Arcas_NA

At some point I'll rewrite and reorganize this multiple-post guide. Especially since the forum update messed up all the formatting/links.

But for now, a quick bump for the eyes of any new players and old. Double XP weekends bring out the best potential for teaming, but at the same time, the level of teaming seems to get poorer.

Some overall extra tips:

- Just do it!: The guide ended with "Be responsible" and how few people want to actually be the team leader. There are no badges and accolades for team leadership. But to get where you want to go, sometimes you just have to do it. When 7 same level people all are "LFT", be the person to step up and form them into a group.

- Be specific: This is much more relevance now than when the guide was originally written. If you're running a team, tell them what you're doing in your recruiting tell. Some people don't like AE missions and they'll refuse many teams since they will just assume that most of the teams are in AE. If you're doing something else, tell them. If you're running an AE team, specify if it's farm or non-farm. Each will matter to different people.

- Have a good plan: Have a plan before you start recruiting people. If you're doing AE missions, take the time beforehand to identify a few arcs you want to try and write down their ID numbers so you can find them easily and quickly when it's time for the team to start. Never form a team and then say "OK, anyone know any good arcs" or "Ok, what should we do?" Players are more impatient than normal on double xp weekends, if they find you wasting their time, they will drop you in a second for the next team.

- Follow the trends: Recognize the patterns when things are happening around you. You may not like Atlas/Cap but they contain the most players looking for AE teams. If you're very persuasive you can get people to travel to AE buildings in other zones, but you'd be swimming against the current. The level range is very bottom weighted on double xp weekends (people want to get new characters going quickly), low level teams will generally be easier to put together than mid-level teams.

Happy Leading!

I originally read it back on the Virtue forums, but this is a terrific guide. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

Hey. If we don't keep our tl;dr ("too long, didn't read"... for the people out there my age) guides in front of everyone's eyes. Who will?

Multiple studies have shown that 4 out of 5 new CoX players don't know there's more than one page to to player guides forum. The other player doesn't even realize the game has forums.

But it wasn't a completely shameless bump, there was some useful info in that post.

Believe it or not, there are still two sections on the way at some point. One of them dealing with VEATs.

Easily one of the more impressive guides I have read in quite some time.

Thank you for taking the time to put this all together.

Time for the quarterly bump.

So what have I been working on lately in PUG-land?

- Team building in Rikti War Zone: A lot of switching back and forth between red-side and blue side to put some creative hero/villain teams together.

- Large team safeguards and mayhems: I can get most teams to "complete the mission" fairly easily... almost comically easy. Case in point, about a hour ago I had a team do the Bricks safeguard on invincible that consisted of Me + 4 scrappers + 3 tankers. As the only death, one of the tankers briefly hit the ground when Ice Mistral got a lucky hit on him.

On mayhem side, it took me a few months to admit it. But bank rush is just the way to go on a large team PUG mayhem... as dangerous and counter-intuitive as it sounds. I talked about it a bit before, but there are a lot of things about mayhems and safeguards that just weren't intelligently designed with higher difficulties and larger teams in mind. The devs built safeguards and mayhems for a 4 person team on heroic. There's no way they sat down with an average non-SuperTeam team of 8 villains, run through a mayhem, and said "Yup, they're going to love this."

So for a variety of reasons, of the three strategies, bank rush tends to get the best results in large team mayhems. You just have to hope for the best that you have the power to take out the Longbow supersquad in the bank lobby.

The next goals... getting past "mission complete". Finding creative ways to deal with the psychotic item counts needed for a 7-8 villain team in mayhems. And just overall coordinating teams better to get us through the sidemissions on time (and with no time scaling for larger teams... the devs don't make it easy)...

<ul type="square">[*]Lord of the Cage Fighters

Whether it's teamleading or SuperTeaming, half the battle of putting teams together is opportunity. So when something out there is popular, I take advantage of it to put out some pretty cool teams. When sonics and archers were new, I had a lot of teams running around with 3+ disruption fields and full archery teams laying waste to enemies.

