devtrackers.gg
Buckle up, this will be a very long read. Let's face it: Trials in their current state are not the most enjoyable experience for most people. There are so many things that throw off players who are new to trials, more experienced players and speedrunners alike. I just want to point out some of the more major flaws and I want to give some feedback on how those problems could be solved.
Replayability & Rewards
The Problem - Currently there are two reasons to play trials: Finish your weekly goals to collect steel and gilded marks or get a good board time to unlock some prestigious rewards. If you have unlocked everything you need from lady luck, there is no point in playing trials. The same goes for the prestigious rewards. Unlock them once and you don't have any reason to continue playing. On top of that, most of the unlockable rewards are titles anyways, which in their current state are just not a satisfying reward at all.
How to fix it - Give us more meaningful rewards. I want people to have a good reason to be invested into trials, so why not give out rewards for reaching certain spots on the board? For example, you could give out ever-green rewards like a certain amount of rams, pots and other useful resources for achieving a leaderboard time and the amount increases with a better board position. In addition, reaching top 5 should give its own set of cosmetics like a crown or a special transmog set. And to increase replayability even more, how about giving out badges to players who reach certain milestones. Those could be displayed similar to the weapon reforges above a slayer so people can see how many Top 100, top 5 etc. a player had in total.
Modifiers & bugs
The Problem - One of the main problems why less experienced players struggle to even finish a trial run are the modifiers. In most cases you're not fighting the behemoth but you're fighting the modifiers. It is simply a very unnecessary way to increase the difficulty artificially. Furthermore, most behemoths are bugged and those bugs are even more noticable if you go for top times and oftentimes they turn out to be game breaking. For example: Behemoths ignoring you mid fight and starting to heal up or behemoth AI just breaking if you stand in a certain position so the behemoth just AFKs. So not only do you have to play around the modifiers, but a plethora of bugs at the same time.
How to fix it - Bugs just need to be finally fixed. Nothing to discuss here. The modifiers on the other hand: An easy fix would be to tweak modifiers. Give us less annoying modifiers or switch up modifiers to actually fit to the moveset and flow of each behemoth. Another more elaborate way to go about it, would be to remove modifiers and add trials specific behemoths instead. Those could be altered versions of already existing behemoths with adjusted or new movesets. This would actually increase the difficulty without adding that layer of... let's call it bullsh*t, some modifiers add. And wouldn't that be way more exciting than just some passive modifiers?
Metagame
The Problem - Did you notice anything different on the trial board since the repeaters rework? Nothing but repeaters everywhere. BuT wHy ArE cHaInBlAdEs In SoLoS tOp OnE?! This week is an exception. Repeaters and Molten Edict are still way better, but they heavily rely on perfect RNG against Boreus to get the best run possible. This is why no one is really trying this week with a real strat. My point still stands: We are currently in a repeaters meta. And if it is not repeaters, it is Molten Edict. There is no weapon variety. It's almost always the same strat with the same set of weapons. If you already know which weapons and team compositions are meta, it makes every week pretty boring and monotonous.
How to fix it - Generally I'm not against meta shifts, but repeaters and molten edict are just way too strong compared to other weapons. I just want every weapon to perform on a similar level or for every weapon to fulfill a certain role. Currently repeaters do almost everything: They buff yourself and your team, they have the highest DPS and on top of that they are the best weapon for partbreaks. Instead of fulfilling one job perfectly, they render every other weapon redundant. Sometimes I wish that weapons would be balanced around trials, because the leaderboards are actually a good way to instantly see how good weapons are generally performing in terms of DPS. The repeater buff perfectly illustrates what happens if PHXL balances around their "data'', which includes players who just shoot their repeaters from the airship while dealing 0 damage... But that's a completely different topic.
Same weeks like above - The meta for groups is also very stale
Animation lock & "eating" partbreaks
The Problem - This has to be one of the most annoying "features" in Dauntless. During certain animations some behemoths are animation locked, meaning you can't get a stagger or a part break during this animation. Boreus is one of the worst in this regard, because while he creates his ice shield, he is animation locked and you can't interrupt this with a partbreak or a stagger (although a shock proc works but let's just ignore that for now). Another perfect example is shadowtouched Koshai. He is animation locked while shooting his barrage of void balls, so you have to wait out the whole animation to get any breaks or stagger. This is, in my opinion, a horrible mechanic. It can make sense for certain behemoths with certain moves, for example the torgadoron bomb dive, but with most other behemoths it is an uncalled-for feature that doesn't make sense and feels horrible.
Another problem is behemoths "eating" part breaks, meaning they just don't get a stagger animation when breaking a part. It is reasonable to not get an extra part break animation for part breaks that happen during a stagger animation, but sometimes behemoths just eat part breaks for no reason, for example if they start enraging or start an animation like turning towards you. It doesn't make any sense and I'm pretty sure this is a bug.
How to fix it - Pretty easy: Overpower phases should have the highest priority over animations. Animation lock could be kept for moves that actually make sense to have something like this, meaning moves that actually make the behemoth look unstoppable. And the eating partbreak bug should just be fixed.
