The Coward's Trial - A few questions.

So last night, as I finally killed Vaal in Merc, I see a bit o' orange on the floor. it's the Unique Crypt Map. WOOHOO! I roll it, and I get this:



I have watched Kripp's Video, and I just had a few questions (as I was at work, and couldn't hear audio)

1.) Do the waves continuously spawn on the timer if you don't take the stairs to the next level? Say... Could I kill all the waves, take the time to comb through the copious amounts of loot that drop, pick what I want, and then head through the stairs to the next level?

2.) If I do have to go through the stairs to the next level fast enough to beat timers, will the old levels reset, and thus lose the loot?

3.) Realistically speaking, how hard is this map? I ground forever before going through the pyramid, So I'm already 66. (I was changing over to a CI build from a Life Build, and wanted to take some extra time). I'm hoping to (finally) get some upgrades to my gear in A3, as I haven't upgraded much since... A1 Merc. Should I try it when I get to the Waypoint for the Lab? Or should I do some of my other maps first? I'm planning to do this with at least 1 friend, hopefully a few more. Will my friend hate me because I'm a summoner?

4.) Is improving it to 20% a smart thing to do before hand? (I'm assuming so, but I'm just curious)

get a totem to eat the corpse... the horror storys i've read of those who didnt do this are crazy.

I did this map once, so here is my understanding of how it works...

"

shoju wrote:

1.) Do the waves continuously spawn on the timer if you don't take the stairs to the next level? Say... Could I kill all the waves, take the time to comb through the copious amounts of loot that drop, pick what I want, and then head through the stairs to the next level?

I think they start spawning when atleast one person goes to the next room. Not positive about this one...

"

shoju wrote:

2.) If I do have to go through the stairs to the next level fast enough to beat timers, will the old levels reset, and thus lose the loot?

Not sure why they would...

"

shoju wrote:

3.) Realistically speaking, how hard is this map? I ground forever before going through the pyramid, So I'm already 66. (I was changing over to a CI build from a Life Build, and wanted to take some extra time). I'm hoping to (finally) get some upgrades to my gear in A3, as I haven't upgraded much since... A1 Merc. Should I try it when I get to the Waypoint for the Lab? Or should I do some of my other maps first? I'm planning to do this with at least 1 friend, hopefully a few more. Will my friend hate me because I'm a summoner?

It's a pretty hard map. It gets very crowded, and there's various magic and rare enemies that get spawned randomly. There's also a wide range of enemies that can spawn - you get split arrow archers, poison arrow archers, pretty much every kind of skeleton archer, mage and melee skeleton type. You also get rhoas.

At the end of each room, there's a necromancer and things can get pretty crazy...we brought a devouring totem but it didn't seem to be doing it's job effectively...but I'd bring it anyway.

I think this map is hard for ES users because there isn't really any room to hide to regenerate your ES...I got lucky and was able to do it a few times but it really gets crowded.

One of the other challenges is that each room is absolutely overcrowded with loot. You have to hit Z to remove the item name tags from appearing, but then you can't see if anything good dropped...and even then, it is very easy to click accidentally on some gear and pick it up, filling your inventory with garbage. It's pretty annoying...there should be an option to not just disable the names from appearing on the ground but also disable picking up of items.

"

shoju wrote:

4.) Is improving it to 20% a smart thing to do before hand? (I'm assuming so, but I'm just curious)

I don't think so...20 chisels is like 8-10 chaos, might not be worth doing that.

Edit: I dont' recommend doing this map at lvl66, could get ugly.

"

Emil_kof wrote:

[...]It's pretty annoying...there should be an option to not just disable the names from appearing on the ground but also disable picking up of items.

[...]

There is! (I think) Should be in the options. It's "Key Pickup".

"

FirefoxG wrote:

get a totem to eat the corpse... the horror storys i've read of those who didnt do this are crazy.

If you are in a party make sure to bring a totem with detonate dead instead! I have heard of a bug where if a devouring totem attempts to eat a corpse at the same time an enemy summoner attempts to revive it then it can cause crashes (for some reason only with 2 or more people)

Detonate dead totem. Awesome. I will figure out how to make that happen. I figure I will probably be 70 by there. I'm trying to take it slow, and my gear is @@)(*^%@*(&ING atrocious. I cant seem to find a good ES chest anywhere. It's my weakest piece of gear by far.

"

shoju wrote:

Detonate dead totem. Awesome. I will figure out how to make that happen. I figure I will probably be 70 by there. I'm trying to take it slow, and my gear is @@)(*^%@*(&ING atrocious. I cant seem to find a good ES chest anywhere. It's my weakest piece of gear by far.

If any of your friends do cold damage that will help a lot.
Pulser or because of the awesome of chain a high crit PS wander with even a small amount of cold damage works a treat. Shattered skeles aren't getting ressed.

I wonder if I should just toss a FP gem in my gear, and level it as I go, or consider leveling the Cold Damage aura for my minions.

EDIT:

And thank you Rhys for the clarification. I am looking forward to running it.

The last level is far too hard for solo, they spawn so fast and the damn boss, I died once, came back, and the room was full of monsters, died instantly. It's almost impossible to do solo, you just won't clear 1+ monsters per second, as the boss keeps resurrecting them, and they keep spawning.