Tedium Trials: Issues and Possible Fixes

[Refa]

(stole the name from the Tempest Trials topic, I could definitely change it if uh whoever came up with it prefer that I not use it)

I've been playing Tempest Trials since its launch, and since then I've gotten ~41k points and am 4371 rank while using barely any stamina potions.  None of this is impressive at all, of course (even I'm not impressed with it, and I'm the one who got it!), but it should prove that I've played a decent amount of TT and am fairly qualified to talk about it.  Tempest Trials is a pretty brilliant concept.  A survival mode fills several niches at once; a more challenging experience, an efficient way to grind SP and HM, and a way to increase the value of healers that the game has never really successfully done before (hope you pulled Bride Lyn/Genny or all of your healers are unviable).  In practice however, the mode only serves to exacerbate all of Heroes' most glaring flaws.  I'm going to list out the most egregious ones and some ways that they could be fixed below.

Focus Heroes- In a gacha game where not everyone is guaranteed to have every unit (and even the focus units that do exist aren't guaranteed to be trained, and training itself is considered a waste of stamina while the trials are going on), it's incredibly stupid to reward people for using certain units (especially when some of them are subpar units to be using for the trial).  While I think the bonuses are a bit much, focus heroes do make sense in the arena.  It forcibly changes the meta game and forces people to use different units if they want to get the best score.  Tempest Trials absolutely fails in that regard, with one of the more popular strategies being to surrender with a level 1 focus hero on the first map and then continue with your real team.  Just...get rid of this.  Please.

EDIT Also why the fuck are these tiered between 20% and 40%?  They should all give the same bonus, just like how the arena works.

Repetitive Maps- What dumbass thought that a pool of around ten maps would be good enough for a mode that you're encouraged to play ad naseum?  This makes repeat playthroughs incredibly tedious when you're going through similar beats each time, especially considering a few of these maps are some of Heroes' worst (I've spoken to no one who liked the map with two rows of breakable walls in the center).  Considering both Training Tower and Arena have a bigger selection of maps, there's really no excuse for the extremely limited selection here.

Repetition In General- You have to play this mode an insane amount of times in order to get all of the rewards (most of which are quite good!), but the experience is incredibly similar each time.  While Heroes is inherently repetitive by nature, there's enough variation between all of the other modes and quests that it generally isn't setting in during shorter play sessions.  However, because Tempest Trials is a long 10-15 minutes slog (if you do it once, that is; do it five times in a row and you're looking at a 50-75 minute experience) that doesn't change much between runs, the tedium really begins to set in fast in a way that none of the other modes in Heroes actually does.  Heroes is a fun, breezy experience that you can make progress in even with short, infrequent play sessions, and Tempest Trials absolutely does not play to these strengths.  The sad thing is, this could be easily fixed just by giving the player more points for each successful run.

Power Creep- Enemy stats start above average (at the level of the highest stratum in the Training Tower or the Lunatic difficulty of the later chapters), and quickly become ridiculous stat walls.  This was intended to make the mode more challenging as you went on, which again, makes sense in practice.  The maps should get harder the further you get on, and the simplest way to do that is by increasing enemy stats.  Additionally, this gives people incentive to pick a stratum with less floors, as enemy stats will ramp up less.  In practice, though, it just encourages exploiting the games' most broken mechanics and ends up devolving into very repetitive strategies.  Look at any thread about this game and you'll find people are using the exact same things every time (for the most part, there are some creative geniuses like the dude who beat it with an all Sakura team): Blade tomes, Brave Bow+ users, powerful 1-2 range units.  It's fucking boring.  This easily could have been solved with greater map variety (having defensive tiles would promote more defensive strategies), different map objectives (defend maps would make it harder to blitzkreig everything), and maybe just not power creeping units quite as much.  Clearly it's not making players think harder, just dumber.

AI That Likes To Waste Your Fucking Time- In the main game, the AI prioritizing buffs, spamming reposition moves, and moving ridiculously out of its way to kill a weaker unit were humorous oddities that were easily exploited to great amusement.  In TT, a mode which rewards playing fast, it punishes the player for something the player can't even control which is bullshit.  If they were going to reward you for playing fast, they should have reworked the AI to accommodate that.

