Trial of Transcendence

[Glazius]

It's hard now.

CRAZY hard.

First - task force, maximum level _15_. Considering you need to plow through all the Hollows content to get there (including two Elite Boss missions) by the time you unlock the task force contact you may need to find someone else to exemplar to just to activate the trial.

Second - run through the Tunnels of the Trolls to get to the entrance to the cavern. Trial-zone spawns for 6 to 8 heroes but since you've got a full team of 8, not _so_ hard. Just time-consuming. Fun to blow explosives up in the face of the trolls setting them. Not fun to get caught in the blast.

Third - the cavern itself. Get in, take down some Circle of Thorns feuding with pumicites, and then look around at the nine-branched cavern. Clear the main room, but watch out for lava - serious heat damage if you drop in, and it snares you so it's hard to get out again. The magma men get healed by it, the fiery bastards.

Fourth - the obelisks. One down each of the eight branches on each side. They all have to be activated simultaneously. They're all guarded. The guards _respawn_. The timer's like 15 minutes, and most of the guards are well up the passageway from the obelisk. Invisibility + recall friend is best. Grant Invis + recall friend on someone else is also good. Or you could just hope somebody has the mad skills to teleport over the heads of the guards and leave them there none the wiser.

Fifth - the payoff. Activating the obelisks lowers a ramp in the main room and gives you access to the ninth door. Time is running short, probably. You've had an hour and a half from the time you got the mission topside until the cavern closed up again.  Behind it is "Koago", "leader" in the Pumicite tongue. He's a monster. Around him is a normal group of pumicites. Behind them a couple more of the beasts are holding Sam Wincott hostage. If you're slick you can engage Koago and have a smaller group run by and take out Sam's guards. If you're not so slick you aggro them into the main pile of pumicites.

Sixth - sweet jesus many of us died and some many times and there was like LESS THAN A MINUTE left but we DID IT! BADGE GET!

--GF

I'm EXUBERANT!

[stray]

"Hard" in a general video game sense, or "hard" in an MMOG sense?

As much as I like Cryptic, my experience with their particular flavor of "hard" usually just amounts as nothing but a time consuming pain in the ass. One in which I need to bring more than a few friends for at that.

Don't get me wrong, I still have high praise for CoH, but it was much easier seeing it's good features in the first couple months of release. The direction they've taken since then just kind of squeezes the life out of it.

[schmoo]

ToT is insanely, ridiculously hard and time-consuming. It's not fun.  It's not good design.

CoH is a great game, but it's getting to be a pain in the ass with stuff like this.

[Glazius]

ToT is insanely, ridiculously hard and time-consuming. It's not fun.  It's not good design.

CoH is a great game, but it's getting to be a pain in the ass with stuff like this.

Unless you count Terra Volta, ToT is the only trial I haven't failed on the first try, though we came close.

The team took maybe fifteen minutes to put together - this was midnight on a Saturday, so doing it on a weekday afternoon is probably going to be a little more difficult. Total elapsed time = < 2 hours, some of that because the leader insisted on ending it back at the TF contact.  We were all too blitzed on adrenaline to care.

There were a couple of genuine newbies along for the ride. (Self-confessed, anyway.) There was a Kheldian and an experienced leader, and I was coming along as an alt, and I couldn't tell whether the three other people in the trial were doing this on alt characters or not.

ToT pretty much demands Recall Friend, preferably on someone with some sort of stealth power. You can't clear out all eight passages before they start to respawn. Emboldened by the lack of respawns in the main room, we decided to flush out all the tunnels. The respawns were a surprise, and we'd have been done sooner if we'd known it would happen from the beginning and decided just to sneak past the guards after the main room was clear.

You need to get eight people together, which is in many ways like herding cats. You need them all to be able to take direction and hit the glowies simultaneously. Using the trial timer to sync the countdown makes it a lot less ambiguous. You need some way of getting past an 8-man spawn with 1 man and not dying. Someone with Grant Invisibility and someone with Recall Friend would probably be good, or my own personal linchpin, a teleporter with Recall Friend (the spawns are mostly situated so you can teleport from out-of-aggro-range to out-of-aggro-range). Our noble leader just turned on his dispersion bubble, chugged some lucks and a break free, and ran.

