Co-op Battle Events

Where and when

The fight opens once a week, on the school's Friday evening maintenance check, and stays open for a full day after that. Odd months, it lands on Hogwarts itself: the Battle of Hogwarts, in full. Voldemort's Death Eaters and Giants hold one side of the field. Dumbledore's Army, the Order of the Phoenix, the Ministry, and every Auror who can be spared hold the other. Nobody on staff has offered a tidy explanation for why the castle keeps refighting this particular week on a schedule. The wards are the leading theory. Nobody has followed it up.

Even months, the front moves to the Ministry of Magic, where everyone on the same side takes on a Death Eater War-Band in the Siege of the Atrium: one enemy, one shared health total, no teams. Once that pool reaches zero, the fighting itself stops; the window stays open on its own schedule regardless, and whatever you had already earned by then still gets paid out once it closes. The Battle of Hogwarts works the other way round: the fighting never stops early, the clock runs the whole day, and whichever side dealt the bigger total of damage when the window closed takes the field.

Look for a nav link in hot pink, a shade the castle does not use for anything else, on whichever page the fight is currently happening. It shows up right where the fight is: on the village screen for a Hogwarts fight, or at the Ministry of Magic for a Ministry one. If you have not yet logged enough Voldemort Encounters to be let through the Ministry's front doors during a Ministry fight, you are not shut out of it. The village screen offers "Answer the Ministry's Call," in the same pink, which joins the exact same shared fight without requiring you to actually stand in a building you have not been cleared to enter. The Ministry's own entry requirements are completely unaffected either way; only the fight itself makes an exception.

Ignoring the nav is not the same as staying out of it. While a fight is open, standing in the right place can occasionally pull you straight into one exchange whether you clicked anything or not, on a cooldown of roughly 15 minutes so it is not doing this to you on every single page. It will not do this to anyone already down for the count, and a player with no turns left still gets pulled in, just narrated at rather than charged for a swing that could never land anyway.

Both the opening and the closing happen only on the school's twice-daily maintenance check, not on any clock you personally need to watch. There is nothing to click to make either one happen sooner.

Picking a side (Battle of Hogwarts)

The Battle of Hogwarts is fought on rosters, and your alignment fills out the paperwork. Good characters sign up with the defenders automatically. Evil characters march with Voldemort's forces, whether or not they remember applying. Neutral characters get an actual choice: both rosters are one click away on the fight's own page, and whichever one you click first is yours for the whole battle. Nobody switches once the roster says your name, not with any link, not with any excuse, not at all.

Once you are on a roster, every swing you land goes into your side's running total of damage dealt, and at whichever side's enemies you happen to be standing in front of. The clock is the referee: the window closes for everyone at the same time, and the side with the bigger total takes the field. The fight's own page tracks each side's running damage total and its share of the combined tally: there is no pool here to watch run dry, and the fight continues at full volume, whatever the numbers look like, until the window closes. A tie is declared a draw, which the paperwork insists is a valid outcome.

Joining the fight

Clicking Attack spends one of your own turns and resolves one full round against the enemy in front of you, the same combat engine behind an ordinary forest fight, which means the enemy gets to swing back. There is no limit on how many times you personally can attack while the window is open, so a Chronos Gem, which refills your turns, legitimately buys you more swings. It cannot open the fight early or keep it open a minute longer than scheduled.

The fight is calibrated to be survivable at every level. The enemy swings back about as hard as the forest monsters around your own year do, so a brand-new first-year who wades in is bruised rather than obliterated. And even your worst swing, the one that whiffs completely, still chips something off the shared total. Nobody travels all the way to a battle and walks away having contributed literally nothing, a policy that was apparently written by somebody who once watched a first-year miss a giant.

The total health the enemy brings scales up with how many people have actually been playing that week, and with how hard those people actually hit, so the fight cannot be quietly finished off by whoever happens to be awake first.

Credit and diminishing returns

Every swing you land counts in full toward your own payout, up to a point. Once you personally have thrown a good number of them at the same fight, each additional swing after that is worth a shrinking fraction of your own payout, though it never rounds all the way down to nothing. This has no effect on the enemy's health total itself, which always takes the full hit regardless of who is swinging or how many times they already have. It only changes how much of that hit counts toward what you personally get paid, so one extremely well-supplied player cannot quietly claim the whole reward while everyone else's share rounds to nothing.

The board and the chatter

A running board of the top 25 contributors, ranked by credited damage, sits right on the fight's own page, alongside a live chat for that location so people can coordinate, call for backup, or announce that they just landed the hit of the week.

Getting paid

When the window closes, the event's gold pool (50,000 gold by default, an amount the administration keeps under review) is split among everyone whose credited damage cleared a floor of 150, in proportion to their own share of the total. Fall short of that floor and no share of the gold comes your way, however many swings you took. The payout is deposited directly into your Gringotts account when the maintenance check closes the event, whether or not you are logged in, so it never spends an unattended afternoon in your purse. Everyone who is paid gets a note about it.

At the Battle of Hogwarts, the split between the two rosters is deliberately lopsided: the winning side takes two thirds of the pool, the losing side takes one third, and then each side's own share is divided up by credited damage as above. A draw splits the pool straight down the middle and the news reports it with a straight face. Clearing the floor on the winning side also earns "Champion of Hogwarts," a one-time badge for the particular flavor of glory that comes with having backed the winning army, possibly by accident.

Clearing the floor at any of these fights also earns "Answered the Call," a one-time badge, awarded to the exact same roster regardless of how much gold happened to be in the pool that week. Even a week where the pool comes up empty still hands out the badge.

Whoever dealt the single heaviest raw hit of the fight gets a mention in the news once the window closes. It is entirely for bragging rights and pays nothing extra.

If it goes wrong

The enemy hits back like anything else out there, and being struck down in this fight carries the same consequences as being struck down anywhere else: whatever gold you are carrying is gone, a share of your experience goes with it, and you are back on your feet to try again the next day. Whatever credit you had already earned before that particular swing still counts toward your payout when the window closes.