Counter Teaming- For most teams, there's generally a few units or combinations of units and the map that are impossible to beat without losing a unit.  This could be a team with two dancers, a team that swarms you while you can't effectively ORKO or wall any of them, breaker skills/Quick Riposte/Vantage on just the right units, and so on.  This normally is not a big issue in Training Tower (the only other randomized PvE game mode), but in a survival mode, it's just straight up unfair.  I'll admit that this is uncommon, but what is way more likely to happen is an enemy team where you have to stall for a ridiculous amount of time (which again, tanks your speed rank which you are heavily rewarded for) just to successfully complete.  Nothing says fun like when the game decides to give you the middle finger for daring to try to get a good rank.  If you had to replay this mode less times in order to get the maximum score, this issue would be greatly minimalized.

And that's all she wrote.  Are there any issues that I missed?  Am I just...wrong?  I wrote this up because TT is a super fantastic idea and there is so much potential that I feel like is just being wasted right now, and I'd love to see these get fixed in future iterations of the concept.

Edited June 12, 2017 by Refa

[Arcanite]

I like it exactly the way it is

It's supposed to tough and stupid :P

2 minutes ago, Refa said:

Repetitive Maps- What dumbass thought that a pool of around ten maps would be good enough for a mode that you're encouraged to play ad naseum?

Good point about this though

I would like to see some defense tile maps hee hee hee

[Refa]

5 minutes ago, Arcanite said:

I like it exactly the way it is

It's supposed to tough and stupid :P

That's perfectly fine!  Sorry if I came across as saying that people who enjoy this are wrong.

[Kiran]

16 minutes ago, Refa said:

Repetition In General- You have to play this mode an insane amount of times in order to get all of the rewards (most of which are quite good!), but the experience is incredibly similar each time.  

This is probably the main issue I have with this event. I haven't slacked off in my TT grinding and currently at 36.7k without the use of stamina pots. I'm already pretty burned out from this event as it ends up being mostly enemies being one round killed by Nino/Tharja. Yet to get all of the rewards, I still have to finish lunatic-7 perfectly 90 times with the 40% bonus. Having the rewards at such a high point score isn't necessarily bad, its just that all my TT runs are exactly the same. Its at the point where I'm so used to it that I'm running on autopilot for most maps.

Edited June 12, 2017 by Kiran

[VincentASM]

I do think there needs to be some variety. While the game does randomise units and shuffles the first 6 maps somewhat, after a dozen goes, you've pretty much seen everything.

No idea how they can improve it though.

Also, I'm not terribly fond of the grind either.

I can imagine why it's there, but 70+ perfect runs to get the best reward (Quickened Pulse) is just painful. That's 490+ maps. Even if some only last a few minutes. (And that's assuming you get a perfect run, which you won't at least half the time unless you're GOOD or have $$$.)

Edited June 12, 2017 by VincentASM

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

2 minutes ago, VincentASM said:

I do think there needs to be some variety. While the game does randomise units and shuffles the first 6 maps somewhat, after a dozen goes, you've pretty much seen everything.

No idea how they can improve it though.

Also, I'm not terribly fond of the grind either.

I can imagine why it's there, but 70+ perfect runs to get the best reward (Quickened Pulse) is just painful. That's 490+ maps. Even if some only last a few minutes. (And that's assuming you get a perfect run, which you won't at least half the time unless you're GOOD or have $$$.)

Even if one is good, sometimes just the wrong setup can tank the score without even killing anyone. The best example is the armours that spawn way in the back of certain maps and either wander off laterally or just plain take forever to get within attack range. The map with the multiple cliffs with the bush in the middle and the one based on C13 are probably the worst of these (especially if, on the latter, an armour decides to go up that stupid left side).

[Cute Chao]

5 minutes ago, Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi said:

Even if one is good, sometimes just the wrong setup can tank the score without even killing anyone. The best example is the armours that spawn way in the back of certain maps and either wander off laterally or just plain take forever to get within attack range. The map with the multiple cliffs with the bush in the middle and the one based on C13 are probably the worst of these (especially if, on the latter, an armour decides to go up that stupid left side).

Oh man, the amount of times a flier or something has stayed just out of range a bit too long, or a unit has gone round the long way to get to me, is frustrating.

