Fork CoH Lambda Trial

as Threatened by the Header, today I am talking City of Heroes.

today, the Lambda iTrial.

No the iTrials weren't programmed by Apple, if they were they'd be less buggy and endow the participants with an annoying smugness.

iTrials are CoH speak for incarnate trials.  Incarnates are the City of Heroes endgame.

I am going to review these trials along two time lines; how they played when they originally dropped and how they play now.
 
~~~When it dropped~~~

Lambdas when they first came out were reasonably challenging, quite a few failed while the player base got the hang of them and advanced their characters up the incarnate ladder.  There's a boring hunt then clear the battle area section which is straightforward and NABD.  Next is a boss fight that is ridiculously easy because the  boss has absolutely no support toons.  Then the team splits to explore two mazes to acquire temp powers used in the end fight.  There's a pretty tight time limit on running these mazes and it was fairly common to not get all the temp powers.  I call this portion the old number 6.

The end battle area also periodically supplies these powers during the showdown.  The first temp power is a debuff, Marauder the end villain hits really really hard and is tough to damage without those debuffs.  The second temp power closes reinforcement spawn points, limiting the reinforcing spawns is important so they don't swarm you.  The typical strategy was to close the spawn points immediately and pass the debuffs to the tank to use as needed. 

Overall this was a very enjoyable and fast paced trial (about 30 minutes) that pick up groups (PuGs) had more than a decent chance to fail.  Your  normal team of good players usually had no problem at all completeling this trial, thankfully my guild drags me along for comic relief.

~~~Current Play~~~

This trial is now incredibly easy and used to grind for the incarnate drops.  As a farm it is decent because it takes about a half hour to complete.  The really cool drops are limited to 1 per character per day so ongoing marathons usually have a lot of players switching toons.

Every once in a while a badge run happens.  Generally badges in CoH are only used for bragging but incarnate badges actually give a random rare drop, so there is actually a financial incentive to complete these.  Completing these badges are harder but pretty straight forward.  A PuG team will miss the badges quite often, but a guild team won't have many problems.