In this recent time, the "new" is the great addition of the weapon customizations (which leads to so many great SuperTeam possibilities on its own) as well as Dual Blades and Willpower. With the overwhelming amount of Dual Bladers running around, that meant a return to an old classic: The Melee Team.

Putting together a melee team is the same as any pick-up-group. But you may want to tell the participants in your recruiting tell that a "melee team" is your goal. I've never had a person leave once they found out, but better safe than sorry.

So what are some of the considerations of the melee team?

Pure or Pseudo: A pure melee team is what I usually put together. On hero side, these are tanks and scrappers, and no one else. But you can always use support too. So you'll have to make the choice if you're going "pure and nothing else" or if you'll quickly drop that mold once you notice a kinetic or a disruption fielding sonic around. Pseudo melee teams are those teams who are mostly melee... with a little extra enhancement from other ATs.

Make-up: In CoV, it's a lot simpler, since it's pretty much just brutes with maybe a few stalkers thrown in. A pure stalker team is a whole different animal altogether. It can be done, and with great skill, but it doesn't lend itself directly to the rock-em sock-em barbrawl action of a regular melee team.
In CoH, two tanks is usually a good idea. Three is also a good number. But once you hit four, you may start whittling away at that overall team damage... where that fourth spot would have probably gone better to a scrapper. You also want see if you can find more offensive tankers as opposed to the traditional type. Or at the very least a tank that can find the bosses and jump on them. If a tank can't find a boss... you'll start wondering why you don't have a scrapper in that spot instead.

Difficulty: You always want to start your pick-up-group with an easy practice mission. But this is almost necessary for a melee team. You want everyone to see how it works. And to get to know how their teammates work.
Your max difficulty depends a lot on the skill of your teammates, but also a lot about the level of the team. Pre-25, you might not want to go past the rugged or vicious. Post-25, when everyone's melee protection has improved with a lot more powers, the limit really depends on the skill of the team. You can do pure melee teams on the highest difficulty settings no problem, if the team works together and knows what they're doing.

Inspirations: There's no outside buffing or healing. But bad things do still happen. You'll want to carry a few inspirations. And you want to encourage your team to leave an open spot as often as they can (and really, inspirations are meant to be USED not stored! ). Whenever someone is getting in trouble, do two things. One, as quickly as you can, toss an inspiration to them, or drag it to their name in the team list. Two, try to find out what's hitting them and go jump in to take some of the heat.

Aggro Splitting: The single strategy of survival for any melee team: In a melee team there are 8 pretty tough individuals. If a group of enemies has to choose between attacking all of them, the enemies will be dead before they can defeat any one person. If L0nErScrap1 goes alone down a corridor and into a 8-member-team spawn by himself, you'll marvel at how quickly his life bar vanishes from your sight. You want the enemies to do a little damage to everyone. Not big damage to one or two.

The Breather: Make sure your teammates know that there is no shame in ducking around a corner for a break while the rest of the team continues the fight. It happens from time to time. And it's a lot better than waiting for them to jog back from the hospital. When anyone is in trouble, the number one thing is to get them to stop attacking unless they are sure they can knock out their enemy pretty quickly. The spawn of enemies have 7 others to worry about, they'll leave the guy not attacking alone. If no one else was attacking that enemy, some other teammate should try to jump over and take that aggro so the hurt teammate can take a break without enemies chasing them around the corner.

