Among the debris of Task Forces and Respecs littered about the maps of Paragon City, there are also the Trials. Single in purpose, focused on one location, the Trials are timed missions that must be completed with the defeat of a Monster villain (High hit points, unlimited endurance, impossible to solo) and in some cases the rescuing of hostages.

At this point in time (Feb. 2005) there are 3 Trials: Cavern of Transcendence, in Hollows for levels 14 and up (but really only accessible to level 18s who get to Talshak the Mystic before they level too high. This is actually the hardest Trial to even enter, as so very few people can get to it!) and MUST keep 8 players at all times for the final step of the mission; Abandoned Sewers, connected to the Sewer network under the Atlas/Galaxy/Steel/Skyway maps, for basically level 38 and up (36s could join but are not allowed to begin the Trial, this is the easiest trial to enter because it only requires one person to start it and others can join as needed during the Trial); and the Eden Spire, in Eden for a minimum of 4 players at levels 39 to 41 only (you could exemplar...).

The Abandoned Sewer Trial is actually a lot harder and a lot odder to deal with than I originally mentioned. For starters, to get to the trial's doorway, you have to work your way through the Abandoned Sewer tunnels to get there. Lots of nasty mobs and little room to maneuver. Even in stealth mode you can run into problems. That's the hard thing. The odd thing is that, despite the fact only one person is needed to start the Trial, you REALLY need to have 8 people there to finish it.

Blue Arc Anom had part of the Trial already done, well actually Mookie got it done. I'll step back a minute. At Level 39, Blue Arc suddenly ran out of options to play: his contacts dried up, his next set of contacts wouldn't talk to him until Level 40, and street hunting wasn't generating enough xp to get the next level. Blue's only options left were the various Trials available at that level: Eden Spire and Abandoned Sewers. This was...well...two weeks ago. It's difficult to get a Trial team for Eden, Blue had to get an invite from a supergroup outing and it was completely by chance. The Abandoned Sewers was available, but there were problems with that.

Getting the trial started is easy: you need to go from your contact Maren MacDougal in Founders Falls into the Abandoned Sewers (connected to the normal Sewers in Atlas/Galaxy/Perez/Steel/Skyway) and hunt down 150 Ritki in the AS. Really, only one person is needed for that, just a simple sewer hunt.

Except these guys are level 38 and up in the Abandoned Sewers, and Blaster ATs, especially mine, are squishy as heck soloing at this level. Blue couldn't even work his way past the Skyway entrance point (Skyway and Atlas are closest to where mass Ritki mobs can be found), blocked off by swarming Hydra Spawn that nearly killed him the one time he tried sneaking past a mob.

Mookie was looking to get the Abandoned Sewer Trial done. She'd reached Level 50 (the current top level) and somehow had missed getting a successful run made (from what I remember, she suffered some pretty tough defeats). Knowing I'd made the level to get in, and looking to exemplar I think once we entered the Trial itself, she had me make contact and then she worked her way into the AS area where she made quick work of the Ritki. Level 50s against Level 39s to 44s win every time.

But this was started late one night, and during it we were told by Cammy (Sophie's alt from the Avatars of War) that we really needed more people. Just because one person can start it didn't mean the Trial would scale downward well enough for one person to finish it. So we finished the first part and planned on starting the second part the next night.

Except Mookie hadn't been back since. And I do want to keep it available for her to work on.

By coincidence, Monday night another player from Safe Harbor's circle of friends and alt groups had the AS Trial, and needed people for it. He'd already cleared the first part and now needed the second part done. So, along with Bjarni (Scrapper) with whom I had teamed at the time, I volunteered for that. Along for the run were Hexxia (Defender), F T Shadow (Defender) from WittyLibrarian's Respec, Mr. Wednesday (Blaster) from the Legendaries, YelloSno (Controller), SHAM-ROCK (Tanker), and a Scrapper whose name I didn't write down and whose personal conflict with Hexxia on some issue would make for a brilliant subplot in a 12-issue comic book miniseries.

The second part of the trial is the key part, the one with the Timer, the one with the special weapons, the one with...damn, there's no pie down there!

There's an access code, once typed in (the contact person touches a computer screen), the timer goes off for 90 minutes and everyone hurries in. Once inside, you are confronted with a downward shaft lined with ramps and stairs swarming with Ritki. The Ritki have nasty, very nasty plans for the Hydra, and ONLY YOU (and about 7 other guys) can stop them.