Loading times
The problem - Some people might not realise how much time and effort is sometimes put into getting a good top 5 board time. With many behemoths and with the current meta the fight is usually not longer than 2 minutes in solos and not longer than 1 minute in groups. If you want to do another trial run after finishing one, you need to ready up, load into the airship, press ready again and load into the arena. It takes around 60 sec. of waiting time on a good PC to jump from one trial round to the next. Depending on the week, between 50% - 70% of the trial is just loading times. With our current group we sometimes have sessions of up to 5 hours playing group trials and more than 50% of those 5 hours are not actually playing the game, but just waiting out the loading times. This is just ridiculous if you think about it.
How to fix it - I don't know if it is possible from a technical standpoint, but what if we were allowed to stay and reset the same instance instead of constantly loading into the airship and finding a new one? To add salt to the injury, sometimes it takes way longer than usual to find a new instance for some unknown reason, which increases the overall loading time even more. I just thought I would also mention this here.
The need of tonics
The problem - The amount of tonics I wasted for trials... Oh boy. I know farming materials and Rams are part of the core gameplay loop of Dauntless but if you want to compete in trials and you don't have any pots left you are forced to farm some good old mushrooms for hours on end. Newer players who want to get into the more competitive side of trials don't really have the resources to constantly do so. On top of that, finishing a trial run doesn't reward you with any resources or materials other than steel and gilded marks once a week.
How to fix it - There are multiple ways to go about this: Give us some resources for killing the behemoth (rams would be enough) or give us resources for reaching certain milestones on the leaderboard which increase with the rank you end up at the end of the week. Another solution would be to add a "Potions Pass" or something like that for a decent platinum price. This pass would just refund all of the pots after a hunt and maybe it could also increase the XP gain as a small bonus. Just a nice little quality of life thing and more stuff people can throw their money at.
Increased behemoth HP & trial goals
The problem - With the introduction of increased behemoth HP inside of trials and the goal system, we lost variety. There were more interesting and inventive strategies you could pull off before like: Tragic Echo strats, strats with constantly reviving each other with agarus or just in general more weapon variety. I guess the goal of this rework was to make trials easier for more casual players while at the same time increase the average kill time for the more invested players. But at what cost?
How to fix it - Honestly, I don't know. Removing the "you are not allowed to die" goal would open up more strats. Or it would be interesting to have constantly rotating goals, which force you to break a certain part or get a stagger inside of Dauntless trials. This would automatically force you to play around those goals and use certain weapons instead of the usual meta stuff.
No new content for trials
The problem - Trials don't get any love anymore. When was the last time we actually got new cosmetics or new behemoths inside of trials? There are so many good ideas for new cosmetics like in this Reddit post just to name an example.Furthermore, the current trial rotation feels pretty limited. There are still a bunch of behemoths that could be added to trials and that I really would love to see in the trials arena.
How to fix it - I just want to see some new stuff in trials. Add new behemoths, add new rewards. Especially older behemoths like riftstalker would be interesting to see and I would love to see more keystone behemoths in trials. Adding a new behemoth is not a huge change. Literally take an existing behemoth and slap some modifiers on it. Such a small addition can give us much needed variety.
The Leaderboards & player retention
The problem - First of all, there is the question if weapon specific leaderboards were a good addition after all. Some boards are not completely filled by the end of the week, meaning you can get access to the prestige shop with a 29 minute hammer run. So all the prestige rewards including the gold crown are devalued because they are so "easy" to get.
Next: player retention. Many people don't even know about trials. The leaderboards are so far away from the spawn and kinda well hidden in the far back. So not only are there not many reasons for players to constantly continue grinding trials, but also new players may never find out about trials. Even though trials is supposed to be one of the endgame activities with sought after rewards, it doesn't feel like anyone cares about the rewards or the leaderboard spots.
Hot to fix it - The devaluation of the current rewards can be "fixed" by adding more rewards for more difficult milestones. Player retention on the other hand is more difficult to tackle. I think it would help with making trials seem more important and desirable to all players. Move the leaderboards closer to the spawn so people have something to look up to and think "Damn, I also want to be at the top". Maybe even add more trials related stuff to the spawn. The statue close to the spawn for example could display the appearance and name of the top 1 solo player of last week.
The statue I was talking about. Just imagine it displaying the best solo player of last week
Closing words
Trials is my favorite mode in Dauntless right now and I would love for it to improve and develop even further. I know that it is not the most popular activity in Dauntless and I know how game development works… They usually put only time, resources and effort into things that actually have a player base or actually generate money. But I still wish for trials to get more love. Loading time issues, more behemoths, more rewards and better player retention would be my top priorities if I had to choose. Bug fixes need to happen either way, that’s just a no-brainer I don’t have to mention.
Thank you to everyone who actually took the time to read all of this. And a special thanks to Texas, Kosmos and Joe for helping me out with the video material and screenshots.
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