Team Coordination: Right after aggro splitting, this is the second concept that makes (and mostly breaks, through lack of use) melee teams. Melee teams are made up of 8 people who ALL have scrapper-lock (that tendency of many melee characters to focus only on what they are fighting, and ignore EVERYTHING else).
You never want 8 players on 8 different enemies on any team. On the melee team, it's fatal. The melee team is a battle to beat the enemy before they beat you. You want to put them on the ground as efficiently as possible. Get your teammates to help each other out to take down foes quicker. If the tank spotted the boss first and engaged him, help the tank take the boss out. Then the most dangerous enemy to the group is on the ground.
If I'm leading the team while playing a scrapper, then I almost never have my own enemy. I'm usually cycling through my teammates and helping with whatever they are fighting. Some teams do "Targeters" and "Mini-Teams" but I'd save those for SuperTeams and SuperGroups as they are a bit too much for the action most people are looking for in a pick-up-group..

Keep your teammates from getting that "my teammate has that situation handled" mindset. Yes, they probably do have it handled. But good team coordination is a good habit that can help bad situations from ever happening.

Enemies: As team leader, and the one picking the police band/newspaper missions. You have a lot of control over the enemy type. And some enemies are just tougher for melee teams. Melee based enemies like Freakshow and Warriors are good for a stand-up fight and are great fun. Ranged loving enemies like the Council and Nemesis... you might have to implement a little more strategy outside of the usual "Run in, kick hard, win!"

The EgoBlade: Yes, I actually once ran into a character called the EgoBlade. And melee characters, by their nature, all have pretty big egos. You usually don't have to do much in this area, reality tends to do it for you (after people hit the ground a few times).
But watch out for your tanks. Many tanks are used to working with teams that need them to take ALL the aggro. They don't have to do that in a melee team. And with no outside healing, it's usually dangerous for them to try it on a melee team. Get the tanks to zero in on the bosses. If they can do that, the team is gold. Scrappers are big boys and girls that can take care of themselves.
Watch the scrappers too. They'll plunge into spawns without the rest of the team all the while telling you, "Don't worry, I got it!"
People will fly to the first enemy they see, and you'll soon have mini-teams fighting on stairs, in basements, on different floors, one of the roof, one in the back alley.

The funny thing with melee characters... a lot of the time they actually will survive. It's part of the frenetic hilarity that makes melee teaming fun. Some of the traditional grouping rules to get thrown out of the window all in the name of "SMASH" and "POW".

So don't get too bent out of shape when your team randomly breaks into three pieces at one point in the mission. Keep an eye on everyone, go help where you're needed most, and have a blast.
But, of course, if everyone starts dying all over the place, then it's time to enforce order and keep everyone closer together.
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[ QUOTE ]
Dealing with the folks who join your team, and then start tossing their orb about, is one of the toughest parts of leading a PuG. "Are we getting more" "Invite X pls" "Can I have the star" "we need x (upped difficulty, Rad defender)" are all signs of someone who has never properly led a team, but think they know what it takes. My personal opinion on this, is that if you think you can do a good job, go and build your own team. If you want to stay, then give the leader a little credit and go with their direction. Unfortunately, these people also seem to have a healthy dose of over-sensetivity, and responding in kind often results in conflict. Not everyone has the time, or the inclination to try and resolve this. I know I don't.

[/ QUOTE ]

My personal favorite is the "Invite person X pls"... while you're in the middle of fighting off some chaos filled army of enemies. Two seconds later, "Hey, can you pls invite so-and-so!" Completely oblivious to the fact that we're all a bit busy trying to keep ourselves and everyone else alive at the moment.

But you're right. Most people really don't have an honest clue about all the different things a team leader kinda needs to keep track of in order to keep it an entertaining a productive experience for everybody.

I had a story from a couple days ago that shows a lot of that. I was on my petless mastermind doing some PUGing. My petless masterminds bring a lot to teams, but like my human kheldians, the bigger the team, the more I bring to the table. So the general assumption I have going in is that I can recruit a lot of the right kinds of people, but it doesn't always work that way.

