Trial of Chaos

In my opinion the entirety of the Trial of Choas needs to be reworked. I have done this trial over 10 times between doing it for myself on different characters and to help out friends and its new bull **** every time. Between the absolutely RIDICULOUS debuffs, and overamped bosses it just feels unbalanced. No boss should have chasing attacks that are faster than my character with a 25% speed buff. I'm a melee character which means I'm close range and don't get enough time to get away from Bahlak before he starts spinning before I die. Instead of it genuinely being a Trial it feels like you have to get lucky to make it through. If I'm just bad please let me know how to get better because this trial is miserable, and I feel zero incentive to actually do it, especially for some rare, corrupted gear that doesn't even have max augments on it.

- Also, I thought there was 3 bosses in the trial of chaos?? I have seen the Chimera once and Chetza once on previous characters. Every time I do it on my monk it's Bahlak? Is that a normal?

Think most people have similar feelings about the trials. The corrupted loot always feels terribly underhwelming and RNG with the debuffs can brick the run.

Oddly once i'd done my ascendancies I started to enjoy them more and actually ran them for the soul core / time-lost jewel rewards... and for fun.

Once the consequences of not getting ascendancy points if i failed was gone everything felt much more chill and enjoyable.

I see what you're saying. When the RNG for the debuffs didn't make it completely impossible I did enjoy them don't get me wrong, I love challenges, but. When I get to Bahlak that has a one shot move that chases me across the arena while being faster than me is criminal. Especially for some players that are doing their 2nd trial for their ascendancy points? Like there's zero way for them to get past him if they get him unless someone sacrifices themselves for the aggro. That part in the very least needs a tweak in my opinion

I'm level 94 and trial of chaos is extremely easy (besides tornado bird). However I agree it's still one of the worst pieces of content in the game.

- Time Locked trails need to be reworked. Ritual, escort and the blood pillar are all just "wait 90 seconds to proceed". Extremely boring.

- Debuffs need to be reworked. All ground effects are significantly worse than stat debuffs. If you get 3+ ground effects or monster resist, it's an instant restart.

- Bosses are extremely inbalanced. The bird and dragon are easy instant kills. The tornado boss is a coin flip though, and the only reason I ever die in a trial.

- The rewards are useless (besides cores). Just leave them on the ground.

It would be more fun if the trial of chaos was just like a mini atlas where you run 10 micro-maps and choose a suffix and prefix each time.

So trial 9 looks like:

- Monsters have 300% increased Critical Hit Chance
- +40% to Monster Critical Damage Bonus
- 70% more Monster Life.
- +30% Monster Resist.
- Monsters are Armoured.
- Monsters are Evasive.
- Players are cursed with elemental weakness.
- Players are cursed with Enfeeble.
- Area has patches of chilled ground.
- -15% player resistances.

etc.


Also giving us relics similar to sekhma

Most of the tornados in this game are op given the limited areas you're fighting in. And that damned entire area phys bomb is bs as well. Either way you need to upgrade your gear. I manage those trail bosses easily now. Think I kill them in 5 seconds. Except the trail master.

"

Bletzkarn#5429 schrieb:

I'm level 94 and trial of chaos is extremely easy (besides tornado bird). However I agree it's still one of the worst pieces of content in the game.

- Time Locked trails need to be reworked. Ritual, escort and the blood pillar are all just "wait 90 seconds to proceed". Extremely boring.

- Debuffs need to be reworked. All ground effects are significantly worse than stat debuffs. If you get 3+ ground effects or monster resist, it's an instant restart.

- Bosses are extremely inbalanced. The bird and dragon are easy instant kills. The tornado boss is a coin flip though, and the only reason I ever die in a trial.

- The rewards are useless (besides cores). Just leave them on the ground.

It would be more fun if the trial of chaos was just like a mini atlas where you run 10 micro-maps and choose a suffix and prefix each time.

So trial 9 looks like:

- Monsters have 300% increased Critical Hit Chance
- +40% to Monster Critical Damage Bonus
- 70% more Monster Life.
- +30% Monster Resist.
- Monsters are Armoured.
- Monsters are Evasive.
- Players are cursed with elemental weakness.
- Players are cursed with Enfeeble.
- Area has patches of chilled ground.
- -15% player resistances.

etc.


Also giving us relics similar to sekhma

There is no +more life, armoured, evasive, "curses," or ground effects in the trail choices.

"

Direfell#7544 schrieb:

Oddly once i'd done my ascendancies I started to enjoy them more and actually ran them for the soul core / time-lost jewel rewards... and for fun.

