Brainstorming alternative benchmarks to Trapdoor mission

[Yomo Kimyata]

As many of you know, lots of people like to benchmark their endgame builds on DPS standards.  One is 'How long does it take to get to the middle of a Rikti pylon?" which is a pretty straightforward single target dps challenge.  Another standard has been timing yourself on the Trapdoor mission from Mendel Ramiel's arc "Power Overwhelming" at +4/x8 (which you can through mission flashback in Ouro).  That mission is a pretty straight forward kill all (that's not a mission objective but that's how people measure it) that has a set number of Council and Arachnos mobs, and then ends with a defeat of an EB.

 

With the upgrade of late-game Council soon to hit live, there are some enemies that will last a lot longer, and random allocation of bosses will mean that you cannot rely on the consistency of mobs, so its value as a benchmark will be reduced.

 

Min maxxers gotta min max, and so I'm sure that people will look for a new benchmark.  I was hoping this thread could serve as a sounding board for ideas.

 

My contribution:  the final battle of the Heather Townsend arc "Burdens of the Past" at +4/x8.  I'll put my reasoning in spoiler in case someone is not familiar with the mission

 

Spoiler

"Burdens of the Past" is a popular arc because people can farm it for incarnate salvage.  You can get it from Ouro, and many people scoot through it in less than 15 minutes for a roll at a random rarity of incarnate salvage.  I happen to really enjoy the entire arc, and like to run it on all my 50s at +4/x8.  The very last battle of the final mission has an option where you can fight (I think it is) eight Knives of Vengeance bosses on a two minute timer.  Here are some reasons I like to use this as a benchmark:

 

1.  It's quick and easy to cheese through the first three missions of the arc at whatever difficulty you like, set yourself at +4/x8 before the final mission, and run through the map to the final fight without fighting anyone except for those final bosses.

2.  There is a built in timer, although it stops as soon as you kill the last so you need to be a bit aware.

3.  It's not a cakewalk of a battle, since they are pretty tough opponents, both offensively and defensively.

4.  It's the same opponents each time, although I don't know it they are the same bosses or if there is some randomness.

5.  You get the incarnate reward each time so there is a lollipop for you!

 

Here are some detriments:

1.  Timer stops after 120 seconds, so there is a limit at which you cannot benchmark yourself.

2.  If you are defeated, the timer keeps ticking so it's not useful for that.

 

 

 

Edited February 17 by Yomo Kimyata
pooor grammer

[GM Impervium]

When page 7 hits, the RWZ will also have multiple "test" pylons what will tell you how long it takes you to beat them. You can then look at their max HP and derive your DPS there.

Possible downside is they don't attack, so you won't get "real world" data as you can turn off your defenses and such.

[FupDup]

Max's mission to take down the Knives of Vengeance might be a candidate. It's very accessible as a standalone mission (no filler missions to go through) and has an EB at the end. However, the KoV are kinda easy because they're mostly focused on S/L damage, so maybe not the best choice. You also need to kill Olympian 29 at the start so he doesn't add a confounding variable to the test. Some of the KoV bosses have an oh-shit button at low health that might mess up timings depending on how many of them spawn. 

 

Sister Solaris' final mission could be a good endurance test because of how many tough mobs and EBs it has, and the spawns are pretty consistent, but you have to go through some normal missions first that might take a while. 

 

A weakness of both is that both allow incarnate shifts from Destiny and Lore powers at T3-T4, which can cause a wide performance gap between incarnate and non-incarnate play at the same difficulty settings. 

Edited February 18 by FupDup

[Mythical Creature]

I am glad that someone brought this up because the trapdoor test no longer serves my purposes, and I would like to brainstorm a good alternative. What I really liked about trapdoor test is that it helped me balance my builds between survivability and damage.

 

Heather Townsend might work as a test of sorts, though it seems much harder to repeat it like trapdoor where you can defeat him and then reset the mission without talking to him. 

 

Maybe a Trapdoor test could be recreated in AE with road tunnel map?

[Player-1]

Hello Yomo Kimyata,

 

@Koopak has a thread that may assist with this:

 

 

 

Ideally, a mission in AE may be the best case scenario to get a truly neutral playing field for such testing.

[Mythical Creature]

Awesome, I will have to give the office mission an attempt this evening. It looks like it is setup for +0/8x, well see how +4 works for it. Thank you.

[tidge]

This doesn't help for most of the year... I like to use the Lady Winter mission as a benchmark for my characters. I have two different approaches.

1.  Time to clear the map (MOAR Candy Canes!)
2. Defeat objects only and defeat Lady Winter + her spawn (faster rewards)

This is one of those missions where the spawns are all uniform in placement and composition, the map is always the same, and the final enemy isn't trivial (for most characters).

 

This is also a mission I like to use to test different power/slotting choices. Otherwise I'm using Tip missions, but those are too variable for a "leaderboard" challenge.