The trials have given me something to do, and forced me to use more units. Now I've got into the rhythm of it, though, I know where people are coming from. About 90% of my playthroughs are beat everyone with Reinhardt and occasionally Xander, switch to Sanaki last round. So almost autopilot. I'm not good enough where that always happens, though, so I think that keeps the pressure on for me a bit. This last time, I was down to my last characters and ended up having to use ones I haven't used all round. They got it, but it was a close thing ^.^''

I would love more maps. I hate two of them so much >.<

Edited June 12, 2017 by Cute Chao

[Arthur97]

You should probably differentiate the name to let people what this thread is.

As for the maps, the whole point is that it's Awakening centered so of course it takes from those maps. Expect future ones to be the same.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

The bonus unit thing is a little scummy. But I'm glad they put Lissa in the 1.4x pool, since she's a free character and pretty much any healer will do if you plan to use one. I also like that none of the bonus units are cavs because I use a cav team to reach map 7 and it honestly feels like cheating. The only punishment geared toward my team is a map where it takes cavs 3, sometimes 4 turns to reach the enemies at the top since they can't cross the forest intersection or be bait the enemies to come down.

It's super repetitious, but I find this mode way more fun and exciting than voting gauntlet. Fighting artificially toughened enemies makes for unique and interesting encounters where standard meta ORKO arena tactics don't work (except I guess blade tomes are still top tier, but I don't have them). 

Edited June 12, 2017 by Gustavos

[Ice Dragon]

2 minutes ago, Refa said:

Focus Heroes-

All four of the lower-tier bonus characters are free characters.

I personally don't think encouraging surrendering immediately with only a bonus hero on your team is a bad thing. It's severely less punishing than forcing the player to get the bonus character all the way through the run.

 

7 minutes ago, Refa said:

The sad thing is, this could be easily fixed just by giving the player more points for each successful run.

Which would require them to proportionally increase the stamina cost per run, which severely hampers how useful the game mode is for other purposes, such as grinding Hero Merit or SP.

 

11 minutes ago, Refa said:

Look at any thread about this game and you'll find people are using the exact same things every time (for the most part, there are some creative geniuses like the dude who beat it with an all Sakura team): Blade tomes, Brave Bow+ users, powerful 1-2 range units.

Good units are going to be good. You're never going to find a way to get around that.

If you're grinding for the rewards and not for Hero Merit or SP, you're going to expect to be using the best of the best that you own.

 

22 minutes ago, Refa said:

AI That Likes To Waste Your Fucking Time-

Players have a lot more control over the behavior of the AI than they think they do. Given a particular unit placement, it is possible to predict with 100% certainty what the AI will do, and you can use your unit placement to influence that.

Furthermore, if you know a unit will spend their turn using a Rally, that's one unit you can ignore the attack range of.

 

29 minutes ago, Refa said:

Counter Teaming-

That just means your team composition doesn't have enough coverage.

 

 

My only advice is: If you're here only for the rewards, aim only for the daily benchmark for the reward you want, and don't overdo it.

 

1 minute ago, Gustavos said:

But I'm glad they put Lissa in the 1.4x pool,

Lissa is a 1.2× bonus.

[SSbardock84]

I was loving it at the beginning because it was something new (and it helped a lot to get Ike's SP up), but yeah the repetitiveness got old fast. If there weren't good rewards then I probably wouldn't be playing it as much as I have been.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

2 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Lissa is a 1.2× bonus.

oops, I guess the 1.2 are all free after all.

[Refa]

1 minute ago, Ice Dragon said:

1) I personally don't think encouraging surrendering immediately with only a bonus hero on your team is a bad thing. It's severely less punishing than forcing the player to get the bonus character all the way through the run.

2) Which would require them to proportionally increase the stamina cost per run, which severely hampers how useful the game mode is for other purposes, such as grinding Hero Merit or SP.

3) Good units are going to be good. You're never going to find a way to get around that.

If you're grinding for the rewards and not for Hero Merit or SP, you're going to expect to be using the best of the best that you own.

 4) Players have a lot more control over the behavior of the AI than they think they do. Given a particular unit placement, it is possible to predict with 100% certainty what the AI will do, and you can use your unit placement to influence that.

Furthermore, if you know a unit will spend their turn using a Rally, that's one unit you can ignore the attack range of.

