Is the MoM supposed to be completable by a PuG League?

I play on Pinnacle, and pretty much everything I do is PuG, for a certain definition of PuG. I have an SG with a total of two members, and expanding to my global friends list gives a grand total of five people, so I have to find teammates somewhere else. That said, most recruitment I do is via the main global channels used on Pinnacle, but if I can't find enough people, I'll turn to Broadcast/Help, sure.

When MoM released, I ran a few, recruiting random people through global chat. On the third attempt, we were successful, with several badges. I've since run MoM a number of times, sometimes asking for shifts, sometimes in groups with a bunch of +0s. Sometimes I was in charge, sometimes I wasn't. I've run it enough to have the Master badge on my main, and I've also run it on at least one other character. It is ENTIRELY doable with a PuG. In fact, I'm of the opinion it's easier with a PuG than most other trials, as long as the leader does two things.

1) Warn EVERYONE going in that if they talk to Desdemona, you'll kick them from the league. That way, you have all the time in the world to explain the trial. I seriously have a macro on my main I can fire 2-3 times to warn people
2)Give a brief, minute, maybe minute-and-a-half summary of each phase. Explain "First, we drop Malaise to 50% health, simple AV fight. Then, he chickens out, we gotta kill our way through three other AVs to get him back. When these nightmares show up, there will be purple voids on the ground. GET AWAY from the voids, they grow and deal heavy DoT as they do. Tanks, feel free to haul the nightmares halfway across the map if you need to. Once the third nightmare drops, Jade Spider appears, but is on our side. Kill Malaise, and we all come back here for tea."

How hard was that? Two chat messages? Maybe a third mentioning the hospital situation, but you only gotta do that once. If the leader's explaining things, and everyone does it right, the trial's actually not that hard. Hell, I was on one where there was at least one person with absolutely no idea what was going on, but the leader thought we were all people who'd done this before, so didn't stop to explain. Except that we had to tell the new person not to go killing voids in the Penny phase, there were no problems at all, and it was about as quick as a BAF run, with better rewards, despite about half the league being at +1 or +0.

In a way, I am glad MoM is hard. It is the 3rd generation itrials and it's not meant for incarnates who have not advanced to 50+2 or 50+3. I think even 50+1 is a bit too low for second part of MoM because of all the auto damage and the spike damage from AV. Once you are dead, you will have a hard time getting up without a real rez. A small wakie will not do it.


Key point in MoM:

1. Bring Psionic protection!!! Widows and /dark are the best choice. I have the most easy time with my Fortunata. Several Mind Links will give the team a lot of psionic resistance. Those "pink patches" deal psionic damage I think because my Fortunata can stand in the patch for a while. The second time we beat MoM, we had 2 Widows. 2 Mind Links can really reduce AV's psionic damage by a large margin.

2. Bring more 50+2 and 50+3 which also means you'll have destiny. Barrier and Rebirth are needed.

3. Second part requires attention. Don't use any aoe that have immb/knock back or any control effects that can stop Voids from getting close. We were told to just use ST attack on AV and the tanker will bring one Void at a time when we need it. Don't use pets that you can't control.


MoM is meant to be a challenging trial for higher levels. I've failed it 4-5 times and finished 2 times. I don't hate the trial.

I only have two real objections to MoM.

One is manageable by player actions, but only to a certain extent. In the Penelope battle, if you are on a low-HP AT and you do die, you will often die again due to the environmental damage pretty much immediately after rezzing unless you can rez in a void's protective bubble. This is particularly true if you get stuck with the "stand up slowly" animation instead of the dramatic floating rez (which lets you activate powers and inspirations), or if you get a rez that doesn't give you full health.

I don't die much during the Penelope trial, but I have died a couple of times on support characters and then died repeatedly trying to get back in the action. That's never fun. Yeah, you can try to make sure you only die and/or rez in a bubble, but that's not always possible.

They could probably address this without touching the trial. No decent non-inspiration rez should force you to do that long stumbling stand-up animation.

The only other objection I have to this trial is that I don't really find it rewarding enough to play often. You get the completion table and the Emps, but a tiny number of Threads. UGT and TPN give what I consider excellent rewards, and Keyes gives two Emp Merits, though only once per day. If I want to run something multiple times per day for repeatable Emps, it would be the TPN every time, even though it's longer and requires more people to start.

Combine the reward with the fact that even tough trials like UGT are more forgiving of having "lowbie" 50s along (in terms of level shifts) and I'd usually rather form/join something else. I run MoM for badges and occasional giggles, but not so much for progress.

Reposting this here because not everyone is a VIP in this thread:

Up to this post, on the live servers only, these are my trial run/fail statistics:

BAF:
Total runs: 225
Failures: 15

Lambda:
Total runs: 213
Failures: 18

Keyes:
Total runs: 91
Failures: 5

UGT:
Total runs: 20
Failures: 11

TPN:
Total runs: 4
Failures: 0

MoM:
Total runs: 6
Failures: 6

As you can see, Keyes isn't a problem. Even the original Keyes with the horrendously annoying pulse damage and highly repetitive objectives isn't prone to failure. TPN is down-right repetitive and dull, but the AV damage is stupid. UGT and MoM though have an outright unacceptable failure rate. I've failed Keyes less than half as much as UGT, despite having run it almost 5x as much. I almost have matched the failure rate of MoM with Keyes, despite the fact that I've run Keyes 85 more times than MoM.

I can lead most PUGs to victory on a Keyes. I can't take a picked league to victory on a MoM trial. I have a coin flip chance of success or victory with a PUG for UGT.

As for the Dilemma Diabolique trial, after the first week I doubt I'll be able to find enough players interested in bringing their 50+3 characters to it to keep it being successful much less actually run.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

The notion of this thread is instantly dismissible because the question has already been answered. YES, MoM is completable by PuG's. Master of MoM (MomNomNomNom) is completable by PUG's. Just like anything else in the game, it is possible that many people have had bad luck in attempting to complete it. This doesn't mean that it's impossible. I can tell you it's not. I do it all the time.

Obviously the smaller servers are going to take longer to figure it out because the communities are less active and there aren't tons of people figuring things out and sharing what they've learned at a rapid rate. The solution to this is to either come to these forums (there's already tons of great info posted here on how to run this trial successfully) learn what you are doing and convey it to your server mates, or move to Freedom or another high population server.

You can't blame the game because you can't beat it. I remember when I was a little kid and I got stuck on a certain level on a Sega game or something, I would always say "the game is cheating." My parents had to tell me that in fact, the game wasn't cheating, I just hadn't figured out how to beat it yet. (In this thread I will not be bringing up the times where this game actually does cheat, because that is an entirely separate matter )