Terror Volta Trial(s) need LESS boredom!

I've been playing CoH long enough to remember the days of Issues 3-5 when doing the Respec Trial was a TRIAL! The failure rate in the Reactor Room was approximately 50% on the PuGs I played in, back in the day ... which made people RESPECT the difficulty of the Trial(s). The 34-43 Respec against the Freakshow though was ROUGH, with Bosses self-rezzing ... and that was before the new Super Stunners got added to the Freakshow!

Today ... uh ... the Reactor Room is more of an exercise in PATIENCE than it is in Prowess (or Patharce, defined as a way to prepare someone for later traumatic experiences). The timing delay between spawn groups is absolutely RIDONKULOUS! It's something like 5 minutes! I can have my Warshade summon a pet using Extract Essence at the end of one wave of attackers, and the pet's duration (of 4 minutes!) will expire before the next wave of attackers spawns. LOL-WHUT?! The looooooooooong wait between spawns in the Reactor Room gives rise to some pretty extreme BOREDOM while *WAITING* for something to happen. We're talking wandering attention span, lack of Combat Focus, draining of battle tension sorts of "why are we doing this again?" boredom while waiting for the timer to run out to ALLOW the next group of hostiles to spawn.

It's gotten to the point where it feels like the only way to FAIL the Reactor Room anymore is if EVERYONE on the team goes AFK (and maybe not even then!). There's just no real "pressure" on the team to *perform* during the Reactor Room phase of the Trial ... and the long respawn timer just makes the whole thing take WAY LONGER than it should. You can spend almost an HOUR in the Reactor Room, waiting for something to happen ...

It doesn't have to be this way ... and most importantly, it most certainly didn't start out this way!

I'm thinking that tightening up/shortening the delay timer between waves of attackers would go a LONG way towards addressing the problems of the Reactor Trial in the Reactor Room. There really shouldn't be lengthy periods of No Combat happening in there. Fortunately, this is something which can be datamined (I presume) to find out a representative "Beat Down" cycle time for how long it is taking teams (on average) to handle the spawn groups in the Reactor Room as presently constituted. That should then give a reasonable target time length for the delay between spawn groups attacking the Reactor in the final room.

And that's assuming that the Programming Team hasn't come up with a far better way to manage/control the timing of the spawn groups in the Reactor Room than was available back in the pre-CoV days of 2005 ...

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

My friend wants a button that allows you to send all the waves right away.

The waiting is the hardest part.

I have no input on the suggestion itself, I just like saying "Terror Volta".

To make any trial or task force more challenging, increase your difficulty per what the team seems capable of. For the 1st respec, try perhaps +2/x5 to feel the burn. <grin>

The nice thing about the trials is that if you fail the final mission, you can speak to the contact and redo the final mission without the preliminaries. So we often go for a solid challenge, with an understanding that if we fail we'll ramp down the difficulty and blow through the final mission for the respec token.

Mind you, I can't really recall failing more than one respec (2nd one, I think).

-Johnny

I want the option to speed it up.

For the longest time, I heard rumors that collecting those crates in the missions makes the trial tougher... Was that ever debunked?

If it isn't true, it should be.

YES! This trial used to be so hard. I loved it! The last mission now is, bar none, the worst in the game. Forget Prevent 30 Fir Bolg from Escaping. Put Defeat All Malta in Oranbega out of your mind. Don't even try to mention Defeat 100 Destroyers. Waiting 5 or more minutes for those stupid spawns to appear only for them to go down in 30 seconds because they spawn three levels lower than anything else in the mission is the worst experience I've ever had in this game.

If people are running the trial because they need a respec, then they should get help from someone who doesn't need one desperately. This is a TEAM game and the trial is TEAM content, afert all.

I think if you don't pick up the shield you can work on getting your damage badges. Thats pretty exciting.
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No, wait, that isn't any better.

I am in two minds:

1) it is a bit dull and used to be quite tough.

2) its for people that need a /respec.

3) its fairly easy to get respecs in other ways.

Three minds, I'm in three minds

I like the idea of making them spawn based on the previous wave's defeat rather than a static timer, personally.

The most important thing you need from a team mate in the TV Trial is good chat

Its also the place where I find out most about my fellow CoH players. Last time I did it we chatted about the various places were are all from, scuba diving versus free diving and a whole host of other topics. It also became clear that the only reason anyone was doing it was because it was the weekly strike target. No one was doing it for "Fun".


Personally I think they should make the trial more of a challenge again and just grant you a free respec when you get to level 25.

It was faster before, but changed because people asked for it to be. Apparently, the spawn timer in TV has only two settings: Too Fast and Too Slow.

Seriously, back when the change was made, I think a dev actually said it had to be one or the other, because of how it was coded. My memory might be wrong, and I would like to think the programmers (past and present) are more competent than that, but...

I have the perfect solution!!

Give the doors on the reactor room catwalk the Halloween treatment. The more you click, the more baddies come out.

That way teams that want to could take a breather between rounds if they needed to regroup or accommodate an AFK while other teams that want to speed it up or like to swim in a sea of NPCs could click all the doors at once.

EVERYONE WINS!!!

A revamp of the trial(s) would be nice, if simply changing the spawn timer doesn't have an acceptable effect.

Maybe the tech used for Rikti/Zombie invasions could be adapted? Or the Protest event in Praetoria? As an outsider I don't know if the stuff used there could work in Terra Volta or not, but it can't hurt bringing it up in the off-chance the idea hasn't been explored before.

30... minutes...

Of just waiting.

I fired up Netflix and watched a whole episode of Monty Python while mindlessly running around.

I have decided that every time I run a Terra Volta Trial, we will play 20 Questions or some other text-based game between spawns to pass the time. It really made the Trial fun. In fact, many of us stayed after to finish off a game that didn't quite get done by the time the Trial ended.

Thread Necro ... because Terror (of Boredom) Volta is the WST again this week.

I spend more time WAITING for something to happen in the Reactor Room than is needed to COMPLETE either a BAF or a Lambda Trial!

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...