Actually, the Tanker stops them. SHAM quickly went into Herd mode and pulled away various heavy hitters so we could get rid of them first. Above all are the Hatched Kraken, Monster types at various levels of the ramps. He pulled one in and the team pulverized the poor booger. For which I saw one full bar of XP fill up, something I hadn't seen since Level 22 on my Blue. One monster, with THAT much XP?!?! More, SHAM, more!

While the Ritki need to be knocked down a peg (or twelve), the rest of us needed to grab special weapons. The Trial gives you two: a Particle Cannon and a Thermite Cannon. Both are good only against the Hydra. No other weapons can hurt the Hydra. So save it!

You also need to know that any character above Level 42 CANNOT HANDLE A SPECIAL WEAPON. If a Level 44, for example, clicks on a glowy, that weapon is GONE. Note to selves: Let the Wookie win. No wait, Let the Level 38s to 42s get the weapons!

The other thing to remember is you don't HAVE to kill all the Ritki in the stairwell area: only the ones surrounding the glowys holding the special weapons. If you can stealth through it, do so, and kill only high-XP monsters (More, SHAM! More! Must...get...leveled...).

At the bottom of the stairwell is the sewer cavern, sewage water and cave scene. In the middle is the Hydra, and in four corners are shield generators protected by Ritki mobs and Krakens. While avoiding the Hydra as long as possible, this is what you do:

1) Pull the Krakens first. Kill Skul them.
2) Attack each Ritki mob one at a time, but save the generators for one of the following steps.
3) Attack the Hydra tentacles. This gets really nasty, not because of the tentacles themselves but because you end up in range of the Hydra's psychic attacks (mind blasts and psychic tornadoes). And the Hydra will be shielded by this point in time.
4) Once all the tentacles are out of the way, break up into 4 teams (2 players each usually).
5) Each team hits a generator at the same time, destroying the generators at roughly the same moment.
6) Now HURRY! Regroup so that the healers can focus, and use the special weapons only (you WILL need to move in close too). Before you know it, the shield generators will be fixed and the Hydra protected again.
7) Circle the generators as a group, because there's more Ritki to kill at the generators. When they're clear, re-break into 4 teams and take out each generator again.
8) Repeat step 6).
9) When the Hydra is at 50 percent health, a wave of Ritki will land atop your group to attack. This is where having a Controller (grav troller especially) is a great help: the Controller can hold the mob while the rest focus on killing the Hydra. Once the shield is back up, move away from the Hydra and kill the Ritki as quick as possible. If you do NOT have a Controller you are...ahem...screwed. Without a Controller, break off the Hydra attack, move away and kill the Ritki.
10) Repeat steps 7) and then 6) again as needed.
11) When the Hydra is at 25 percent health, a large wave of Ritki will land atop you. KEEP fighting the Hydra and let the Controller hold the mobs. With luck you will get the Hydra out of the way and you can finish off the Ritki ASAP. If not, do your best. Again, without a Controller you will need to back off your attack and take care of the incoming Ritki mobs.
12) Once the Hydra implodes, run over the area where it was sitting and get the Exploration badge. Dance on its bones.

There. Simple, right?

The stress comes from the fact you've got that bloody timer that won't stop or pause or anything. At some point you'll look at the Hydra sitting there with half-strength with 20 minutes to go on the clock and you'll wonder, "Hey we got to hurry this up!"

Our team got it done with 12 minutes to go. We got the last wave of Ritki at 15 minutes to go. We did pretty well, considering there were oh...10 or 12 deaths here and there, all caused by the psychic blasts the Hydra nailed on us.

So, having run this with already, I can only hope that when I run it again with Mookie we can do as well, and that I at least won't be stressed by the clock.

That said...Intermission

Insert chirping noises here.

End of Intermission. Part Two!

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Thursday, March 3, 2005. Mookie pops up (in RL she had been in Boston, rounding up the surviving cast of Ally McBeal for deportation to Canada). I immediately finish a door mission with Emerald Thunder (from Safe Harbor, it was okay Emerald had to get going anyway) and join up with Mookie. I got the access code from Maren and hurried to Steel Canyon for the sewer access. Mookie provided escort, her Level 50 (and her SK'ing me) keeping the mobs at bay.

Remember that I hoped the clock wouldn't stress me out? It didn't. Something else did.

We did what was called a pick-up team. Unlike teams formed from supergroups and people off your Friends list, a pick-up team is people standing around you, most often total strangers. You take a big risk with a pick-up team: the player that's joining you might have a bad character build (a Defender that went for weapons instead of shields and buffs, or a Blaster that went and got the melee attacks from the Secondary power pool), or else doesn't know how to play a particular door mission. You can get people who will go blustering in and getting everyone killed by aggro-ing too many mobs at once, or won't follow instructions and make mistakes, and...well. Sometimes you get a GREAT pick-up with players who've been on long enough to know their roles and do their jobs.

