I went into the Wicked tier grind in Black Ops 7 expecting the worst, mostly because everyone in my group chat kept talking like it was some kind of cursed life choice rather than endgame content, but once I actually sat down and did it with an eye on BO7 Bot Lobbies for the boring bits, the whole thing felt a lot more manageable than the horror stories made it sound.
Getting Ready For Wicked Relics
The game will not even let you touch the Wicked trials until you have cleared the main Easter Egg in standard mode and picked up the lower tier relics, so if you are trying to skip ahead, you are wasting your own time.This is also the first spot where people mess up the requirements, because you need two Grim relics and two Sinister relics equipped at the same time when you queue in, otherwise the trial flag just does not exist and you can sit there for 60 rounds with nothing happening.
How The Phone Steps Really Work
Most of the stress comes from the phone sequence, but once you have seen it once, it is not that complicated.You start at round 20, listen for that sharp ring and then go hunting for the red phone, usually in the Blackwater Lake cabin or near the boathouse dock, and you just interact with it until you see the red smoke and hear Mr Peeks giggling in your ear.You then repeat this on round 30, round 40, round 50 and finally round 60, always in that order, and if you miss any of those windows or get distracted and forget to hit the phone before flipping the round, the whole chain resets and you are back to square one, which is the part that really stings after an hour plus of play.
Surviving The Red Portal Trial
When you actually hit the phone on round 60 and get everything right, the red portal opens and the real trial starts, but it is way more about pacing than mechanical skill.The big twist is the flat 50 percent damage nerf, which sounds brutal on paper, but if you are running a Pack a Punched Necrofluid Gauntlet or just a solid Ray Gun build, you still chew through most of the horde without feeling totally useless.You get six waves in total, with heavy HVTs showing up on wave three and wave six, and if you train near the cabin traps, keep your reloads clean and avoid hero plays, solo runs feel surprisingly calm, more like a long endurance test than some insane "one mistake and you are dead" challenge.
Dealing With The Grind And Why The Relic Matters
The bit that really wears you down is the time, because pushing all the way to round 60 in Cursed mode is a few hours of pure focus and one lag spike or host crash can blow the whole attempt, which is why a lot of people quietly use services or bot lobbies to level guns or camos instead of repeating failed high round runs over and over.The Blood Vials relic itself is weird at first glance, because disabling your weapon augments feels like you are throwing away power, but once you play with it you realise it forces cleaner gunplay and better positioning, and you need it anyway if you want to finish the collection and unlock the Tier 4 upgrades, so it ends up being more of a bragging rights piece and a different way to play than some punishment drop, and if you are already someone who likes to buy game currency or items in RSVSR, you are exactly the type of player who will appreciate having that extra flex in your loadout.