Trial of Chaos improvements

So first I'll post my main problems with Trial of Chaos and then try to suggest constructive solutions:

1) RNG of debuffs and trial rooms: This can be beyond frustrating sometimes because it can literally be the difference between cruising through at level 80 on a 10 Trial Ultimatum key or getting absolutely destroyed at level 90 by a certain boss. I think players in general dont like too much RNG in their games and we already have crafting and loot as pure RNG systems.

2) The difficulty/frustration spike between the 3 bosses: The bird boss that spawns a baby is absolutely easy. Like it feels like it has much less HP than the others and all of its attacks are easily dodgable.
Chimera is simply super-mega annoying even after the nerf. It still flies around way too much and runs away which is the most frustrating thing any enemy can do. Not hard but way too tedious to fight fast unless youre severly overpowered.
Finally, the other bird boss that can turn into the tornado is absolutely hard. Like really really hard. The problem with this is the extreme spike over the other two bosses, meaning your run now not only depends on trial and debuff RNG but also as a third RNG parameter on the order of bosses. If you get this boss last, you're very likely f'ed until you're level 90+.

3) The amount of time it takes to transition from room to room and the amount of time the "survive until the timer expires" trial takes. Its just long and tedious for literally no reason.

Solution suggestions:

1) In both Chaos and also Sekhemas, you could let players select the debuffs they want for each room at the start of the trial with a sort of tier system with a score: Each debuff is associated with a certain pool/tier and a debuff from a higher tier gives a bigger score. Players have to reach a certain minimum score to be able to do a certain trial level.

Example:
- Debuffs tiers are 1-5 with 5 being the hardest. Each debuff gives 100 points per tier level.
- In order to open a 4 room Chaos, you have to pick debuffs of a combined minimum of 1000 points, so you can either pick 2 tier 5 or 3 tier 3 + 1 tier 1, etc.
The point is: Its up to YOU, the player which is always a good thing and you can create strategies depending on your current character instead of always being at the mercy of an RNG sequence. 7 and 10 room Chaos trial could then have higher minimum scores and possibly a larger selection of debuffs.


2) Either bring all 3 bosses to around the same difficulty level or have the sequence of bosses fixed should help a lot. In general I think all the nerfs made the tornado bird boss too hard. It should not be that even in the late 80s levels this boss feels so goddamn hard. Keep in mind that at this point in the game, mapping doesnt do much anymore except getting EXP because loot is rare and Trials of Chaos is the number one farming place for currency, meaning players are incentivised to do it due to a lack of alternatives. Also have Chimera not fly around SO often...like it really does it every 4-5 seconds...

3) Here I suggest making the entire Chaos trial just one room with a panel in the middle similar to Sekhemas. Everytime you interact with the panel, the next trial can start and the layout of the room can change in a short loading sequence. If you combine this with my suggested solution to 1) meaning the debuff sequence is already fixed then there is even no need to select a debuff at this point, meaning players save even more time and can do the content faster (yes we like that a lot). But please make us not waste 60 seconds every time to transition from room to room, especially with these slow elevators. It feels bad and costs the majority of time. Also I suggest lowering the timer in the "survive until the timer expires" trial to 50-60 seconds and have more waves spawn faster.

This would also have the nice side effect that you can actually make bosses harder as dying anywhere in a game never causes much frustration if you dont lose much time and you can do another 4-5 minutes to get to where you died. But at the moment, Trials of Chaos takes a good 15-20 minutes easily even with a good character and if you happen to get tornado bird as the last boss and die (sometimes even after he is dead due to his nice mechanics that dont stop the moment he drops....) you just feel very frustrated to not only lose the Ultimatum key, all potential rewards but also 15-20 minutes of your time. If this happens even 1-2 times, I can promise you I close the game for that day immediately. Challenge is fine but not this waste of time that comes along with it. Same for Sekhemas btw. Most of us are adults with a job and cant afford to waste so much time achieving absolutely nothing. Another way would be maybe to still get the rewards you currently have when you die maybe. So that at least if feels rewarding to have done some trial rooms.
Last edited by LW187#4876 on Apr 15, 2025, 4:22:46 AM
Last bumped on Apr 15, 2025, 4:21:52 AM

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