Yeah, I think that's actually the core problem right there.
For ASCENDING the trials are completely overtuned, at least 3 and 4.
At that point it's MANDATORY to do the trials, and you're doing them handicapped since you're literally missing Ascendancy points.

Once you have the Ascendancies done:
1. Your character is stronger.
2. You don't NEED the run to succeed to get something out of it. It's a matter of how many keys you get vs how much loot you get from them in total. Failing one Trial just reduces your net gain a bit.

So the whole thing feels more fun.

Here's a bunch of ways to at least equalize the experiences a bit:

1. Make Ascending not dependant on the honour system.
If you lose your honour, you can't get loot at the end, but if you get through, you at least get your Ascendancy.

2. While the key would give you Ascendancy points, ALWAYS run the Ascendancy at the minimum Enemy level, regardless of the key.

3. Just straight up nerf all negative modifiers to the run as long as the key would give you Ascendancy points.
This may be exploitable to farm loot, depending on implementation, which brings us to:

4. Nerf everything, i.e. enemies, modifiers AND loot while the key would give you Ascendancy points.
So while Ascending, the Trials are way easier but pretty much just there to Ascend. Afterwards they are harder but also way more rewarding.

"

Bletzkarn#5429 schrieb:

I'm level 94 and trial of chaos is extremely easy (besides tornado bird). However I agree it's still one of the worst pieces of content in the game.

- Time Locked trails need to be reworked. Ritual, escort and the blood pillar are all just "wait 90 seconds to proceed". Extremely boring.

- Debuffs need to be reworked. All ground effects are significantly worse than stat debuffs. If you get 3+ ground effects or monster resist, it's an instant restart.

- Bosses are extremely inbalanced. The bird and dragon are easy instant kills. The tornado boss is a coin flip though, and the only reason I ever die in a trial.

- The rewards are useless (besides cores). Just leave them on the ground.

It would be more fun if the trial of chaos was just like a mini atlas where you run 10 micro-maps and choose a suffix and prefix each time.

So trial 9 looks like:

- Monsters have 300% increased Critical Hit Chance
- +40% to Monster Critical Damage Bonus
- 70% more Monster Life.
- +30% Monster Resist.
- Monsters are Armoured.
- Monsters are Evasive.
- Players are cursed with elemental weakness.
- Players are cursed with Enfeeble.
- Area has patches of chilled ground.
- -15% player resistances.

etc.


Also giving us relics similar to sekhma

Same. The only loot you really pull from Chaos that seems worthwhile is the soul cores or the uniques from the trial master. More importantly, you leave most of the corrupted items you earn at the end on the floor because you don't have the inventory space to even take them to disenchant, since there's no stash box in the reward room (unlike Sekhema).

Sometimes you get a lot of rares spawn in the trial so you pull decent loot, other times you get nothing. Sekhema can get you rooms that guarantee one or several rares that means I always walk out of that with nearly half a quad stash full of stuff to sort out and usually a couple of exalts. But Chaos? Mostly I just get filled up with disenchant fodder at the end most times.

Also thinking of it, your rewards really don't 'ramp up' as you do it. You just get a bunch of useless stuff added to your reward pool that you're risking, while the content gets harder. Maybe each challenge you take should get paired with a randomized reward that juices up the content further? You could have some fun with it besides just 'extra rares, rarity, or quantity'. Like a reward mod that might give 'corrupted items have % quality, corrupted items have +1 sockets, corrupted items drop with their corruption 'lucky', etc. Could be neat to turn Trial of Chaos into a corruption crafting minigame for what you pull from it.

Edit: Thinking especially on the rewards front because the Trials aren't maps and thus don't get your Atlas passives or tower juicing mechanics. Another idea is you could use a waystone along with your trial invites to juice them further.

Honestly the ascendancies are low-key lazy content in the first place.

An ascendancy is supposed to be where you lock your class into a specific set of strong points to further progress it.

Ascendancies should TEST the build based on the ascendancy...

The whole one-size-fits-all thing is filler fluff and it's apparent because some builds have no problem with it and for others it's impossible.

It's just one of MANY things that needs to be completely redone for the game to be better.

I've just farmed 50+ 10 trial ultimatums in a row and here are some thoughts!

Overall I like the Chaos Trials and think they're a far more interesting expression of the roguelike system than the Sekhema trials. It feels like the player has more agency when it comes to the difficulty modifiers, and the modifiers themselves are in general interesting to deal with and make for more engaging gameplay without being just stupdily frustrating like some of the Sekhema effects.

**Rooms**

- Survive Until the Timer Expires: Monsters spawn painfully slowly, and almost 100% of the time, when they do spawn, it is just 2 packs of white monsters that you kill in a second or two and then just stand around doing nothing waiting for something to do.

