A Virtue Guide to the CoP

HVAs are better than shivans for this because they stay at range and have their own -regen attack. You should have enough vanguard merits to buy one after doing a ship raid.

I was monitoring recycle times on the AV shield against the stormer (to time my Howling Twilight through the shield up if possible). Bringing the shield down took between 35 (best) and 50 secs normally (a couple were longer). Faster cube-mob kill times would be essential to getting the stormer down.

Player ability can only go so far on kill speed. It would likely be right on the edge to get the shield down again consistently within the 30 second debuff timer, assuming they are successfully applied just before shield up.

As you pointed out near the beginning, heavily setted/purpled characters would be the obvious solution to increasing performance on this. Certainly there's no objection to running a cherry-picked raid with the goal of defeating the stormer, but these would likely not be general public raids. However, as with the use of temps and temp-pets, relying on people who have maxed out their builds isn't the preferred direction to go ultimately for general public raids. A strat that allows anyone with a generic build and utilizing few (if any) temp/pets would be the ultimate goal.

I believe that the red AV, even with the shoot-through-shield bug, is balanced enough for a pug-level public raid. It's likely he'd become less of a challenge when the bug is fixed (I hesitate to say 'too easy').

Also, I believe that when the shoot-through bug is fixed, the stormer AV will become doable and balanced. From observing several attempts against him, the slowness in getting the shield back down seems to come from his debuffing the raid groups through the shield. Add in the increased deaths from increased player vulnerability, and the stormer becomes 'broken' hard. If the stormer no longer can debuff the raid while the shield is up, the effectiveness of the raid is restored, and we've already seen that he can be handled at least down to 50% during shield-down.

So essentially, my position is:

1. Red is balanced for a public raid even with the bug; might be too easy if fixed.
2. Stormer is likely balanced once the bug is fixed, but only min/max characters and teams with temps are going to take him consistently.

It will be interesting to see how this develops in time. For now, to maintain the fun and interest of doing the trial for the most number of people, I agree with BT that the stormer should be skipped and only the red done.

(although, raid willing, I'll be more than happy to attempt against the stormer to learn more about the encounter/weaknesses/tactics).

All valid points. My worry on the Storm AV is more putting in the effort and hitting that brick wall will be a major turn off for people joining the CoP for the first time. The complete lack of rewards unless you win is already quite a turn off to doing more than one pass at it. Right now people want to go in get the badge and thats all. Getting people interested in doing it for the unique factor is much more a problem. While some people hit a brick wall and thats what will push them to retrying I find most people want the satisfaction of winning and that is part of the draw.

That make me think. Last friday i helped a friend on the 2nd try. They had called the first when facing the purple AV. I logged about right after they called it. They lost a few ppl at that moment and i was happy to join. The issue he had at that point, he was lacking a 3rd captain from his sg.

I told him ill see if we have 3 onlines, an interested so we could use my base instead of his, if not, ill drop my sg and join his for the time being. Time we gather 24 ppl again, we had 4 ppl from my sg, so we gived a try with my base. Since it was a funny night, my ISP decided to do a Maintenance..YAY! They still had 3 from my sg so they were able to start, but i think my dc'ing was at the worst moment. My team ended up in there own instance of the trial, a bug we prolly all faced by now.

They tried to fix it, by dismissing the teams, reforming etc. nothing was working, ...and at some point i was back online. Timer was running and i suggested someone from my sg join his. And we apply a hard reset, by starting s new Timer from his base. Yay complete reset. Yay all in same instance... Yay there is 3 ppl that cant go in the instance. "You must complete your current task before... etc." Guess who were the 3 ppl? The 3 that was still in my sg (including me). The previous timer was still running, from our base CoP trial. Strangly that prevent you from joining another CoP trial from another base <.<

So well, we simply dropped our sg and were able to zone in. Its not a solution for ppl that care for there prestige mark. Good thing it was not the case for any of the 4 members, at least not for the alt we were playing.

In the end we faced the purple AV, we decided to give a try after all the trouble we faced it was lame to give up. with little success. I dont recall much from the phase 2, either it was that lame i was sleeping at my kboard, or there is nothign to tell, :P

That Run make me remind 1 point. On phase one I believe there were too many leaders on request channel. I think we pugged a few ppl and some decided we should do stuff there way <.<

Should only have 1 CoP leader, and 3 team leaders or the CoP leader is one of the 3 team leaders as we often see. CoP Leader call the shots, ppl should be attentive to instructions. Team leaders should do there job as instructed by the CoP Leader, and only use the request channel for task under there responsability. etc etc you get the idea. Many ppl telling everyone what to do lead to confusion. On that run, I was happy not to lead the Trial for once, listen and learn from other methods. I ended up leading a team tho, and it was not That bad, but still some ppl self proclamed themself "I know it all", "You should do what I say".
If you have suggestion advise your team leader or use broadcast, and dont use the Imperative.

If im not mistaken taking the Storm AV to 50% was done with a first strike stacked nukes/shivans/HVAS etc ?

Really nice if not!

