Strategy for the upcoming TPN trial

TPN trial:

Story behind it: Releasing the information that you found from the UG trial to the public in Praetoria. Maelstrom tries to stop you from doing so.

Setup (Tips): You will want to have your league split up into "2 teams"; an inside team and an outside team.

The outside team should consist of your Single Target damage dealers, one or two "tankers" (brutes, tankers, etc...) and maybe a "healer/support" toon if you have one.

The inside team should consist of all your MMs, AoE damage dealers, etc...

Main reason why is because the outside team will need to defeat 1 single mob type during 2 of the phases (Telepathists) while the inside team goes around to 3 different buildings and defeats lots of mobs and activates Terminals to increase Public Opinion.


Phase 1:

Defeat 5 mobs. Yeah, nothing hard here, just defeat 5 mobs


Phase 2:

Gain 50 Public Opinion. Same thing, defeat the surrounding IDF/D.U.S.T. mobs to increase public opinion.

One thing to watch for is the "HD Cameras." You do not want to blow these up; they are gray-conned mobs that sometimes show up near you...if you blow them up, you lose Public Opinion.

In the one run I was in during beta, I never saw a camera get close to where I was...but just FYI.


Phase 3:

Gain 250 Public Opinion.

This is the one time where everyone can go inside the middle building and help get all 4 terminals unlocked/used.

After you defeat the mobs/unlock and use the 4 terminals; a cutscene happens and Maelstrom is there going to stop you (he says)!



Phase 4:


This is where having the league split up into 2 teams is needed. The outside team stays outside and defeats the Telepathists before they start confusing mobs and turning them against us.

From what I understand the Telepathists always spawn in the same spots. There can only be 6 out at a time. But the longer they are out the more civilians they confuse as well as they (telepathists) have a zone-wide debuff that debuffs DEF (and probably more but I know DEF for sure).

When I did the TPN trial; we had 6 of those DEF debuffs on us and...let's just say -60% (or more?) DEF debuffs...hurt... :P

To help out the outside team should probably use a macro/bind to look for the Telepathists themselves....so here it is:

An easy way to target & deal with the Telepathists outside without killing the civilians is this macro: /macro Tele targetcustomnext Telepathist


Now for the inside team.

The inside team goes into 1 of 3 buildings. It will say in the trial UI which building to go into. They are all named; the far right building is x (forgot name), middle building is the TPN main campus and the far left building is Visual Studios (forgot name but it's something similar I think). It will always go in order though. So, for example, far right, then middle, then far left, then far right, then middle, then far right; and so on.

Once inside the building you'll have to weave/run your way to the back end of the building to where there are 4 terminals and HD.

HD is a big ol' HD television (like the TV/radio contact in CoV). HD can be killed (and during the trial some mobs try to destroy it and if they are successful then you lose PO (public opinion) as well as losing access to the middle building (I think). So having 1 "healer" for the inside team should be fine.

So back to the 4 terminals. There are technicians guarding the terminals and you need to take them out to be able to click on/use the terminals to gain PO. However those technicians are invulnerable because there are IDF mobs guarding them. You have to take out the IDF mobs before you take out the technicians.

In this phase though, it's best to have the tanker/brute just taunt the IDF mobs into the middle of the room (it's a big enough room to do so). Once the IDF mobs are in the middle; you can have some of the inside team take out the technicians and then click on the terminals.

This is faster than defeating the IDF mobs and then the technicians. And speed is the name of the game in this trial because you lose PO over time (I think) plus if you lose HD or if the outside team kills civilians you lose PO.

Once you take over all 4 terminals inside 1 building, the next building goes "up" and you can then enter that building. Same drill. You'll most likely go through all 3 buildings at least 2x before getting enough PO (depends on how well everyone is doing on the outside team too since killing civilians is easy to do if you're not careful).

Once you have 500 PO, you go to the next phase.


Phase 5:

Defeat Maelstrom. He'll appear outside. So the inside team will go outside and help defeat Maelstrom.

Nothing really hard about him; he does have an "auto hit death" it seems. I haven't seen it myself but basically he does a "Marked for Death" and if you are Marked for Death, you'll have an icon above your head as well as "Marked for Death" in red text below your health bar (like you're Held/etc...).

You have a few seconds (? really don't know here) before he does his Vorpal Judgement attack which kills you if you have that MFD on you.


Phase 6:

This is a copy-and-paste of Phase 4. Same strategy and everything.

The only thing that changes is that Maelstrom is now outside randomly attacking anyone outside. Also the Telepathists spawn faster now.

So this is where having a "healer" help heal the "tanker" type that will taunt Maelstrom to help against the ST dmg dealers from dying from Maelstrom and they can keep killing the Telepathists.

Once you get 500 PO again, you go to the next phase.


Phase 7:

Defeat Maelstrom. Again, same thing as Phase 4. When I did this in beta, no one died the 2nd time we fought him (I think). Again, he dies pretty fast (with debuffs of course!).


Once you defeat him for the 3rd time, you win.



When we did this in beta, we finished in about 40-60 minutes. I'm sure that once everyone is comfortable with things; you could get it down to 20-30 mins maybe.


Also FYI, the civilians do hurt and actually do damage to you. I think they were "2-hitting" some tankers/other targets that were outside. It's possible they get stronger the longer they are confused by the Telepathists but I can't say for sure.

Unless things change, they definitely use molotov cocktails (ie. burn patches) which do significant damage...so beware. Again only go for the Telepathists if you're on the outside team.


Some help/text was taken from VoodooGirl's write up in the beta section (mainly the macro command).

Can't wait for this trial to go live. sounds like a blast!

Thanks for the heads up

If you try this again on beta, run into that patch and confirm that it's fire damage instead of something crazy like Nanite or undefined.


Procedurally, it doesn't sound very complicated - but I guess we'll be making good use of Clarions again. Happen to notice what the mag of confuse was? And whether it stacked?

If 6 of them are dishing out confuse and it's like the avatar's, that's some pretty high mag. Hopefully, they're spread out.

The strategy will be:

1. Attempt to zerg, die horribly and fail.
2. Female Dog about it on the forums.
3. Try something else, die horribly and fail.
4. Female Dog about it on the forums.
5. Repeat 3 and 4 until marginal success rate is achieved.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

From the description, seems like almost exactly twice as many phases as will really be enjoyable. :^P

Hopefully they're taking that extra time to apply the lessons learned from Keyes: repeating the same action N times within a single trial (gather 30 temp powers, gather 30 more temp powers, gather another 30 temp powers) does not make it N times more fun.

Anyway, I never seem to have the right timing to check out new trials on beta. It's nice to know a little about this one before seeing it for the first time.

Updated the strategy a bit...still not perfect but gives people a general gist of things.