By far the worst room, you can't speed this process up in any way by either character power or player skill, and it is pretty much an afk room. Monsters need to spawn much faster, and killing rares (at least, or maybe just killing anything) should subtract seconds from the timer. OR at least give the player something else to do while waiting around.

- Sacrifice Enemies In Blood Circles: Similar to the above, monsters spawn very slowly and are almost always white monsters, resulting in a lot of standing around waiting and doing nothing.

- Collect The Soul Cores: If you get pushed by a monster while putting the Soul Core into the altar, you DROP the soul core and the Soul Core gets teleported back to it's original spot on the floor, meaning you need to go back and pick it up again and insert it again. This is very frustrating and time wasting, especially as it can't be prevented by clearing out monsters near the altars, since more can and do spawn and then charge into you causing this issue. Presumably this is just a bug and not an intentional design.

Some of the soul core room layouts are definitely pretty tedious, and I often find my approach to this room is just running back and forth between cores and altars ignoring monsters as much as possible to get it done quicker. Least favourite room after the AFK room.

Suggestions to make these more interesting: Get rid of the switches and wall puzzles, they're not engaging, just annoying and cause more waiting and walking. Instead why not have each soul core guarded/held by a mini boss, so that there is some actual gameplay in these rooms, would make collecting the cores much more engaging than just running past everything and clicking on them.

**General**

- Downtime: Definitely too much pointless walking/waiting between the trials. Between the elevators, the stone doors, the time stops, and the sometimes very long hallways, I feel like at least half my time in a run is spent just getting to the next encounter. This does not make for engaging gameplay and seems like it should be very easy to improve, this is one area where Sekhema does it better.

- Where Are the Rares?: In many runs it seems like there are zero to very few magic or rare monsters, even when selecting the Lethal Rares modifier, I often run into 3 or less rare monsters over an ENTIRE run. I guess 30% of zero is still zero... Regardless, one shotting sparse packs of white monsters and an occasional magic pack isn't particularly engaging. Perhaps pack size and magic/rare monsters should increase with each modifier you select as a baseline.

- Endgame Scalability: This might be an unpopular opinion, but whereas Sekhema trials feel painfully long and tedious, Chaos Trials often feel very short. This is not a problem/criticism, having content like this that you can jump into for 10-15 minutes is a positive. But I think the Chaos Trial formula could also lend itself well to a more 'infinite' system, where you can keep progressing and stacking more difficulty modifiers until you die or cash out.

Or at least perhaps have Ultimatums with more rooms, 15, 20 etc. Since in Sekhema you're already going through dozens of rooms per run, this doesn't seem too crazy. Perhaps you can use currencies on Ultimatums like you can with Waystones, which increase the room count and give various modifiers to the run. This again doesn't seem too wild since the Trialmaster can already drop Ultimatums with various rarities and modifiers.

Perhaps have a modifier that increases the area level of the rest of the run, or maybe every X rooms, or when you defeat a boss, the rest of the run gets +1 to area level.

These options would provide some extra endgame scalability to the runs so that they can still provide an element of challenge and interest for powerful characters.

- More Difficulty Modifiers!: The current pool of difficulty modifiers is fine, but can get stale pretty quickly if you are doing a lot of runs. It would be awesome to see the pool expanded so that you are less likely to get runs where you are just choosing the same 3-5 that your build can deal with easily. I think this would increase the replayability significantly.

- Heart Tethers: Unable to use travel skills while tethered (only tested with Leap Slam and Stampede). Is this intentional or a bug? Means that if your clear skill/s are also travel skills you can't use them and thus cannot choose to stay in the heart tether and fight if you don't want to get stunned, and also have to try and walk/roll out of it while getting attacked and not being able to use your abilities. If this is an intentional extra challenge that's fine I guess, but it is very counterintuitive and is not indicated in the description of the Heart Tether modifier.

- Rewards: Having all the rewards be corrupted, while a thematically fun idea, in practice makes these rewards pretty much useless. In 50+ runs I have never seen even a vaguely usable item from the non-soul core loot. As others have said, if they are going to be corrupted they could at least have max quality, sockets, and affixes. Even so the majority would still be vendor/salvage trash, so I don't see how this would be too good.

- Chimera Boss: The flying off is not an interesting mechanic, it's just annoying, and due to the size and verticality of the arena, means that if you don't kill it before it flies off, you spend more time walking around to find the boss than you do fighting the boss. I don't think I need to elaborate on why this does not make for engaging gameplay.

**Overall**
Chaos Trials are probably my favourite endgame activity, I hope to see them refined and expanded on in the future.

For reference: Lvl 93 Titan.

Thank you for reading and have a great day Exiles.