The ToT needs team-friendly powers in a time when not a lot of power slots are available, and it needs good coordination among people who may still be learning the game. It's a good thing it's totally optional and following mission chains from your contacts can get you beyond ever needing to hit the Hollows. (In fact, I deliberately put myself in perma-debt for the entirety of levels 10-15, did all my missions including Hollows missions, did approximately zero street-hunting, and am still halfway to 15 with one storyarc left to run. There is _twice as much_ xp from 10-15 as you need to level.)

I don't hesitate to call it "hard mode". It needs a good mix of powers and a little luck. But I felt challenged, and unlike Positron's task force the challenge was not "staying awake". I think the reason is that it expects you to have every relevant skill - offense to clear the main room in a timely fashion, defense to not wither under the 8-man spawns and Koago, team coordination to open the cavern, and stealth, or at least getting-past-without-fighting, to get to the obelisks in the first place and regroup afterwards.

If you needed to do it to unlock the potential of leveling beyond, say 15 or 20? Or heck, if completing it got you anything beyond a nifty badge that says "Transcendent" (which is not even part of any accolade)? Yeah, unreasonably hard. But there's nothing to force you into it outside of a little thrill-seeking.

--GF

[Strazos]

Most people seem to underestimate the uses of Super Speed....no agro unless you stop in a mob's face.

[Sky]

Or you could just hope somebody has the mad skills to teleport over the heads of the guards and leave them there none the wiser.

Fly + stealth?

[Murgos]

Smoke Grenade and pretty much any travel power should do it too.  If they are spaced decently you could just use smoke grenade.

[schmoo]

I did the ToT with some higher levels (I was there basically to exemplar one of them, and man a clicky).  We did it with no fighting except a little bit around one of the obelisks and the last encounter, where the guy's guards were killed and we exited, which took all of 30 seconds or so.

If we had had to fight our way through it, it would have been a nightmare, and we would have died multiple times, due to the mobs re-popping.  Invising through it was boring.  Either way it's not fun.

[UnSub]

My memory of this trial is 45 minutes of:

"On 3"
"3"
"2"
"1"
"NOW!"
...
...
...
"Who didn't click on the obelisk?"
...
"Okay... on 3"

Ahh, good times... The Hollows is a great zone as well.

[schmoo]

My memory of this trial is 45 minutes of:

"On 3"
"3"
"2"
"1"
"NOW!"
...
...
...
"Who didn't click on the obelisk?"
...
"Okay... on 3"

Ahh, good times... The Hollows is a great zone as well.

Lucky you.  No one knew how to count in my team.   Between people going afk at random times and invis running out, it's a wonder we managed to do the mission at all.

[tazelbain]

I don't play CoH to Sam Fischer my way through a mission, but I am sure other people see it differently.
It's only a problem for badge collecters.

[Llava]

It's ridiculous how long it takes some people to get the obelisks.  I mean, it displays to you when someone has activated theirs, and there's like a 5 second window there.  How hard is it to click on something when you're told to?

Apparently, pretty damn hard.

[raydeen]

The one thing I noticed about ToT was the fact that it absolutely killed my framerate. I've got a medium range PC and video card and usually CoH runs really well. ToT made it cry. Maybe it was the number of enemies in a relatively small area.

And props to Shockeye. I gather from your original avatar that yer a Doctor Who fan?

[eldaec]

It's ridiculous how long it takes some people to get the obelisks.  I mean, it displays to you when someone has activated theirs, and there's like a 5 second window there.  How hard is it to click on something when you're told to?

Apparently, pretty damn hard.

To be fair to the unwashed masses, most of them are blissfully unaware that it says in their system window when a stone or other glowy has been clicked on.

[Llava]

Then what's their excuse after I point that out to them?