The Minds of Mayhem Trial Guide

Another quick guide to help out. I'll go back and reformat this.

The Mother of Mayhem trial is a 16 man trial with 5 phases. It rewards 5 or so astral merits and 2 Emp merits the first time it is run in a 20 hour period. Every time it is run in that period, it will only give 1 merit.

During the trial, you are unable to hosp. Instead, every 30 seconds, Desdemona will offer to revive you with full health and endurance. If you accept this, you will lose 15 seconds off the timer. While it may not seem much, this will add up and thus, barriers with rezs, howling twilight and healers with revives are needed.

Ideal set up: 2 tankers (or 1 tanker, 1 brute), and 3 mezzers. Howling Twilight makes runs a lot smoother.

Phase 1: Malaise and Friends

Best Destiny: Barrier with Ally Rez x2
Lore Pets?: Yes
Suggested Inspiration: Greens, Wakies.
AoEs: Yes, including Judgements

Part 1: Malaise is in a large courtyard with multiple Mother Mayhem clones. He has a big perception radius, so tankers/brutes should run in first. Mothey Mayhem clones do Psi ranged damage and can just be AoEd down. Burn him down to 50%.

Part 2: At 50% Malaise runs off. After a few seconds, one of 15 random AVs will spawn, usually giant monsters. They are all tank and spanks, although the Avatar of Hamidon does have a nasty cone. At this time, purple patches called World of Anguish will spawn on the ground. They will grow and vanish at around 18 seconds to the next one. If you stand in them, you will be hit with a fast acting DoT. MAKE SURE NO ONE HAS FLY ON, AS THE DOT WILL SPAWN IN THE AIR AND KILL PEOPLE BELOW. Just burn down each AV. Use Lore Pets on 2nd AV.

If you are going to be revived or wakied, make sure you do not wake on a patch or you will die again.

Part 3: When the last one is dead, Maliase will return. Just burn him down and dodge the purple patches. An AV on your side will spawn, but apart from that he is just a burn.

Once Malaise is down, everyone will be teleported and revived so you can regroup before phase 2.

Badge Advice: There is a badge for killing 16 of Malaise's Nightmare Archvillians. The ones in phase 4 don't count. The only way to earn this badge is to run this trial at least 5 times and get lucky.

Phase 2: Penelope Mayhem and the Storm Voids.

Destiny: Barrier with Rez, Clarion for knockback protection.
Lore Pets?: No
Suggested Inspirations: Greens, wakies, escapes.
AoEs: No

There is only one phase to Penelope's fight. She is in a room full of tempest gyros (bosses), and storm voids (objects). Penelope is unaffected by any attacks, unless she is in an eye of the storm. Eye of the storms are bubbles that form when you kill a Storm Void.

The trick to this fight is to have everyone bunch up around Penelope in the middle of the room and target through one person. Have tankers and brute pull the storm voids to Penelope, controllers and doms mez them, kill one, then beat on Penelope while the eye is up. The eye will also protect you from the psionic DoT from the room.

Tempest Gyro's can be ignored if you have barriers and healing. If the Storm Voids are going out into the hallway, it can be quite hard to move Penny. Have everyone run outside room to break LoS and she will run to the door.

Badge Advice: If you can defeat Penelope using 4 storm voids only, you will get a badge. This will require high DPS in order to get Penelope down by 25% or more per storm void. It is also important that extra voids are not killed until the last one expires.

Phase 3: Mother Mayhem.
Destiny: Barrier with Rez, Rebirth.
Lore Pets?: Yes.
Suggested Inspirations: Greens, wakies.
AoEs: Yes.

The Mother Mayhem fight has 2 parts. Protecting Aurora in her prison and beating on Mother Mayhem.

During the fight, portals will spawn. Have 2 high DPS and 1 healer run into the portal. They will be teleported to another room where Aurora is being held and attacked by Mother Mayhem clones. Kill the clones and heal Aurora. Painbringer or any +regen abilties seem to work best on keeping her up for longer. After a while, the people in the other room will be returned to the main room where Mother Mayhem is.

Reflections will spawn and attack the portal, but I found you could ignore them and just keep burning Mother Mayhem and waiting for the next portal to spawn.

Mother Mayhem herself has two tricks up her sleeve. A large red circle called Suffer in Silence and a small blue one called Shared Suffering. If you see the red text Suffer in Silence and a large red spikey circle around your feet, run so no one else is in that circle. Anyone in the red circle when it goes off will die. If you see the words Shared Suffering and a small blue circle around your feet, bunch up with people to share the damage or you will be killed.

The best strategy we found, was to bunch up around Mother Mayhem, letting the portal team do their thing. We could then ignore the blue circle, and when someone had the red circle, they could run to a corner of the room.

Badge Advice: Get to the portal early and have the healer keep Aurora above 75% with everything they have.

Phase 4: Mother Malaise and Shalice Tilman.
Destiny: Barrier with Rez, Clarion.
Lore Pets?: No.
Suggested Inspirations: Greens, wakies.
AoEs: No.


Mother Malaise reuses some of the same tricks from Phase 1. The purple circles (except they vanish at 23 seconds to the next set, instead of 18 seconds) and the huge perception range. Maliase doesn't do much damage, again, but he has some nasty debuffs as well that lower your mez protection by 8 mags.

Periodically, someone will be debilitated as well. This just reduces your damage and healing output, and can just be ignored until it wears off.