5) That just means your team composition doesn't have enough coverage.

My only advice is: If you're here only for the rewards, aim only for the daily benchmark for the reward you want, and don't overdo it.

1) It defeats the purpose of having focus heroes in the first place.

2) I don't see why they couldn't keep the stamina cost the same.

3) Good units are going to be good, but it rewards hyper offense.  There are good units who are more defensive in nature.  Not blaming anyone for using these unit types, obviously it makes the most sense.

4) Doesn't work as well in practice as you say.  If I need my blue unit to kill someone on the right side, the green unit will be drawn towards them even if there's a closer unit nearby.  I generally get A ranks in speed but this wastes a turn or two that didn't need too.  Same with Rallies, since it means those units will spend longer getting in your range (and being able to ignore their attack range doesn't mean much when they're all the way across the map anyways).

5) Yes, it does mean that.  However, 1) not every team comp has perfect coverage 2) with the hefty stamina costs, you're not encouraged to experiment (only going with what works and 3) spending SP to train units and get better team comp is a waste of stamina.

[MaskedAmpharos]

I agree with some of your points but not others. 

Perhaps I am simply numb to the experience from the other gacha games I've played, but the whole "hours of repetitive grinding on just a handful of maps/options" part is not only no different from a standard gacha event (though it's the first of its kind for Heroes specifically, which is why I imagine people who are playing this as their first gacha are turned off from it) but is in fact more lenient than a standard gacha event since it's entirely possible to get the best rewards without having to play the highest difficulty or spending premium currency on refills. In addition to that, Heroes is being extremely lenient by not hard capping the rewards (only the top 10k players in terms of score can get the seal or something along those lines), allowing everyone to at least have a shot. 

I think the main problem is one of expectations. A standard gacha event does not expect everyone to be able to get the good rewards, only the people willing to put in ridiculous amounts of time and/or money. However, up until now in Heroes, the best rewards have been pretty accessible to everyone. As such, the average player still expects the good rewards to be within their reach and become frustrated when they turn out not to be (or at least not without hefty grinding). 

However, as said before, I will grant that my difference in perspective may simply be from me being numbed to the experience as a result of other games. If this is a player's first event of this type, then the frustration may be more understandable because of how different it is compared to prior experiences. 

Moving on from that, I actually disagree with the power creep complaint. I think it's a good thing that this mode is a step up in difficulty, and inflated stats are the most direct way to do that, especially if you also want to keep the enemy units random for the sake of variety. GHBs do a good job of adding difficulty through specific unit and skill combinations and lowered skill cooldowns in addition to the inflated stats, but that is balanced around the player knowing exactly what units to expect and being able to prepare for it. Because the enemy composition is shuffled, it's much more difficult to replicate the increased difficulty of GHB maps without resorting to inflated stats. As an aside, I also appreciate that some of the later enemies have high enough stats to discourage the glass cannon meta that's been so dominant in Arena, allowing for things like Seal, Sweep, and Poison Strike/Savage Blow skills to be more useful since it often takes more than one unit to take down Veronica or some of the other later enemies. It's not perfect of course: a moderately buffed Tharja can still ORKO Veronica with no issues, but it's a step in the right direction.

Additionally, added map variety a la defensive tiles and defense maps, as you suggested, would be counterintuitive for the LTC playstyle the trials are trying to encourage since those favor turtling and would completely tank your time score. Of course, you could alleviate that by getting rid of the time multiplier altogether, but I do like the idea of a secondary measure of skill to further separate the better players from the average ones besides simply keeping your team alive. If you have an alternative suggestion besides low turn count, I'd love to hear it. 

That said, I would appreciate greater map variety just in terms of, well, more maps. I don't want defensive tiles or defense maps, but I will agree that having more maps in the pool would be nice. 

Also, as @Ice Dragon stated, if you know enough about AI manipulation, it is entirely possible to know how the enemy AI will move 100% of the time, making it easy to exploit. Bad AI is certainly annoying in situations where they get stuck in a Reposition or Draw Back loop instead of moving forward to attack you, but that can be chalked up more to overall game design than the Tempest Trials specifically, since they're a problem elsewhere. 

