Daily Trials
Daily Trials are live for all players — no operator flag, no waitlist. If you have a team of three, you can run today's Trial right now.
Daily Trials are a fixed daily challenge: one team runs a short, curated gauntlet for a spot on the leaderboard. The whole point is efficiency — not just clearing, but clearing cleanly and fast.
The gauntlet
Every Trial is 4 nodes fought in a fixed order:
- Standard
- Swarm
- Elite
- Boss
You bring one team of three and play it out. Combat is the same turn-based system as a Journey run, and your team's condition carries between nodes — so the gauntlet gets tenser as you go.
Attempts and scoring
- You get 3 attempts per day. The Start button locks once you're out.
- Only your best run counts — a stronger attempt replaces your previous score.
Clearing all four nodes is the floor, not the goal. A wipe — losing your whole team before the boss falls — scores zero, no matter how much damage you dealt on the way. Everything below is computed server-side from the fight itself — nothing your device reports can inflate it.
How the score is built
Once you clear, your score is a base number multiplied by four factors:
score = base × survivors × damage-efficiency × underdog × rounds
Each factor pulls in a different direction, so a great run is one that wins on all four — not one that maxes a single stat.
| Factor | What it measures | The math |
|---|---|---|
| Survivors | How many of your three are still standing at the end | ×1.5 for all 3 alive · ×1.25 for 2 · ×1.0 for 1 · 0 = wipe = zero score |
| Damage efficiency | How clean the clear was — damage you dealt vs. damage you took | dealt ÷ (dealt + taken), a value from 0 to 1. Get hit less → closer to 1 |
| Underdog | How weak your team was relative to what your bracket is expected to field | expected power ÷ your team's power, clamped to the 0.5×–2.0× range. Weaker team → higher |
| Rounds (a golf score) | How fast you cleared, measured against par — not raw speed | Under par is a bonus, over par a penalty, clamped to the 0.5×–1.5× range |
Rounds are scored like golf — against par
Speed matters, but it's scored relative to par, not as a raw "fewer is always better" race. Every node type carries an expected clean-clear round count, and your Trial's par is the sum across its four nodes:
| Node | Par (rounds) |
|---|---|
| Standard | 12 |
| Swarm | 30 |
| Elite | 18 |
| Boss | 21 |
| Full Trial | 81 |
Come in under par and the rounds factor rises toward its 1.5× ceiling; grind over par and it sinks toward 0.5×. The clamp is deliberate — it stops one freak-fast (or mis-counted) clear from dwarfing the whole board, and keeps scores comparable even when enemy tuning shifts the absolute round count.
The underdog factor cuts both ways
This is the part that surprises people: over-powering your bracket lowers your score. Your bracket is set by your top Avatar's ascension (see below), but the underdog factor looks at your team's actual power against the bracket's expected power (the bracket target plus a small ~10% edge, so a team fielded right at expectation still earns a mild bonus).
So a team of un-ascended Avatars stacked with strong gear and essence lands in a low bracket yet gets marked down for being too strong in it — you can post a flawless, barely-scratched clear and still score below a player who cleared with a leaner team in a higher bracket.
So the optimization isn't "bring your strongest team." It's clear cleanly and fast, keep all three alive, and don't stack more power than your bracket needs.
Ties go to the lower-power team
If two players land on the exact same score, the tie is broken in favor of the one who did it with less party Power — the underdog wins. It's the same principle as the underdog factor, applied at the tie: matching a score with a weaker team is the better run, so it ranks higher (and takes the higher reward slot). This holds on both the daily and weekly boards.
The values above (survivor steps, the 0.5–2.0 and 0.5–1.5 clamps, per-node par) are the current live settings and may be re-tuned as the mode is balanced. The shape — reward clean, fast, all-alive, right-sized-for-your-bracket runs — is stable.
Each Ascension bracket is its own leaderboard. The headline "top score" you spot may belong to a player in a different bracket than the one you're in — that's not a like-for-like comparison, and a higher raw number there doesn't mean you played worse. Check the board for your bracket to see where you actually stand.
Ascension brackets
Trials have daily and weekly leaderboards, each split into four Ascension brackets, I through IV. You don't choose your bracket — it's set by the highest-ascension Avatar on your team. Bring one heavily ascended fighter and you're placed in a tougher bracket for the whole run.
Each bracket sits around a different target power:
| Bracket | Target power |
|---|---|
| I | ~375 |
| II | ~840 |
| III | ~1,180 |
| IV | ~1,475 |
Because your bracket follows your top Avatar, a team built entirely of lower-ascension fighters competes in an easier bracket — another reason the mode rewards thoughtful team-building over raw power stacking.
Reset
Trials and their leaderboards reset at 00:00 UTC. When you're out of attempts you'll wait for the next daily reset to run again.
See also
- Node types — the four node kinds the gauntlet strings together
- Run Mode — the combat and carry-over health it reuses
- Your fighters — ascension, which sets your Trial bracket