Epic Trial Queue

I braved the trial queue for the first time since hitting level 80, on my warlock no less. Inspiration was a double Tyranny of Dragons currency event and me trying to earn some Linu's Favor for her.

I tried queueing for a random at first, but the randomiser was insistent on throwing me into Assault on Svardborg (repeatedly). I'd never actually completed that one before but apparently it's a lot more doable nowadays. My first run was still a fail, from what I could tell because one or even both of the healers just dropped group mid-fight (even though it was going fine until then), so we wiped, and since we weren't getting any more backfills at that point the group fell apart. I got it two more times though and those other times we completed it successfully. While I didn't have any of the keys for the chests on that character, I was still pleased with the AD payout (I'd forgotten just how much you can earn from doing the random trial queue every day, 40k+ a pop).

I eventually got into some Tiamat runs as well by queuing for that specifically. It felt a bit odd to see it downsized to ten people - to rebalance for the lower numbers they made it so that the middle cleric is permanently under a shield and doesn't need defending anymore. What I did like was that they changed the dragon souls to work with the special ability hotkey they added in Undermountain so that you don't need to worry about manually dragging a soul onto your bar mid-fight anymore. Otherwise the experience was similar to how I remembered it, and we always killed all the heads in one to two phases.

I Tried Assault on Svardborg Today

Until a couple of weeks ago I'd never done an "epic trial", which I guess is what passes for a raid in Neverwinter. When I finally overcame my reluctance and queued for (normal) Demogorgon (the epic trial introduced with Maze Engine), I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was and that it didn't even take ten minutes.

So when I recently hit the maximum amount of "potential bonus rewards" for the epic trial Assault on Svardborg, which you accumulate from questing in Sea of Moving Ice, I thought I'd give that one a try too.

I got a pop after about fifteen minutes. Everybody seemed kind of hesitant to run in and start the fight, until one guy finally took the lead. I followed him and immediately got turned into a block of ice. I stayed that way for about ten seconds, then died. This repeated a couple of times (me running in, turning into an ice block and then dying a few seconds later), with other people also dying left and right; then everybody abandoned the instance.

I looked up the basic strategy for the fight to better understand what had happened and to be honest it sounds way too complicated for a pug even on normal. For example when people get turned into blocks of ice, others are supposed to break them out within seconds or the frozen person dies (like I did). As if that's going to happen with a bunch of randoms!

I guess those bonus rewards will remain unclaimed.