Dumb Idea: "The Gauntlet" Trial

[Varkarrus]

There'd be three versions of this trial: an Easy, Medium, and Hard mode. All three would be available regardless of hero level; the enemies would scale according to the level of the lead player, and you can combine the difficulty setting with level adjustment.

 

The trial's story would simply be some guy offering a training simulation to heroes, using a bootleg copy of the Architect Entertainment server code, maybe with the twist that he streams all of the combat on his twitch channel, while commentating like a game show host, all for profit.

 

Simply put, this trial is a procedurally generated trial with multiple floors, like a random Death From Below. Each floor would have groups of enemies from 1-2 factions, and there'd be an elite boss at the end of each floor. The enemy factions can be anything; even hero-only or villain-only factions, as long as they fall within the level range. At the bottom floor, there'd be an arena with an archvillain and respawning mobs.

 

The difficulty of the trial would come from a time limit, and limited lives. Whenever you are KO'd, you will have a 20 second time limit to be revived by an ally / use an awaken, or else you lose a life, and respawn at the start of the floor. Once you're out of lives, the next time the 20 second timer runs out, you are eliminated from the trial. The time limit is also prohibitively small, but you get a small time bonus every time a mob is defeated, and a larger time bonus whenever your team moves to the next floor.

 

The difficulty setting determines the number of floors, and the number of lives. The time limit would increase on higher difficulties, but scaling slower than overall length; so even though the Easy time limit is lower than the Hard one, you still have much more time per floor on average.

 

As a final note (may be too much?): you can't bring any temporary powers or inspirations with you into the trial. Throughout each floor, there would be glowies protected by mob groups that, when interacted with, give inspirations and/or temporary powers to your team. You can't take either of them with you out of the trial. If you run out of lives, your inspirations are reallocated to your teammates.

[justicebeliever]

I like this idea...I really like the idea of the timer (which safeguard/mayhem missions already use really well), I like the idea of limited lives, and the prohibition on temp/powers inspys....

 

What would you envision as the reward for this and how the reward scale based on difficulty?

 

I'd love it if the last floor was something like the gladiator pit from summer blockbuster...multiple AV's, but on a timer...

 

Cool stuff!  /signed

[Varkarrus]

I figure it'd be something like:

 

When you complete it, you get a daily reward for your chosen difficulty + any lower difficulties you haven't completed that day (i.e: if you do easy mode and win, you get the easy reward, then if you do hard mode that same day, you get the hard AND medium reward, but not the easy one)

 

The daily reward would probably be a small number of reward merits, and maybe incarnate salvage on higher difficulties if your team is high level. Outside of that, every time you complete it, you'd get recipe drops and salvage. Also, there'd be several badges for each difficulty, one per minimum level. (i.e: getting the Level 1 Hard Gauntlet badge may be easier than getting the Level 50 Hard Gauntlet badge)

 

And finally, for the Bottom Floor: I forgot to say but I was picturing one of several random arenas:

 

• A small arena where you fight a single, very hard Giant Monster, with no / limited adds
• A medium sized arena where you fight a single archvillain with a trickle of adds
• A Terra Volta arena where waves of enemies attack and you have to defend a center point, with a weak archvillain at the end. May be tricky because of the time limit, but the timing of each wave could depend on how quickly you eliminate them instead.
• A large arena where you fight waves of weak archvillains, exactly like Summer Blockbuster
• An easier version of each arena which appears halfway through the trial when you're on hard mode.

Edited July 31, 2019 by Varkarrus