Old Cathedral of Pain Trial
This article is about the original removed Cathedral of Pain Trial. For the currently available Trial, see Cathedral of Pain Trial.
This article contains information that no longer applies to the current version of Homecoming: City of Heroes/Villains. It is provided for historical purposes.
Overview
The Cathedral of Pain Trial was originally made available in late September 2006 and was taken off of live servers around October 11, 2006 due to a game-breaking exploit that allowed characters to level from 1 to 50 within a matter of hours. The trial eventually returned in Issue 18, albeit without Items of Power as potential rewards and no longer relevant to Base Raids or PvP.
Requirements
The Trial could only be attempted during a 7-day window within a 28-day period. After the 7 days, a 21 day raidable cycle began. (However, Base Raids were disabled in Issue 13.)
In order to take on this challenge, a supergroup was required to have a Base with the following items:
- 8 rooms
- 6 Dimensional Anchors
- Mission Computer or Oracle
- Raid Telepad or Raid Teleportal
- An Item of Power Base for the Item of Power
The Trial accommodated up to 24 players which could form three teams. All players were sidekicked/lackeyed to 50. Players who were defeated in any part of the trial were transported back to their base hospital.
If the supergroup already had an Item of Power, then the trial could not be repeated until room was made for an additional one.
The Trial
Beginning the Trial
- After agreeing to attempt the trial from the Oracle or Mission Computer, a 60 minute timer started. The supergroup had that long to complete the trial.
The Courtyard of Shadows
- There were three beams shooting up into the air. Next to each beam emitter (called Psionic Resonators) there was a cube-like object (called a Willforge) floating in midair. It spawned large groups of Soldiers of Rularuu. In order to destroy the resonators, all guardian Rularuu that spawned had to be defeated. Once all the Rularuu were defeated, the resonator had to be attacked. All three resonators had to be brought down at nearly the same time, with each of the three teams working on one. Once all three were down, the door to the Cathedral of Pain opened.
Master of the Shards
- After entering the room, characters could look upon an Aspect of Rularuu. He was surrounded by a shield similar to the ones around the Resonators. There were three more Willforges. The shield could be brought down using the same method previously used on the resonators. Once all the mobs were defeated, characters had about a minute to fight the Archvillain, who had a high regeneration rate. Upon defeating the AV, the Supergroup received an Item of Power in their Vault, and each member received a huge end-of-mission bonus (as no bonus was otherwise received in the mission).
Rewards
Completion of the Cathedral of Pain Trial would award the Supergroup an Item of Power that would be housed within their Base and provide benefits to members of the Supergroup. These items could be stolen via Base Raids.
It was expected that the trial would award a badge with this image:
For a brief time a progress bar appeared under Supergroup Badges with a counter for how many times the supergroup had successfully completed the trial. Unsuccessful attempts to complete the trial during the period when it was live in 2006 did count for progress on this badge.
Original Version Exploit
The exploit that led to the original Trial's removal enabled any member of the SG running the trial to run a delivery mission or "fedex" type mission and upon clicking the end contact, the mission would not complete but the character and team would still receive the mission completion bonus. This resulted in several people clicking their way from level 1 to level 50 in a matter of hours, and also allowed the accumulation of large amounts of prestige and inf for various SGs and players.