Absolute Virtue - "Eureka!" moment?

So, over at The BG Forums there's a post which claims the first significant progress on Absolute Virtue since the Kraken DRK was ninjad. Ever since the S/E video was released, which zoomed into the chat log when Absolute Virtue uses his 2hr abilities that showed players using their 2hrs as well, it's been speculated that using your own 2hrs after AV used his would somehow lock down his own 2hrs. Unfortunately, after much testing, and much death, no real significant progress had been made.

Until now, it seems. A player named Suteki over at JP Button claims that his linkshell had shown some success in locking AV's "Call Wyvern" 2hr - that is, getting it so he doesn't use it again - by getting their DRG to use Call Wyvern right after AV did. However, when trying it out with a new DRG, they couldn't get it to work. That interested them, and in comparing the differences between the two DRGs to see what might have caused it, they noticed something huge: The first DRG had a Love Torque equipped, and the second one did not.

The entire theme of sea, of course, surrounds virtues and vices, virtues and sins. Every jailer in Sea has a name surrounding a virtue: Fortitude, Temperance, Faith, Justice, Hope, Prudence, and Love. Each jailer (excepting Love) drops "virtues" that are used to spawn the next mob, and all jailers (including Love) drop Torques and Weapons associated with the virtue they are guarding.

Of course, the idea that these items had something to do with the key to beating AV is nothing new. Very early in the process, people tried using the different weapons in the fight, but nothing tangible ever resulted, and eventually the idea that the weapons had anything to do with the kill was discarded, and you were laughed out of the room at BG if you suggested it.

The critical flaw in this reasoning, though, is that proving that using the weapons in the fight (and by inference, the torques) did not weaken AV in any way did not prove that they were not involved at all. The possibility always existed that they were part of the equation somehow, not by themselves but rather as the key variable in a more complicated scheme. I've long thought that, given S/E's stubborn insistence that people kill AV only the "right" way and their insistence on ninjaing him every time players have come up with a way to beat him anyway, meant that the eventual solution had to have something to do with the theme of sea as a whole, which goes back to virtues and vices. In that sense, it only makes sense that the pieces of gear with the names of the virtues on them would have to be involved somehow. The problem is, nobody had any clue how, and the thoughts of most people drifted elsewhere.

The current hypothesis is this: each jailer drops a weapon that is 100%. These weapons are not that great and are generally ignored, often kind of laughed at by the player base as they have job-equipability rules that don't seem very intuitive. But because the DRG can wear the Love Halberd and the DRG in question had a Love Torque on, the thinking is that each job should be wearing the Torque that corresponds with the virtue whose weapon their job can equip.

More intricately, it would go something like this:

- Each 2hr has an associated "virtue"; when AV uses his 2hrs, he is testing to see if that is a virtue you possess

- Each 2hr has an associated job

- Therefore each job has an associated virtue

- What each job's virtue is, is given away by which jobs can equip which "virtue weapons" (note that each job can equip only 1)

- Wearing the appropriate "virtue torque" for your job and then using your 2hr in response to AV using his confirms to AV that you have that virtue, and he will move on to another, thus "locking" that 2hr

That fits in on a very nice thematic level with what Absolute Virtue says when he is spawned:

At lassst the time has come...

The ssscattered fragments of my thoughtsss once again mine. Long forgotten memoriesss filling me once more...

However... these memories generate sssuffering... These thoughtsss... bring remorssse...

Tell me... for what sssearcheth thou, to travel this far? Show me... by what principlesss art thou driven?

In particular, the last line: "By what principlesss art thou driven?" seems to indicate that from an RPG perspective, the AV confrontation is more of a "test" than a "fight". This would go a long ways to explaining S/E's extreme stubbornness in resisting the player base's (sometimes extreme and very innovative) means to try and kill him using the standard fight formulas. They want it to be something very different, something that fits in with the theme of Sea from an RPG perspective, not just another mob to burn down with the right formula.

Of course, even if this does turn out to be 100% spot on the money, AV will likely never be a trivial fight. For one, having jobs with the appropriate torques is not easy, as the torque drops are quite rare (but that fits in with S/E's theme of stuff requiring a lot of work; in this sense the torques make much more sense than the weapons, as the weapons are all 100% drop). Plus, they tend to go to jobs that can use them, more than jobs that have the appropriate "virtue" for their 2hr, meaning you won't see a lot of RDMs with Justice Torques running around. Still, thanks to people having multiple jobs at 75, this isn't impossible to test, and if it turns out to be correct, will almost certainly have a major impact on LS policies when distributing torque drops (since AV's drops are so prized).

For another, even if you do "lock" his two hours, that means you have to survive them once, which is no easy feat. A single chainspell/manafont is usually enough to trigger a wipe. But linkshells have proven that surviving one of these is not impossible, and of course it's not supposed to be easy.

There are still quite a few wrinkles. It doesn't fit in exactly with the S/E videos showing the developers killing AV, because that video shows the developers spamming 2hrs of multiple jobs in response to AV using his, which has led the player base into assuming that they must do the same. Because those videos also show the same players using their 2hrs multiple times during the fight, that's led to speculation that S/E was playing in "god mode" with their 2hr recast timers set to 0, or that there is a way somehow during the fight to reset one's 2hr. If it's the former, players have treated that as evidence that not even the developers, who know the secret, could beat AV legitimately, and if there's the latter, there's never been any evidence of any 2hrs ever being reset during an AV fight.

My proposition would be the former - that S/E was indeed in "god mode" during their fights - but not because they couldn't beat AV legitimately. While there are elements of the videos that clearly are trying to tell us something specific (zooming in on the chat logs at two points during the fight), there also may be elements of the video that are obfuscating the true strategy so that it won't be obvious.

Remember, S/E wanted the videos to be a hint, not a guide.

So how do you show that you lock AV's 2hr by using the corresponding 2hr without completely giving it away? You respond to his 2hrs with multiple 2hrs from various random jobs, but then run in "god mode" so that you can do this and still beat him.

Throw in the additional variable of having the appropriate torque equipped, and it's no wonder the community has yet to make any significant headway.

So, who knows, this might turn out to be bullshit, but for now it constitutes a very hot lead, and it's the first idea I've seen in a LONG time that gives me any inkling that it fits in with the story/theme of CoP.