For the pick-up team we started off relatively okay. With Mookie there, we garnered F T Shadow (again! Some people just stay down there and play the Sewer trials over and over. You can repeat it if you fail, for example. The XP is too good with the types of kills you get on the Hydra and Krakens), so with those two I figured we will do well. Into the mix came Sirrion, hell guardian, and Betty Nugs. We had one character but he switched over to his Level 50 Scrapper Demon Nightmare because we had trouble finding a Tanker. Short a Tanker (and 8th player), we took a gamble to work with this team and went from there. I typed in the code (just touch the monitor screen), set off the timer, and in we charged.

This wasn't a good mix. With two Level 50s, we were constantly torn over whether to let them charge through and wipe out the Kraken and Ritki for us (quicker killing but less xp), or exemplaring them down to our level (which had two 36s in the mix, the lowest you could get into the Trial). Between all this, we had problems sticking together, hopping down the rampway to each of the glowing weapons crates, and a good number of deaths occurred.

And at this point I lost my temper with Demon Nightmare. Having been told before the Trial started, and repeatedly told as we approached the glowys, he still went out of his way to touch two of them, and expressed dismay when he found he didn't get a weapon out of it, essentially wiping out those two weapons from the other teammates who could have used them. It was like...We kept telling you! At least Mookie knew not to do it! Argh!

After checking, about three times, that our Levels 36 to 42 players had at least one special weapon, the decision was made to head straight down to the bottom and finish the second part of the Trial (it's not needed to clear the rampways). Once there, confusion continued. We kept alternating between exemplaring the Level 50s and then not, especially as we were confused about how to deal with the Kraken monsters that were down there. Finally we decided on letting the 50s stay at 50, but not after we made a series of blunders in aggroing Krakens to attack us at the worst possible times.

After the Kraken and Ritki were cleared Mookie wanted to go after the generators next, but I had to remind her to get the tentacles first: the Hydra tentacles are wicked painful and when we use the special weapons we have to be in real close. The tentacles would kill us before we were able to fire the weapons, so...

We then tried the steps of knocking out the generators and then going after the Hydra, but that still caused problems, and we barely gave the Hydra a scratch before we had to pull back with a few deaths and a lot of bruised feelings. At this point, FT quit the team with little explanation, but I have my suspicions that she had gotten frustrated with the confusion. I don't blame her. I sent an email to apologize afterward, I'll just have to see how it goes.

Another thing we didn't plan out properly was how to handle the Ritki ambushes at the 50 percent and 25 percent markers. For one thing, I should have been firm about the Level 50s waiting for the Ritki ambushes and NOT focused on trying to hurt the Hydra. Look at this photo on the left. The Level 36s and 38s are using the Special Weapons on the Hydra like they are supposed to. In the middle is Mookie, using her fire breath. This was the heartbreaker. You see, there's a reason for the Special Weapons: NOTHING ELSE HURTS THE HYDRA. EVEN IF YOU'RE LEVEL 50, YOUR ATTACKS DON'T WORK. I told her, twice, and spelled it out in the open when I caught Demon using his punches on the Hydra, that they needed to stop hitting the Hydra and protect the team from the ambushing Ritki. They didn't listen...even after I typed UPPER CASE letters to indicate yelling.

I knew I was losing my temper. I apologized about 4 times during the Trial. And then, 5 minutes later, I had to yell again because someone did something they were told not to do. Sigh. Pick-up teams. You gamble when you play Vegas, you gamble when you play Atlantic City, you gamble when you play pick-up teams.

I figured I died about 6 times on this Trial. Once in the rampway, once with the Kraken aggroed to attack us while we circled the generator areas, and for each time we charged at the Hydra. And one of those times was from the second wave of Ritki at the 25 percent health mark. It wasn't pretty. At all.

We succeeded in killing the Hydra. The light shone, the vortex appeared, and then...ever see the ending to the movie Poltergeist? That's what happens to the Hydra, it gets sucked into the vortex. And that is that.

So. One Trial. Two teams. What have we learned?

1) Follow the damn rules of the Trial.
2) Have a Tanker on the team.
3) No Level 50s.
3a) Better yet, just to make sure, noone above Level 42.
4) Which means you need more Tankers.
5) Don't let a player with anger management issues try to run a Trial. Defer leadership to someone with better people skills.

With many apologies again to the people on the second Trial who don't like getting yelled at, and apologies to the people on the first Trial for not getting a salute photo at the end of that Trial.

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