The Trialmaster is way too rare.

My friends and I didn't even know the trialmaster could spawn as a boss and its been weeks into the league LOL

Hasn't this type of problem existed before already?

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bluecometxD wrote:

My friends and I didn't even know the trialmaster could spawn as a boss and its been weeks into the league LOL

Hasn't this type of problem existed before already?

To be fair, you will NEVER see the Trialmaster if you aren't beating 9 waves in T13+ maps. So if you guys haven't made it that far into your Atlas yet (I didn't look at your challenges, but that seems very likely with only 9 finished), it's literally impossible for you to have seen this fight.

I've seen the Trialmaster 3 times at Awakening Level 7 (edit: just got #4 during the 8th set of conquerors), which honestly makes it far less rare than many end bosses from past leagues, but you ONLY see it once you reach the later stages of endgame (very reminiscent of Farrul in that way, tbh).

Casual players NNA.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

I've seen the Trialmaster 3 times at Awakening Level 7 (edit: just got #4 during the 8th set of conquerors)

This is something that honestly worries me. I got my first Trialmaster yesterday as well (a few hours after my post, nice timing btw). But at that point I already completed at least 250 T14+ Ultimatum without failing.

My friends are in a similar boat. They have played even more than me and got their first (and only) Trialmaster fight even later (300+ T14+ maps).

What worries me is, when I see posts of people getting multiple of these fights even before AW8 it has to mean one of two things:

1. RNG is RNG, as always. I cannot tell if the 'evidence' I collected is meaningful to draw a conclusion here.

2. There is a bug OR unknown mechanic preventing you from reaching wave ten.

Either way, it should NEVER take anyone more than 100 maps to get a try at the league mechanic boss once or, if the designers really insist on this taking multiple hundreds of maps to do, then at least make it deterministic at some point so I don't even have to think about option 2 and have something to work towards without feeling frustrated (or less frustrated because hundreds of red maps for a single try is still way too much in my opinion).

The weirdest thing is that the Trialmaster doesn't seem to be entirely random. There's some chance involved I'm sure, but of the various people I know playing this league a few of us are very consistently finding a 10-wave Trial every 50-80 high tier maps (I just counted, I'm at 317 total maps run this league and I've fought him 4 times, so I'm probably right at 50 average T13+ maps to get Wave 10) and others are finding them significantly less often. Every 200 maps, maybe, but at that low probability you can't really perform statistical analysis because each individual spawn IS an outlier by definition. It could easily be as low as 1 in 500 for people who aren't accidentally fulfilling some as-of-yet-unknown criteria which increases your chances of getting offered waves 9 and 10.

Whatever the cause is (so far my friends and I have about 15 theories and zero evidence to support any of them), we're certain the last two waves are directly connected by it: those of us finding a much higher number of trials offering wave 10 are also finding a significantly higher number of trials which end after wave 9 instead of wave 8.

I've only just now started tracking my Trial data to try and make some sense of this, but the two current leading theories in our minds (again, based on mostly nothing so far) are:

1 - The Ultimatum mods you select have associated difficulty ratings, and choosing "harder" ones gives you a better chance of getting extra Trial Waves. This is my own personal top theory, because it mirrors the clear inspiration this league mechanic took from the Final Fantasy 7 Battle Square.

2 - You have some hidden "hot streak" rating which is negatively affected for trials you skip entirely as well as trials where you cut a deal, not only trials you lose outright. I know a lot of players who are skipping the stone circle trials entirely, and to my knowledge none of them are in the "trialmaster every 50 maps" bracket.

UPDATE: I think I might be on to something... less than TEN maps since my last Trialmaster, and I just got him again (#5 of the league, 319 total maps run)

Pleeease GGG, just make this boss deterministic. Make every Ultimatum go to wave 10 and if you complete it, you get 1 of 20 Trialmaster Splinters or something.
I can't comprehend why, for almost any league boss (Atziri, Oshabi, Maven, Sirus, Elder, Shaper, ...), you come to the conclusion to make then deterministic and/or tradeable and then you implement this pure RNG fest without any way of influencing it.
There is absolutely no joy if you are not able to "work" (play) your way to a certain part of the game. For the very least give us some Atlas passives or watchstone mods that give ultimatums a hgher chance for a higher wavecount or something.

