouses will work itself out. I think right now everyone sees that 5 minute timer and 10 cases to get and we freak out. Every pair of cases adds 1 minute so you really have 15 minutes which is plenty of time to clear as you go especially with the new incarnate powers everyone is now getting.

Haven't yet done the clear method and it requires both groups to kind of know where the boxes are (they are at least in the same place on the map from what I have seen) so they can hit them and gain the extra minutes but there is a lot of valuable iXP being lost in those warehouses. I think the squishies will prefer this method if we can get teams to do it. For now I just tell everyone to do their best to stay with their leader, knowing it is a death sentence for some squishies.

I've seen both good and bad on these trials. Been on many BAFs where everyone just ignores orders and runs off and we leave a hole and fail the prisoner phase. Been on Lambdas where we either don't get all 10 crates or end up with 5-7 acid despite getting all 10 crates.

For both trials I have found you can recover from team wipes by taking a minute or two and having everyone stop, rez, regroup then hit as team. Now if someone doesn't listen and insists on putting themselves in the repeating loop of hospital - attack AV - die in less then 1 second - repeat there is not much you can do. Most groups have listened even when I am not the leader and we regroup, sometimes we still fail, other times we recover and get the job done.

Over all I give this content a thumbs up. I thought I would hate the grind but so far it is fun. Lots of enemies + big booms + scrapping by when I should have died = why I play this game

I never had too much bother racing through on either my MM or Defender, but I also didn't feel like I was helping much when I did (by the time I caught up with the survivable guy that didn't need to be careful the crate was half dead already - and while I was ok, my MM's pets were dead).

And yeah, there's always at least one person that doesn't realise they have an acid. Which is sorta fair enough if you're new to the trial and all, except that a) at the start we ask "anyone not familiar with how the temp powers work on this one?" and get silence, and b) as soon as we finish the labs we say "check your temp power list for molecular acid, it's crucial for the next stage". If after that you can't find and use the acid (or at least say "where's my temp power list?" or "I have an acid, how do I use it?"), well, I despair.