(side note: someone i spoke with about our last sunday attempt on the purple AV, was telling me we did had him to 50% w/out nukes, but i think it was not the case, i personnaly saw 75% was the best we did)

In any case, from my own experience, I do believe this AV is beatable w/out nukes. Since it have been prooved you can do a shield respawn cycle and come back to him with his HP not back to 100%

As for IO'ed builds, sorry if i was leading to the idea we should all be IO'ed to the teeth. I only meant, "good build" in general, SO'ed or IO'ed. As oposition of bringing a build you are currently working on and somehow inbalanced Ex: dont bring your lvl40 brute. At least not t'il we figured how to make this painless and easy. But again, sometime we do are looking for a 24th to start, and you will pull a "this is my highes lvl villain/hero".

In the perfect world, will have 24 ppl ready to join every night, with balanced AT's, etc. In reality its not often the case.

Also i would like to understand what is not an pug CoP trial? I like to think I have a bunch of ressources to pull ppl to join on events, I prolly have more ressources then most players. I'm lucky to have such ressources, but still, I dont think of a single CoP i did not had to PuG. By PuG i mean ppl i dont know or never teamed with (or barely).
Admit some nights i maybe have 20 ish ppl from coal/private channels/friends etc.

I understand the idea of not scaring casual players, but we also have to do some tries on the purples AV.

Side note: PuG are fun in general, in my book, im always happy to run stuff with new ppl. Sometime you ran on some bad apples, but that is life.

To answer some points:

Stormer was brought to 50% on one of your pug raids. The problem is he goes back to 100% consistently before the shield can be dropped again, even with -regen debuff timing. His interference with the raid I believe is the most likely cause of not being as efficient dropping the shield in a timely fashion (as is done regularly on the red AV). Once the bug is fixed, I think the issue should be resolved.

A 'generic build' as I've used it is one that has few if any set bonuses to boost survivability and performance (power recharge, soft-capped defenses, increased regeneration, etc). Generic builds are SO-only or generic-IO-only; ie what the devs have stated they build the game difficulty around.

Angels and friends have run mostly public pug raids and are the usual I've been on; however Angels have also several SG and invite-only CoPs to get badging done for both players and supergroup badges. That's what I meant by non-pug trials. The majority of CoP runs I've attended/seen have been public pugs though and that would be preferred.

Hi, a few questions and comments.

I have to agree on the tank/brute staying in place, well at least I like the idea.
I remember 1 run agains the RED Av where I saw the brute from the other teams moving in place early or simply staying there. And that do seems to help a lot on keeping the mob in place as well as reducing agroo on squish'squis'squidely'squishies.

We often have the AV at 1 cube, leaving the 2 other cubes free of the AV aura. And sometime we do manage to have 1 brute to succesfuly taunt the AV away from all cubes.

(ps: ive mostly done it red side, so i often think "brute" instead of "tank" )

The only down side I could see is loosing some DPS (brute are dps unit in my book, compared to tanks)


How to start it ?, only one team leader from the sg/vg have to click on mission computer. All the other sg member automaticly get a mission related to the CoP, the trial itself. I got confuse one time because the mission was not set, but was most likely showing in the mission list from my team leader ( we were using someone else base that day).

The diff instance zone bug : Make sure to have everyone in the base, all 24 team members. 1 team leader start the timer (click mission puter). All 3 team leader go zone first. Other team member stay put in base. Team leader stay near zone entry and acknoledge they are in the same instance. Then everyone can zone. So far it works for us, unless crap append, like 1 guy dc' or a team leader click on puter too early w/out making sure everyone is ready (ya it appenned to us).

Yeah could be, I've been on a lot recently and they blur together.

After reading through the 1.0 version, the discussion here, and then participating in the first Saturday CoP run I decided to edit the guide in order to help clarify some things. This is largely based on Blazing Tiger and Xeon's information.

Table of Contents
Definitions
Phase 1: Form the Teams

• Trial Requirements
• Team Composition Recommendations
• Recommended Temp Powers

• Designate the Team Assignments
• Start the Mission

• Obelisk Game Mechanics
• The Obelisk Assault

• Setting Up and Buffing
• The Aspect Game Mechanics
• The Aspect of Rularuu Assault

• Oracle or Mission Computer
• Raid Telepad or Raid Teleportal

• 1 Tank/Brute
• 3 Damage
• 4 Support

Thanks for the updated version Bayne. Have not been feeling to well recently. So for my next task Id like to see if there is any connection between the obilesks and which AV is spawned. If people can note which obilesk goes down first and last and which AV spawns maybe we can see if it is connected or if it is tryely random. I remember my last try the final Obilesk to drop was Dispair and we got Big Red

A good synthesis of the guide info.

I have been doing the 4 nukes method and with all other bios being dropped when the shield is down the first time. and it has been working well. I do it this way because I find it easier to just dump all the buff ones first than trying to designate when each drop should happen. Im sure its overkill and could be better balanced but I do it just for ease of PuGs. Last Saturdays run saw us with onlt 3 bio nukes and 1 chem nuke so that really turned that area of the strategy into a moot point.

Saturday was mostly the result of inexperience which this guide is here to alleviate. Granted it is no subsitute for actual experience though.

Y'all see the patch notes on the Test Server for today? Looks like CoP will have to be done without Nukes soon

Yes I have seen. I have some words for the devs...but i will keep them between me and them

HVAs are more important than nukes anyway.

I am inclined to agree. Ran two CoPs back to back and managed with 1 bio and one chem so Im not worried about the change as much as Im upset THAT was the issue that needed to be delt with first.

I have updated the original post. It is more comprehensive and excludes Nukes from the instructions...as soon as i find out hoe to color things I will. Beynod that I think it covers everything you need to know but feedback is always welcome.