Update 2 to my last post:

Trialmaster is deterministic. The alternative is too statistically impossible to even contemplate, I just spawned Trialmaster #6 TWO MAPS after my last one.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

Update 2 to my last post:

Trialmaster is deterministic. The alternative is too statistically impossible to even contemplate, I just spawned Trialmaster #6 TWO MAPS after my last one.

The hotstreak thing from your other post makes sense. Chaos wants...chaos. If you keep winning, it seems reasonable that he would take interest and intervene himself. With all these people skipping stone circles they're probably screwing themselves out of chances to fight him. Idk, like you said, no hard evidence here whatsoever.

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innervation wrote:

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

Update 2 to my last post:

Trialmaster is deterministic. The alternative is too statistically impossible to even contemplate, I just spawned Trialmaster #6 TWO MAPS after my last one.

The hotstreak thing from your other post makes sense. Chaos wants...chaos. If you keep winning, it seems reasonable that he would take interest and intervene himself. With all these people skipping stone circles they're probably screwing themselves out of chances to fight him. Idk, like you said, no hard evidence here whatsoever.

Grimro did a lot of testing with the win-streak thing where he ran a streak of 100 and concluded that its not a thing. If there's a deterministic way of spawning him, it hasn't been discovered or made public knowledge yet.

I'm not surprised that this is so rare, GGG has a track record of doing this bs. Back in abyss league I remember not seeing one of the abyssal liches for the entire league. Last league in ritual I didn't find a single volatile ritual till about a month into the league with 500+ hours played. If ultimatum actually goes core, I bet they would make the trialmaster spawn much more common.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

Update 2 to my last post:

Trialmaster is deterministic. The alternative is too statistically impossible to even contemplate, I just spawned Trialmaster #6 TWO MAPS after my last one.

What makes you so sure about this now? Just because you got it more often recently? That could very well be a statistical outlier.

In your post you pretty much explained how the encounter is random but also threw in some anecdotes about what happened to you and friends (as I did as well) without any evidence on what you did differently.

All things considered it is much more likely that it is not deterministic in the current iteration as there are no steps to reproduce what you (and your friends) experience.

If streaks are important, then they only marginally influence it. From all information we have gathered, there is no reason to assume it is deterministic at all.

I am happy to be proven otherwise.

If it is deterministic and you can literally fight him every other map that would be hilarious and stupid just as much as finding him every few hundred maps by random chance.

Edit: To add to the evidence we have: In my original post I stated I only failed two times. I also stopped early on two other occasions for big rewards. My win streak would be between 10-50 here. Coincidentally I also failed one after making the post but I got to wave ten just a few maps after. I highly doubt the streak affects the spawn in any way, against what I would like to believe since it would make sense gameplay-wise (my opinion).

I'm always hesitant to state any conclusions while still testing out game stuff like this because this community has a way of running with half of the information and reposting it badly on the subreddit. My entire guild got Doxxed at one point because some overenthusiastic individual decided to invite the entire sub to message me for information about a specific hard-to-find unique item, completely without my permission or knowledge and in flagrant disregard for the selectively-enforced subreddit rules. So all I can say for now is, "I need to collect more data but this looks promising."

As for why it looks promising, well, that part is easy enough to explain: I decided to test something very specific, and was able to spawn 3 Trialmaster encounters in under 20 maps by doing it. That's one hell of a coincidence if I'm not at least partially on to something; if Trialmaster were purely random the odds of this happening the instant I changed to this specific test are inconceivably small: easily a hundred thousand to one against. Again, I need to test this further, but if I'm walking down the road and I see 16 consecutive coins turned heads-up, my explanation doesn't tend to be "all of these were flipped randomly and happened to land the same way."