The other day, the mastermind has a group doing some vicious missions. Outside of myself, was one corruptor (ar/traps), a dominator, and a dark/dark corruptor that joined late. It didn't take me long to realize that the assault rifle corruptor was a bit on the new side. I had to remind her to switch off sprint while fighting for instance. The other corruptor was -3 levels to the rest of us, but I let her stay that way mostly because of the dominator. The dominator was a really skilled player, a master of his craft. And he knew it. He was the all-star of the team, and his performance made it ok by me to have the lower corruptor float along with us.

It wasn't long before the dominator was yawning and wondering when things were going to get tougher. He just didn't seem to realize that he was grouped with a mastermind with no pets, a pretty low skilled corruptor, and a decent corrupter - somewhat neutered by low level.

There really are only two difficulties in the game, I like telling people. "Easy, and team wipe."

It's the job of the team leader to think about his team as a whole and take a good educated guess as to how much the team can dance on the knife without getting cut. Sometimes it really does work out that vicious seems easy... while ruthless would wipe everyone all over the warehouse. It all depends on the situation.

At some point, somebody asked me if we were getting more corruptors... we were playing at about 11AM EST. Kinda a dead-zone for putting teams together. There were 5 corruptors online in our 10 level range. 2 of them were already on our team. Also every single solo brute and dominator (and some grouped ones) had already heard from me and either politely declined or didn't get back to me.

"Getting any more peeps?"

[ QUOTE ]
Awesome guide, Arcas. This is a must-read for anyone who intends to do much PuG leading.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

[ QUOTE ]
One of my characters has a bind that says something like, "Would you like to join my team?" Once (and only once, admittedly), the first person I successfully invited took a quick look around and went, "Hey, what team?" He then got really mad that I 'lied to him' and left the team despite my explanation about how I was still recruiting. No big loss, really, since such impatience and unreasonableness are probably signs of a bad team player, but I really didn't enjoy the verbal abuse.

[/ QUOTE ]

No doubt, it says a lot about a person if they can't give you two minutes to send off a few tells. I've even seen people with something like "don't invite me unless you have an established team" as their search comments. To each his own, but every team starts from two people at some point...

(Sidenote: I personally love people with those outrageous search comments. "Don't invite me unless the enemies are +4 my level." "I don't like you, leave me alone." "InvITe me NOW NWO NOW!!!!!" ---- saves time for the both of us since I don't have to bother sending them a tell or having them in my team. I do sometimes send tells to the "Don't send me tells or invite me" people. Just to tell them that they can always /hide to get off of the team seek, and /unhide later. Helps them since they never have to be bothered by tells from people like me. And it helps me out by getting them out of my sight and sparing me that horrible "list truncated" message. )

Every once in awhile, someone does ask, "Hey, I thought you had a team?"

Sometimes the response: "There're two of us... we do!"

But a lot of time it's: "Well... it's coming along, but one has to get the most important parts first, right?"

And it isn't just fluff, it's mostly true. A lot of times I'll glance at the various AT lists in the team seek and say to myself, "Ok, if I can get that sonic/sonic defender, then I can get this guy... and that lady... and that kheldian." But if I don't get the sonic/sonic, then I might go off in a totally different direction, putting together a different type of team.

Hopefully when people find themselves the first person recruited to a new team, they can take pride in knowing that they were the first person recruited.

<ul type="square">[*]The "/bind"master

Truth be told, I don't use /binds very often. It's the old-man in me that refuses to change I guess. I still type out just about every recruiting tell I do; stupidly priding myself on typing every hero/villain name without spelling errors (no matter how odd...). And I'm still a user of SHIFT-selecting.... even though I know my reaction time is slower when I have to get to teammates 6-8, as opposed to the blazing fast speed I can get to teammates 2-5.

But you can do all that stuff, with a lot more speed and accuracy than I could ever produce. Just by using some /binds.

I'm not a /bind expert by any means, so I'll do my best not to butcher this. But the first area you can shave your time is in recruiting for your teams.