I'm not sure what to say about counter teaming, really. Sure, there's no such thing as a team that has 100% coverage, but it is reasonable to have a team diverse enough to cover enough scenarios to where you would only run into a team that truly "hard counters" yours once every 10 runs or less. If you're being counter-teamed every run or every other run, then the problem is your team composition and not the game. 

I will agree with your point about Focus Heroes though as I don't think they're necessary for single player modes like this since their primary purpose is to encourage playstyle shifts in a PVP setting. 

Overall, I don't think the Tempest Trials are nearly as bad as you make them out to be, and I'm glad Nintendo is giving us a new mode like this. Is it perfect? No, nothing is. But the difficulty is reasonable, the grind isn't as bad as most other games, and the rewards are both incredibly great and accessible. 

[SatsumaFSoysoy]

I'm just gonna say, I hate grinding, but I'm loving this mode. Perhaps I'm just lucky to have a great Lucina and wonderful optimized units, which is making this much less tedious for me compared to other people, but I'm having fun every run I do because of how BS it is. Every map requires a game plan, and I get a kick out of perfectly executing every time.

[Ice Dragon]

14 minutes ago, Refa said:

1) It defeats the purpose of having focus heroes in the first place.

Players with the bonus heroes get the full 1.4× bonus for having the hero and the full 1.2× bonus for perfect survival. Simple as that.

16 minutes ago, Refa said:

2) I don't see why they couldn't keep the stamina cost the same.

If you increase the point rewards per run, that means either the stamina cost has to go up to limit the number of runs the player can run or the reward threshold have to go up to compensate for the increased rate that players acquire points.

Asking for an increase in reward points without any other change is identical to asking for less work for the same rewards. That defeats the entire purpose of this event.

19 minutes ago, Refa said:

3) Good units are going to be good, but it rewards hyper offense.  There are good units who are more defensive in nature.  Not blaming anyone for using these unit types, obviously it makes the most sense.

I'm running a balanced team with Lucina, Ninian, and Fae capable of performing both player-phase and enemy-phase roles (with Lucina favoring player phase and Fae favoring enemy phase) and have no trouble getting maximum rewards.

I figure hyper offense is common because it's easy to build, easy to play, and players probably already have most of the pieces for it from their arena teams.

37 minutes ago, Refa said:

4) Doesn't work as well in practice as you say.  If I need my blue unit to kill someone on the right side, the green unit will be drawn towards them even if there's a closer unit nearby.  I generally get A ranks in speed but this wastes a turn or two that didn't need too.  Same with Rallies, since it means those units will spend longer getting in your range (and being able to ignore their attack range doesn't mean much when they're all the way across the map anyways).

Meeting in the middle is often a usable strategy where spending an extra turn to get a more central position can save a turn or two of chasing down stragglers.

Enemy units that spend their turn using Rallies are ripe for just running down full steam ahead because they never hang more than 1 movement range behind the rest of their teammates. If they're truly all the way across the map, then so is the unit that they just cast their Rally on.

40 minutes ago, Refa said:

1) not every team comp has perfect coverage

That's a problem with your team composition and not a problem with the game.

If you have a limited roster, then that's a challenge you have to live and deal with. A limited roster is a challenge for every game mode, the only difference is how impactful it is. You should expect the highest-tier challenge the game has to offer to have the biggest reliance on having a either diverse roster or a single extremely strong core team.

41 minutes ago, Refa said:

2) with the hefty stamina costs, you're not encouraged to experiment (only going with what works and 3) spending SP to train units and get better team comp is a waste of stamina.

With only perfect runs (705 points), it costs 2840 stamina to acquire the maximum reward. This means you need to use 70% of your free stamina on this event at maximum efficiency to acquire the maximum reward.

But let's be realistic here. The highest unique reward, Quickened Pulse, only requires you to spend 35% of your free stamina. If you aren't running perfect runs, you can still get by easily with spending only half of your stamina on the event and half of your stamina elsewhere.

Going for the maximum 99,999-point reward is a luxury, and like any other luxury, it's on you to balance whether or not you can afford it and to hold yourself responsible for the consequences of your decisions.

[SatsumaFSoysoy]

5 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

I'm running a balanced team with Lucina, Ninian, and Fae capable of performing both player-phase and enemy-phase roles (with Lucina favoring player phase and Fae favoring enemy phase) and have no trouble getting maximum rewards.

