trials for navigator hasn't really made good use of its core gimmick in ages it sucks. the whole premise of the shifting map is that the way you play each wave will influence how you get to play the wave after it because the field mechanics persist but that doesn't mean shit when TN-2 doesn't have field mechanics at all unless you really want to count the is3 treasure chests + all the carryover enemies are just in a separate lane where none of that matters, and most waves only carry over like two rows of tiles so you can't meaningfully pre-deploy, and the cannon positions don't even persist between waves in TN-3 so it doesn't matter if you preemptively destroy them or not, and they don't layer the field mechanics of different bosses the way older iterations did either
like in TN-4 for this round they start out with some classic mudrock gramophone gaming, but only one gramophone carries over to the next wave and it's away from where 90% of the second wave happens so whether you capture it or not doesn't actually matter much. the gramophones have an interesting interaction with the witch king in that they can heal him above the threshold where he teleports your units so he can do it again, but the witch king originally had his own field mechanic of music variations and that doesn't get used here even though that mechanic and the corresponding enemies have a number of interesting potential interactions with gramophones too. then the third wave again only carries over a single gramophone away from where the rest of the map is happening. fremont interacts with the gramophones somewhat in that he locks up your units if they retreat so using operators to capture gramophones becomes more difficult, but he would have that same interaction with music towers. and fremont's own attack gimmick (being able to store them) would be significantly amplified by the music variations too. so in the end the whole map feels half baked and like they just threw some loosely related bosses at the wall instead of actually weaving them together.
compare to TN-4 in TFN#2 which had emperor's blade, andoain, and talulah. emperor's blade dominion persists into andoain's wave. andoain's dodge field persists into talulah's wave and if you handled emperors blade badly there's going to be dominion all the way into talula's wave too. the gelato stops from andoain's wave can block fireballs in talulah's wave. the mechanics sensibly layer on top of each other. TFN#2 TN-3 was mudrock into manfred into steam knight, where the gramophones on the first wave would give you a much easier time against the reborn creations in the second wave if captured, and the manfred cannon persisted into the battle with steam knight so you had to manage both the cannon and the barrages carefully. TFN#3 TN-2 was a near light map where the only pre-lit area was on the first wave so you had to chain your deployments into each wave if you wanted to be able to even see damazti on wave 3, that one was fucking cooking. TFN#4 TN-4 it was possible for the wholeass boss from wave 1 to carry over to wave 2, because father agenir's whole thing is that he's looping around on the outer fringes on the map harassing you while you fight the actual map. really good way to translate that to this gamemode.
and on the opposite end TFN#5 was dogwater because it was all IS bosses but the field mechanic of IS bosses is "you are in integrated strategies" so there's nothing to carry over between waves, you just fight a bunch of bosses that were designed for a specific environment outside the environment that makes them work. same for the RA and SSS bosses in TFN#6 right now, croc priestess and the crystalline beasts are scary in large part because you're meant to bring your own tiles and fight them over two acts so with their stats and paths adjusted to an environment without those conditions they're lame
prguitarman
janainaart
2087
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
areudirty
andulkaphoto
romaincrisis
snowghoul
