The_Masque

This a fairly new (and yet old) aspect of the game. Until people have gotten a few runs under their belts it probably was necessary to be so stringent with team selection. I've been following some of the chatter on other servers about this and most of the raids that weren't successful were most likely due to poor team selection and lack of coordination between the teams.

I would imagine as this get run more and people become more familiar with it, team makeup will be less and less of an issue.

The reason we decided on so many debuffer spots is you have such a small window of time to take down the AV. It just seemed to us that the longer a trial/raid lasted the greater the chance for failure was due to people running out of temp powers/insp/temp buffs, people losing focus, and people getting frustrated and quitting.

WOOT got the emps filled in this is looking really good.

Thank you Mackie!

Adding Stellar to backup list

Looks like we are down to:
3 EMP/Therm Spots
4 Shielder spots- Will take sonic/ff/cold/thermal for these at this point
1 rad spot


Zamuel we are full on scrapper blaster at this moment but if we cant fill I have you on the alternate list.

This is what we have been running for teams:

1) Well built tank- High HP and Psi resist/def is good for this. So we have been trying to get WP, stone with minerals, I've also seen invulns do well on this.

2) Buffers- Colds are good for this because they offer both buffs and debuffs. FFs are good because they offer a visual reference for the team (stay in the bubble!) for healing auras.

1) 'Healer'- Emps and therms- Emps are good for group aura buffs and Therms offer shields and debuffs so both are good.

2) Damage- We have been trying to focus on scrappers just because they usually have mez protection so the 'healer' can just focus on passing out heals/buffs/ and cm types of powers to the people who need them.

This leaves two spots open per team: which we have usually tried to get a mix of Rads, hopefully 1 dark (for group rez), sonics, and spots open for just anything.


I would think that redside may have an easier time because:

Brutes are filling the tank role (but bringing a little more damage), the scrapper roles (maybe bringing a little more survivability and damage since the fightin is almost non-stop).

Corrs are filling the buff/debuff/heal/blaster roles.



As far as the AV, I think someone else said it but it looks like his shield is on the same type of timer as the Obelisks, so once the cubes are cleared (I think the timer starts after all the cubes are cleared not the 1st one, but I may be wrong), his shield goes down and the timer starts.

I think one of the keys to defeating him is -regen debuffs. So stacking things like benumb or Lingering radiation (non-toggle) may help to keep him from compeletely regen-ing when he is in his bubble.



The strategy we use for the indoor map is:

All three teams gather at the door, we use all aura types of buffs then split and attack the 3 cubes. The team that was performing the best outside on the obelisks (or if a team has 2 tanks) gets the cube with the AV. Once the cubes are clear gather around the AV (we usually drop pets/nukes) and attack him. Once his shield goes up (we usually only get him to 30-60% the 1st go around) split back up clear cubes and go back to finish him off.

This sounds like an issue we ran into as well. You may have had teams on different instances of the outdoor map. I've seen this happen with missions in AE before. I 'think' might be a bug where if someone on to the team enters prior to the team lead (all the team leaders have to be in the same sg) then it may create 2 instances one for the Raid SG and maybe(?) one for the sg that the teammate who clicked in early belongs too(??).

We restarted the trial and let the team leaders enter 1st and had no issues on the restart.

One other interesting note: The CoP trial appears to still follow the rules of Base Raids. If you start one you can not quit it (we had to switch sg bases on the restart) and you may not join another raid (CoP trial) until the timer on the initial Raid is over.

Honestly, people think this is an easy trial, it is not. The two speed(ish) runs that were done were run by some really good players who have spent a lot of time and effort in prepping for this to make sure each team had buffs/debuffs/heals/tanks/damage.

I think it is like anything else in this game:

A)You can have a well built team crush a Masters of XXXX tf/sf, and it may actually seem almost boring or inane to those on the team.

B)You can have a non min/maxed team struggle (or not) through the same tf/sf.

I just would not judge the CoP trial by the people who have run it in a speedy fashion, as I do not think that will not be the norm. I also would hesitate to suggest that just because a team has temps (Heavies/nukes/shivans) that they are going to auto-win the trial.