I mean to be fair, you have +10 merges on your side.

[Raven]

I completely agree with this. The first 2 days were bearable, especially since rewards were given fast and frequently, and it was something new. Now that I'm past 30k points, the quality of rewards has not ramped up at the same rate as the amount of actual effort needed to obtain them. I wonder how many will find the sheer willpower that will be needed to power through to 100k points, because I'm really not enjoying this grindfest.

The principle is great; but the execution is terrible. As already mentioned, it just takes so fucking long to burn through nearly 100 of the same 7 maps a day (288 stamina a day lets you run 14 full tempest runs in 24 hours). Tedious. It's already gotten boring and lost its edge due to the sheer repetitiveness of the mode and what is needed to be done to achieve 100k points. Either raise stamina costs and points earner, or lower the points needed to obtain all the rewards. The grind is not fun, but I'll be damned if I let the orbs just slip away like that.

[General Horace]

By far the worst part of this event is how long it lasts.  It still lasts for almost ten more days.  People are already desensitized to it after 4(?) days of it.  I get the maps are all from awakening because it's supposed to be awakening themed but even just having the event last 5 days or a week instead would make them a lot more bearable (with prize scaling to match).

And i'm saying this as someone who hasn't played it very much, I barely have over 20k points.

[Rosetta]

I totally agree with you. I know people who can never beat the hardest mode. For me, I usually beat six maps and get 336 points.  If I'm lucky I can win and get around 500 points. So we need to grind harder to get incredible scores like 30k or 50k.

The major thing I complain about is that it wastes too much time. I am so bored that don't even have the patience to pick up another team and play the same map again. I just use stamina potions again and again, without bothering to think about strategies. I am having a really bad experience playing this mode.

After I got to 30000, I count the hours wasted on this game that would otherwise be used in research (yes I'm a graduate student), and l am not excited even if I have my masked waifu. Anyway, I should stop wasting time on complaining and start to work.

[Ice Dragon]

30 minutes ago, SatsumaFSoysoy said:

I mean to be fair, you have +10 merges on your side.

In Fae's case, it's the difference between overkilling by 30 HP versus overkilling by 20 HP against anything blue. The merges really only matter for her match-ups against colorless (namely Klein) and final map Cecilia (though I could just make Lucina do that instead).

Moonbow Lucina should be able to handle everything I use her to handle without the merges, minus Hector and Sheena on the final map, who aren't guaranteed one-round kills for me, either. Maybe she'll miss some one-round kills on Frederick or Beruka or a double attack against a dagger. My Lucina (neutral Atk with S Attack +1) does exactly enough damage to one-round kill Veronica without Moonbow assuming no buffs, meaning a +0 Lucina should only need to proc Moonbow to make up the damage.

Ninian is probably the only character I use where the merges make a huge difference since combat Ninian doesn't work well at all at lower merges.

Elise is unmerged with vanilla skills.

[Refa]

3 hours ago, Arthur97 said:

You should probably differentiate the name to let people what this thread is.

As for the maps, the whole point is that it's Awakening centered so of course it takes from those maps. Expect future ones to be the same.

Sorry, I did that.  Hopefully it's better now.

I don't think they needed to use just Awakening maps simply because it's Awakening focused.  It limits variety for not much benefit.

2 hours ago, MaskedAmpharos said:

Perhaps I am simply numb to the experience from the other gacha games I've played, but the whole "hours of repetitive grinding on just a handful of maps/options" part is not only no different from a standard gacha event (though it's the first of its kind for Heroes specifically, which is why I imagine people who are playing this as their first gacha are turned off from it) but is in fact more lenient than a standard gacha event since it's entirely possible to get the best rewards without having to play the highest difficulty or spending premium currency on refills. In addition to that, Heroes is being extremely lenient by not hard capping the rewards (only the top 10k players in terms of score can get the seal or something along those lines), allowing everyone to at least have a shot. 

I think the main problem is one of expectations. A standard gacha event does not expect everyone to be able to get the good rewards, only the people willing to put in ridiculous amounts of time and/or money. However, up until now in Heroes, the best rewards have been pretty accessible to everyone. As such, the average player still expects the good rewards to be within their reach and become frustrated when they turn out not to be (or at least not without hefty grinding). 