When Maliase hits 50%, he will phase out and Shalice Tilman will spawn by one of the statue (it goes clockwise if you look at it from the entrance) , along with 4 bosses, each a nightmare. She begin to slowly make her way to the well in the middle and you have to stop her. To do this, she has to be mezzed, but she has a lot of mez protection. So how do you mez her? You take away her mez protection by pulling the Nightmares in front of her and dropping them. They will make her mez protection drop, and then you can mez and burn her. For powers like ice slick, it is best to put them towards the fountain, not the statue otherwise she won't have her mez protection down and be affected by them. You have to burn Shalice down to 0 to make her despawn and sever her connection, then Malise will respawn with 100% HP. Rinse and repeat 3 times then burn Maliase down to 0%

Badge Advice: Simple badge and any league can get it if they don't let Shalice get to the well.

Phase 5: Shalice Tilman Beatdown.

Destiny: Barrier with Rez, Clarion.
Lore Pets?: Yes
Suggested Inspirations: Greens, wakies, reds.
AoEs: Yes

You have 2:30 mins to beat Shalice. Your damage will be reduced by lack of morale, but the more damage you do, the more your morale will increase. This is a very simple section. Just beat her down. There will be no more Des rez's so if someone goes down they have to be rezed.

If you've got to this stage, you will have little to no trouble finishing her off.

Hope you all enjoyed this guide.

I think the phase 4 part of this guide is incorrect. I played with a team of 10 last night where we made it to the final encounter and failed. We tried the whole "pull the nightmares in her path, but don't kill them" thing, but she kept on moving towards the fountain.

The second we killed one of them though, she seemed to stop in her tracks. By the time we realized this, we had run out of time, but it was enough for everyone to question if we were just imagining things or if the guide was wrong. I specifically saw a notice at the bottom of the trial UI where it said something along the lines of "KILL the nightmares to 'control' Shalice."

Everything else about the guide seems to be spot on though. Is this just an old guide from beta that they maybe changed before going live? I haven't been following the beta patch notes.

Because you asked (thank you for that!) here is the badge information for the trial:

Trial Badges.

Section 2: Minds of Mayhem Badges.
Master of Minds of Mayhem

• Hint text - Achieve the following special achievements during the Minds of Mayhem Incarnate Trial: Mental Voyager, Dreamwalker, A Perfect Storm, Daylight Saver and Lost Connection to Server.
• Completion text - You have mastered the Incarnate Trial: The Minds of Mayhem.

• Mental Voyager
  • Hint text - None.
  • Completion text - You have completed the Incarnate Trial: The Minds of Mayhem.
• Dreamwalker
  • Hint text - Defeat all of Malaise's possible nightmares at least once.
  • Completion text - Through persistence or madness, you have faced down the many nightmares of Malaise while battling him in the dreamscape of the Minds of Mayhem.
• A Perfect Storm
  • Hint text - Defeat Mother Yin while creating no more than 4 Eyes of the Storm, then complete the trial.
  • Completion text - Despite the furious typhoon of psychic energy enveloping you within Mother Yin's layer of the Minds of Mayhem, you were able to keep calm, efficiently using the precious Eyes of the Storm to put an end to Mother Mayhem's hold on Penelope Yin.
• Daylight Saver
  • Hint text - Defeat Mother Mayhem without allowing Aurora Borealis' health to drop below 75%, and then complete the trial.
  • Completion text - Deep within the Minds of Mayhem, you came across the long-suffering Aurora Borealis, whose body and mind had been taken over by Shalice Tilman. Separating the two was never going to be an easy task, but you did it while causing minimal risk to Aurora Borealis, delivering her from Tilman's torment with a minimum of suffering.
• Lost Connection to Server
  • Hint text - Defeat Shalice Tilman without missing any opportunity to sever her connection to the Seer Network, and then complete the trial.
  • Completion text - When you finally were able to confront Shalice Tilman within the depths of the Minds of Mayhem, you found that she would not go easily, for she was strongly connected to the Seer Network. Despite this difficulty, you found a way to sever her connections with little trouble, never allowing her to regain her strength after being chased from Malaise's broken body.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

can someone verify the nightmare kill location requirement, I can't tell its its between her and the alter, on the alter or just near her.

From what I've seen, when they die they make a ring on the floor. While in this ring, mother mayhem can be stunned and slowed.

Or, while in the ring she is slowed and damage sometimes makes her stop.

Need confirmation please.

She can even be KDd. Ice Slick was very effective for stopping her in one trial I was on.

Updated the guide. Improved it, anything else people want to add?

I've seen a lot of people get frustrated by the Nightmare fights, so I'd like (if I may) for a few more teams to try the above attack pattern to try and smooth things out!

Mind if I add that image to the first post?

Course you can, and despite the PUG issue, please use the trial staging area to describe this idea and please try it out, as I'm keen to get more data about these new trials

Started teaching the In/Out strategy on PUGS a few days ago on exalted. People seemed to pick it up fairly quickly after seeing it work a time or 2 on the first GM. The hard part was getting them to realize the the patches grow and that you have to jump AWAY from the GM, not just back up a few steps.

I also ask anyone with range and fly to stagger themselves around the GM and to fly up when a patch spawns. The patches large horizontal AOE only occurs on that plane so vertical movement is an easy way to cheat it. I've even used this on my tank as a way of staying in melee.