Do people actually run CoP Trials?

I'm just wondering, I still keep seeing Mothership and Hami Raids around, but I've yet to see any Cathedral of Pain trials being formed ever since they got reintroduced. Am I just unlucky and I'm just not around when they're being formed? Do I need to be a member of a secret society before I get to join the trial?

Also for what it's worth I play pretty much entirely on Virtue.

What server are you on? Virtue has a raid schedule posted as a sticky in their server forum.

On Justice I have seen several formed/run, but it's usually late at night, taking up to 2 hours to form. I think the specific requirements to run it are what keep the others to be run instead. More of a "because we can do this instead" than an "I don't want to".

Also, the CoP former(s) can be pretty nitpicky sometimes as to the team makeup, which tends to drive some away from trying it.

We did one two weeks ago on Infinity, planning to do another next weekend.

Virtue raids CoP regularly

Omega Shockwave runs frequent and successful CoPs on Guardian and this is pretty much his game plan.

It isn't really popular which is unsurprising given the coordination required and shoddy rewards. The merits are derisory, and I'd rather cube the incarnate reward than stand around for an hours set up for a 20 minute GOOD trial or an hours bad one. (To be fair Omega is very good; he starts at most 10mins after scheduled time, gets into the Cathedral first attempt and has a great success rate.)

A coalition I belong to tried to run one before Xmas, but it was bugged to the point we could not complete it.

If it's fixed, we'll have to run it again sometime soon!

@SpaceNut - My 50s, AE arcs and current projects at ParagonWiki

Hi Noxi,

I also usually run on Virtue and I also see very few CoP's being run during my play times.

However I did see and get on one just last week, the first since the initial wave after it released when I was fortunate to get my badges.

This was a well planned and well led attempt with experienced bosses and, from what I saw in chat, a majority of players who had run it before.

The teams were even rebalanced/matched before we started and every step was detailed in a "first" runner friendly manner.

The mood was really happy and full of expectation.

We started and took out the towers in about 8 mins.

We then hit the inside and looked at the Purple AV

Forty five minutes later this team of 24 players had played their little socks off, with very few deaths and a well thought out plan executed very slickly. However it became apparent very quickly that we were going to have major problems to overcome the AV's regen! The leaders could see this, but talked in chat and came up with alternative stratagies which were then put into operation by the team leaders.

The team members listened/understood/agreed to keep trying and then implimented those strategies.

We were just swatting aside the respawns and so getting back to the AV asap but it had always regened to full and we never saw the health bar dip below 90%. We dropped all the usual temps and used all temps such as Envenomed Dagger.

We persisted for about 40 mins till, with mutual frustration and anger (all of it directed at the Dev's who were the targets for such poor design and still no corrective action to a known problem), we disbanded.

One topic that kept coming up in chat was the horror that this might happen when the WST goes live and it is the CoP with recurring purple AV's.

I know that I felt cheated for nearly 2 hours effort and playtime with no reward! I know from chat, that so did a lot of the other guys.

And yes I am aware that "Folks" have defeated the purple AV but I was a member of a group of 24 players that could not. A group that was not a disorganised mish mash of Pled AE 50's et cetera, but a unit that spent 35 minutes wailing on one AV in a co-ordinated and thoughtful manner that could not even dent it!

So a long answer to perhaps a hint of an answer as to why we see so few CoP's run!

Cheers

So, I know that nukes are no longer useable on COPs, but is the purple rularuu still buggy/nigh indestructible?

I was on two attempts over the weekend, both failed for lack of damage output even with a horde of shivans helping.

We run them quite frequently on Pinnacle, no prep time, just usually wait 5-10 mins for everyone to log in, then crush it in around 12 mins.