However, as said before, I will grant that my difference in perspective may simply be from me being numbed to the experience as a result of other games. If this is a player's first event of this type, then the frustration may be more understandable because of how different it is compared to prior experiences. 

Moving on from that, I actually disagree with the power creep complaint. I think it's a good thing that this mode is a step up in difficulty, and inflated stats are the most direct way to do that, especially if you also want to keep the enemy units random for the sake of variety. GHBs do a good job of adding difficulty through specific unit and skill combinations and lowered skill cooldowns in addition to the inflated stats, but that is balanced around the player knowing exactly what units to expect and being able to prepare for it. Because the enemy composition is shuffled, it's much more difficult to replicate the increased difficulty of GHB maps without resorting to inflated stats. As an aside, I also appreciate that some of the later enemies have high enough stats to discourage the glass cannon meta that's been so dominant in Arena, allowing for things like Seal, Sweep, and Poison Strike/Savage Blow skills to be more useful since it often takes more than one unit to take down Veronica or some of the other later enemies. It's not perfect of course: a moderately buffed Tharja can still ORKO Veronica with no issues, but it's a step in the right direction.

Additionally, added map variety a la defensive tiles and defense maps, as you suggested, would be counterintuitive for the LTC playstyle the trials are trying to encourage since those favor turtling and would completely tank your time score. Of course, you could alleviate that by getting rid of the time multiplier altogether, but I do like the idea of a secondary measure of skill to further separate the better players from the average ones besides simply keeping your team alive. If you have an alternative suggestion besides low turn count, I'd love to hear it. 

Also, as @Ice Dragon stated, if you know enough about AI manipulation, it is entirely possible to know how the enemy AI will move 100% of the time, making it easy to exploit. Bad AI is certainly annoying in situations where they get stuck in a Reposition or Draw Back loop instead of moving forward to attack you, but that can be chalked up more to overall game design than the Tempest Trials specifically, since they're a problem elsewhere. 

I'm not sure what to say about counter teaming, really. Sure, there's no such thing as a team that has 100% coverage, but it is reasonable to have a team diverse enough to cover enough scenarios to where you would only run into a team that truly "hard counters" yours once every 10 runs or less. If you're being counter-teamed every run or every other run, then the problem is your team composition and not the game. 

I will agree with your point about Focus Heroes though as I don't think they're necessary for single player modes like this since their primary purpose is to encourage playstyle shifts in a PVP setting. 

Overall, I don't think the Tempest Trials are nearly as bad as you make them out to be, and I'm glad Nintendo is giving us a new mode like this. Is it perfect? No, nothing is. But the difficulty is reasonable, the grind isn't as bad as most other games, and the rewards are both incredibly great and accessible. 

I'm not particularly familiar with gachas, so you're right that I don't have a point of comparison on that front.  I'm just speaking from a general game design standpoint and someone who doesn't enjoy spending time grinding.

I don't think inflated stats are bad in and of themselves.  It's more that when combined with the other issues, they become more of a pain than they would be normally.  If they wanted more defensive play, though, maybe they should have added more defensive terrain to encourage that.

Knowing how the AI will move 100% of the time won't help if you know that they're going to move in a position that will waste your time.

I don't run into teams that hard counter mine, but moreso that I run into a unit or two that force me to waste turns dealing with them.  I'm fairly sure this isn't just me because a lot of people complain about one or two units that are a pain in the ass to deal with.

2 hours ago, SatsumaFSoysoy said:

I'm just gonna say, I hate grinding, but I'm loving this mode. Perhaps I'm just lucky to have a great Lucina and wonderful optimized units, which is making this much less tedious for me compared to other people, but I'm having fun every run I do because of how BS it is. Every map requires a game plan, and I get a kick out of perfectly executing every time.

That sounds great!  Pretty sure that's what they were going with Tempest Trials to begin with, it just didn't do it for me personally.

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

1) Players with the bonus heroes get the full 1.4× bonus for having the hero and the full 1.2× bonus for perfect survival. Simple as that.

2) If you increase the point rewards per run, that means either the stamina cost has to go up to limit the number of runs the player can run or the reward threshold have to go up to compensate for the increased rate that players acquire points.

