First of all, I want to say that even though I'm not normally big on team stuff, I love the trials, and the Underground is in fact my favorite. I'll also put forward that I liked hearing that the Lambda and BAF were going to have their rewards nerfed, and am a bit upset that they won't be.
But I'll say that, of the four trials on the liver build right now, the Underground is the odd one out in terms of actually being good as constructed for a league.
Lambda is very neatly divided, and very obviously designed for two teams working together. That's good.
The BAF is pretty widespread, and you probably need the numbers it supplies you with just to cover all that ground.
I'm a bit split on Keyes. The extra hands are definitely useful in the reactors, but that many people running around does at times end up with a 'too many chefs' thing in actually fighting Anti-Matter, where everyone around just sort of detracts from the effectivenss instead of adding to it. It's fine as-is, but it probably doesn't need to be 24-man.
Underground, though, I firmly believe is a poor choice as a 24-man trial. It's essentially a big dungeon crawl with some big bosses, and that's all well and good. But 24 people in there at once ruins it. It destroys visibility, everyone gets in each other's way, and I'm in firm belief that it gains absolutely nothing from having that many people in return for what it loses by basically being one big mission map.
So my suggestion is pretty simple: Remove the EBs spawning in regular mobs, maybe shrink the length a bit, and make it an 8-man trial. Lowering it to just one team would, I feel, solve pretty much every issue with it.
Too cramped: Mission maps are designed for eight people, and the majority of the Underground is formed of Praetorian Underground mission rooms with varying levels of growth in them. Too hard to coordinate: 24 people are hard to wrangle, especially in fights like the AVs in the Underground where positioning is vital and not doing so will get you killed. One third of that, on the other hand? Much easier. Boss fights very hard: I personally don't think hard boss fights is an issue, but even I can tell that the Underground's AVs, the self-healing War Walker in particular, are very hard to handle with that many people. They'd need to be scaled down to more manageable levels if made for a smaller league, but I feel like this is necessary anyway, and cutting out the EBs will go a long way towards it. No reason to actually run it: I feel like this has to be done if the developers want people to actually run the Underground, because as it stands, especially when the new trials come into play, it's stranded in a position where nobody has any real reason to play it. If you want fast to complete, you go for Lambda and BAF; for something more difficult, go take on TPN or MOM; Keyes is in a hectic little world of its own, that with the proposed changes in beta will have its own fans as an ordeal of teamwork more than anything else, that SGs and global channels will probably have fun with. But the Underground, as it stands, has no advantages. Rebuilding it for a single team will make it the trial that small groups of friends can band together and spend most of an hour doing and getting rewards for - since Tin Mage and Apex fell out of use when trials actually started happening, Incarnates are in need of that.
First of all, I want to say that even though I'm not normally big on team stuff, I love the trials, and the Underground is in fact my favorite. I'll also put forward that I liked hearing that the Lambda and BAF were going to have their rewards nerfed, and am a bit upset that they won't be.
But I'll say that, of the four trials on the liver build right now, the Underground is the odd one out in terms of actually being good as constructed for a league.
Lambda is very neatly divided, and very obviously designed for two teams working together. That's good.
The BAF is pretty widespread, and you probably need the numbers it supplies you with just to cover all that ground.
I'm a bit split on Keyes. The extra hands are definitely useful in the reactors, but that many people running around does at times end up with a 'too many chefs' thing in actually fighting Anti-Matter, where everyone around just sort of detracts from the effectivenss instead of adding to it. It's fine as-is, but it probably doesn't need to be 24-man.
Underground, though, I firmly believe is a poor choice as a 24-man trial. It's essentially a big dungeon crawl with some big bosses, and that's all well and good. But 24 people in there at once ruins it. It destroys visibility, everyone gets in each other's way, and I'm in firm belief that it gains absolutely nothing from having that many people in return for what it loses by basically being one big mission map.
So my suggestion is pretty simple: Remove the EBs spawning in regular mobs, maybe shrink the length a bit, and make it an 8-man trial. Lowering it to just one team would, I feel, solve pretty much every issue with it.
Too cramped: Mission maps are designed for eight people, and the majority of the Underground is formed of Praetorian Underground mission rooms with varying levels of growth in them.
Too hard to coordinate: 24 people are hard to wrangle, especially in fights like the AVs in the Underground where positioning is vital and not doing so will get you killed. One third of that, on the other hand? Much easier.
Boss fights very hard: I personally don't think hard boss fights is an issue, but even I can tell that the Underground's AVs, the self-healing War Walker in particular, are very hard to handle with that many people. They'd need to be scaled down to more manageable levels if made for a smaller league, but I feel like this is necessary anyway, and cutting out the EBs will go a long way towards it.
No reason to actually run it: I feel like this has to be done if the developers want people to actually run the Underground, because as it stands, especially when the new trials come into play, it's stranded in a position where nobody has any real reason to play it. If you want fast to complete, you go for Lambda and BAF; for something more difficult, go take on TPN or MOM; Keyes is in a hectic little world of its own, that with the proposed changes in beta will have its own fans as an ordeal of teamwork more than anything else, that SGs and global channels will probably have fun with. But the Underground, as it stands, has no advantages. Rebuilding it for a single team will make it the trial that small groups of friends can band together and spend most of an hour doing and getting rewards for - since Tin Mage and Apex fell out of use when trials actually started happening, Incarnates are in need of that.