The Coward's Trial - Unique map garbage

I was lucky to drop this map today and did it with my L80 EK marauder. I must say it was most fun and most challenging map to solo I've done so far. Afterwards should have swapped life leech gem on to make it easier but there was so much hostiles I didn't really have time to swap gems. Obviously if I had 6L and/or Kaom's it would be walk in the park but for full self found/self craft it was very challenging and nice surprise compared to all faceroll everything type of maps.



EDIT: It was in HC without having any idea whats gona happen. if you didn't figure out during 2 first rooms you wan't to detonate as many corpses as possible as fast as possible before necro appears dunno what to say. You can't detonate all corpses fast enough but enough to keep it somewhat tankable.

And finally thanks for the diamond supporter who designed it. It was surprisingly good, fun and challenging.

Ran this map today and well, on top of the usual 6 man group ATI issues, when the final boss appeared my fps dropped to 1 (felt more like a slideshow) and died :( , rest of the group managed to clear tho.

While I like survival type games and modes, I personally wont be doing this map again due to the technical problems at the end, the sheer amount of loot on the ground (hidden makes little difference), and all the mobs with multiple auras is unplayable for me (and I used detonate dead as much as possible^^).

never tried this map, but from the OP's description - it bares some resemblance to an arena challenge added about a month ago to Torchlight 2, called "Tarroch's Tomb":
monsters spawn in waves, boss at the end of wave. survive and get the loot.

however, that's where the similarities end.

"Tarroch's Tomb" is a true end-game area, hardest in the game. whereas "Coward's Trial" is a level 66 map if I understood correctly.
it's also not a set of rooms, but one rather large arena you can run quite a bit in, with 2 monster-spawning spots for each wave. and the mobs in a wave are designed to compliment each other (like a heavy tank + some ranged, or a summoner with several fast swarm mobs).
and god knows you need the extra space - because each wave spawns mobs of a level and strength so much higher than yours.

it's a "test your might" kind of thing, where you accumulate increasingly better chests behind the arena with each wave you defeat, and can decide if you want to quit and collect the loot you earned (best loot in the game), or continue to the next wave and risk losing all chests if you die.
it's also so hard, you need a very decent build to beat all waves, even on the easiest difficulty. I didn't (because I play 2nd hardest), but I heard you have to fight several bosses in the final wave, who are twice your level. and I'm talking Act Bosses, not just unique mobs.

the thing is though, there are no cheap "everybody resurrects" tricks, and no aura stacking on mobs. what you kill stays dead, if you can actually kill it before it kills you. and that's a giant "if" :)

now I might sound like a Torchlight 2 fan - and I am - but I'm a fan of Path Of Exile too.
so I think GGG should not get ideas from an offline-based game, and especially implement them so poorly, and so closely linked with all the problems this Beta already has.

"Tarroch's Tomb" is an "OMG this is insane!" kind of thing.
"Cowards Trial" in contrast, sounds like "What?! the mobs are cheating!". cheap challenge. and to make matters worse - RNG will make sure your reward at the end will hardly be worth the effort.

so please dear dev team, please take a look into the problems currently plaguing this Beta, and solve 50% of them at least.
you can always add new content after release, including a refined "Cowards's Trial" which will actually be fun to play.

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Rhys wrote:

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lukeiy wrote:

Seems pretty stupid. By the time you find that out, it's already too late. Add a delay to his mass resurrection, and put a line of text when you mouse over him describing what he will do if you don't finish him quick enough.

It isn't supposed to be fair: it's supposed to be hard. That's what the diamond supporter wanted.

I think you would agree that there's a difference between "hard" as in challenging gameplay and "hard" as in, "you drop to .02 FPS, your computer locks up, you desync, and resync to a resurrect screen."

At the very least, I would hope so. I have no issue with stuff that's supposed to be hard. In fact, I hope there's more hard content in the game. I just want the difficulty to come from the gameplay and not from a battle against technology and network connection.

The fact that the OP completely lagged and locked up when the boss spawned, and numerous players that I've spoken to have crashed out of the Coward's Trial, should be a matter of concern. To see it trivialized like this by the developers is quite disconcerting.

^ I don't think the OP's complaint was that the area was too hard. More that the area was 'bugged' because he would get <5 FPS, freeze up, and die because he couldn't do anything. It's a BS way to die and has nothing to do with the map's inherent difficulty.

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Rhys wrote:

Yeah, it was a trade-off of awesomeness vs. performance... sorry about that.

What exactly is causing the FPS drop in this case? We already know that many mobs on the screen, with lots of effects and so on is not cool, but is there anything specific that causes this behaviour on this specific map?

Also, is this a CPU or GPU failure?

And you did know that it will create performance issues, yet still released it? Bad GGG :) Maybe you should have delayed the release of this unique and keep it in Alpha testing until you knew it would be working properly on what is today an average PC (I'd say something like a 2 GHz i3 with a HD 7750 is average these days - how would the map work on such a PC, both at minimal and max settings?)

Did this map.

FPS was horrible.

My feedback:

Obviously i'm a bit frustrated (failed map) but i still want to add something hoping it's not seen as whining whatsoever.

I tried to detonate as few as possible and see if i could do the boss then. The problem was then that once the boss had spawned i was unable to move at all. when you are solo in there without any ability to dodge this turns the map into a pure gearcheck (gear- and hardwarewise).

Around me were 4 circles of skeletons right from the start. Due to this i died two more times and all portals were gone by that time.

So my suggestion: Increase the roomsize of the last room by like 25%-30%.
I'm up for hard maps, the first 3 rooms were quite funny and (at least the rhoa room) hard.
The last room spoiled the fun then because it turns from fun to either using loopholes or being bodyblocked until you die :(.

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Rhys wrote:

Well, this map isn't supposed to be super-endgame-plus-god-mode-best-drops-evarrrr so I'm not sure what point the comparison to Tarroch's Tomb is supposed to present. It's an interesting factoid, I guess.

We know that some users have performance issues with certain areas, not just the Coward's Trial. We hope to improve this more in future. It doesn't really have anything to do with difficulty, though.

first of all, thank you for your response.

although it really wasn't fair on my part to compare a "super-endgame" area in a released game to a level 66 map in a Beta - my intention was to show 2 things:

1) an arena-type challenge can be playable and enjoyable if added when the game is already mature enough from a technical standpoint (see my other "fix first, add content later" posts to emphasize this).

2) the fight itself - even if you have a super-machine and super-connection to do it without lag or desync - just feels cheap by design. instead of a mob that appears and resurrects everything you previously killed, you can make a really tough mob appear, and/or make the waves consist of mob types that compliment and enhance each other's threat level.
"swarm with enemies, then swarm some more" is the most primitive and overused approach to an arena challenge in my opinion.

I mean not to offend in case you were the one who designed it, but doing it in an "unconventional" way would make players go "wow! this is epic! who did this?"
which would be a good description to my reaction, when going into the Vaal Oversoul boss-fight for the 1st time, and every time afterwards :)