Asking for an increase in reward points without any other change is identical to asking for less work for the same rewards. That defeats the entire purpose of this event.

3) I'm running a balanced team with Lucina, Ninian, and Fae capable of performing both player-phase and enemy-phase roles (with Lucina favoring player phase and Fae favoring enemy phase) and have no trouble getting maximum rewards.

I figure hyper offense is common because it's easy to build, easy to play, and players probably already have most of the pieces for it from their arena teams.

4) Meeting in the middle is often a usable strategy where spending an extra turn to get a more central position can save a turn or two of chasing down stragglers.

Enemy units that spend their turn using Rallies are ripe for just running down full steam ahead because they never hang more than 1 movement range behind the rest of their teammates. If they're truly all the way across the map, then so is the unit that they just cast their Rally on.

5) That's a problem with your team composition and not a problem with the game.

If you have a limited roster, then that's a challenge you have to live and deal with. A limited roster is a challenge for every game mode, the only difference is how impactful it is. You should expect the highest-tier challenge the game has to offer to have the biggest reliance on having a either diverse roster or a single extremely strong core team.

6) With only perfect runs (705 points), it costs 2840 stamina to acquire the maximum reward. This means you need to use 70% of your free stamina on this event at maximum efficiency to acquire the maximum reward.

But let's be realistic here. The highest unique reward, Quickened Pulse, only requires you to spend 35% of your free stamina. If you aren't running perfect runs, you can still get by easily with spending only half of your stamina on the event and half of your stamina elsewhere.

Going for the maximum 99,999-point reward is a luxury, and like any other luxury, it's on you to balance whether or not you can afford it and to hold yourself responsible for the consequences of your decisions.

1) Rewarding players for simply having bonus heroes doesn't add anything to the game.

2) They could also just have less reward tiers if they don't want to increase the number of points.

3) Fair enough, from your experience there seems to be more options than I assumed before.  And yeah, that's probably why hyper offense is so common.

4) I'll have to try that out WRT meeting in the middle.  As for rallies, I've had people cast rallies on horse units who move far ahead enough for me to attack them but not the rallier.  It also tends to be a pain in maps with terrain that gets in the way.

5) I have to live with it, but I don't have to like it or approve of it.  All of the other single player events are doable with a wide variety of units, and this particular event is not more challenging than those at all, just more luck based.

6) This is entirely true.  My bad for claiming otherwise.

1 hour ago, SatsumaFSoysoy said:

I mean to be fair, you have +10 merges on your side.

I don't think +10 merges are necessary for great reliability, just a small pool of the best units (Tharja in particular is insanely useful for both being a bonus hero and one of the best units to use to kill Veronica).  Pretty sure he's not even going for an optimal team comp, anyways.

1 hour ago, General Horace said:

By far the worst part of this event is how long it lasts.  It still lasts for almost ten more days.  People are already desensitized to it after 4(?) days of it.  I get the maps are all from awakening because it's supposed to be awakening themed but even just having the event last 5 days or a week instead would make them a lot more bearable (with prize scaling to match).

And i'm saying this as someone who hasn't played it very much, I barely have over 20k points.

Yeah, completely agree with this.  It'd be so much more bearable if it was only available for five days.

Edited June 12, 2017 by Refa

[MaskedAmpharos]

@Refa Differences of opinion aside, I would like to say that I appreciate how you seem to be reacting maturely and are open to discussion on points of disagreement. That's a trait that's a lot rarer than it should be. 

[Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi]

I think the 35% (or 70% for 99 999) of free stamina doing perfect runs and the event lasting for 14 days is supposed to encourage people to spread things out, interlacing other activities using the remaining stamina. Of course, being the big event with the big rewards everyone is excited about, not to mention the tendencies of the playerbase, people are just hardcore devoting every point of stamina to it, with many burning themselves out. It probably also doesn't help that the game's counter-intuitively dangling community rewards with a five-day time limit.

[TheWill]

In all honesty, when this event came out, I was pleasantly impressed.

Personally for me, I think this is the best event the game has had and a step in the right direction for sure. This game has had a huge flaw with nothing to do, so finally having a grinding event was a very pleasant experience. Of course, there should be resting periods and there fortunately will be.