Let's say I'm recruiting a blaster named Cosmic Bolt. One of my usual recruiting tells would be "Hi, want to join our team for a mission or two, Cosmic Bolt." And say there are about 6 other blasters I can hit in the same level range (law of numbers - the more you contact, the quicker you get your team). So, I'll have to type out that sentence, 6 times. I'm pretty quick at it, but still takes time, especially if you already have your team and you're fighting/babysitting or otherwise engaged.

You can make use the CoX language to make things a bit easier.

Just open up the team seek, select "Cosmic Bolt" (or whoever) and type

[ QUOTE ]
/t $target, Hi, interested in joining our team for a mission or two?

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Then ENTER. It will send a tell to "$target", who in this case is Cosmic Bolt.

But wait! The critic in me says. *I* like to use everyone's name in the tell, to show that I'm actually talking to him or her specifically.

It takes about two seconds for the /bind masters to quickly correct me and say: "Well, just change it to this: ..."

[ QUOTE ]
/t $target, Hi, interested in joining our team for a mission or two, $target?

[/ QUOTE ]

Now the result for Cosmic Bolt would be a tell he receives that reads: "Hi, interested in joining our team for a mission or two, Cosmic Bolt?"

Or anything else.

[ QUOTE ]
/t $target, Hi, $target, the Rikti are invading in Steel Canyon, want to come help us out?
/t $target, Hey there, $target, the Brickstown bank is being robbed by the Freakshow! Join us and we'll strike for justice!"
/t $target, Sup, $target. Well these Goldbrickers have been smearing my good name. So I'm gathering up some troops to help smear them all over the warehouse wall. Come on over for the loot!


[/ QUOTE ]

Next, just click on the next person you want to recruit, hit the UP arrow key (the last line reappears), and hit ENTER again. Now the next tell is off to the next player.

Now I certainly don't advocate using this to quickly spam everyone in the server... you do want to have a team plan and a reason why you want to recruit the people you want.

But this does greatly help to shave time. It might take you only a few seconds to quickly contact a group of players, where as it might take me a minute or two to type everything out. Might not sound like much, but you can relate when trying to recruit that needed teammate while swimming in hordes of enemies in some invincible/relentless map.

You could even make a /macro of it if you wanted; placing it as a button on your power tray.

[ QUOTE ]
/macro Tell "t $target, Hi, want to join our team for a mission or two, $target?"

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That puts a handy button named "Tell" right on your power tray, that does the exact same thing when you click a person on the team seek and then click the button.

(Literally a couple of minutes ago, I just tested it out on a low level corruptor by putting a team together for some relentless snake missions. I wanted to make sure the /macro worked the way it was supposed too. A dominator replied to me by saying "Wow, I can't turn down a great tell like that!" Part of me almost felt a little dirty.With the use of a simple easy button and a split second of my time, we had a unique recruiting tell that's easily 90% better than the usual "U wnt grp?!?1?" tells that they get from other people. )

Another area for using commands is for binding the teammates to specific keys.

Many people use the numpad:

[ QUOTE ]
/bind numpad1 "team_select 1"
/bind numpad2 "team_select 2"
/bind numpad3 "team_select 3"
/bind numpad4 "team_select 4"
/bind numpad5 "team_select 5"
/bind numpad6 "team_select 6"
/bind numpad7 "team_select 7"
/bind numpad8 "team_select 8"

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Those will /bind the numpad keys to selecting each teammate. Where I would use SHIFT+7 to select on of the teammates, the numpad /binds allow the same thing with the touch of key.

Powers and series of powers can also be attached to them. You can set it up, for instance, to select a teammate and say a phrase. Or select a teammate and apply a buff, or a heal.

(Much more on /binds from the /bind guide)

As for me, I'll continue to use my old-man slow ways, while swinging my cane and complaining about the young generation: "Back in my day we ran 2 miles through the Hollows, in the snow, no jetpacks, without dying, because their were no taxi-bot people. Those were the days where men were MEN, and debt was DEBT. When the Rikti would come down without warning and slap you around because they were 30 levels higher than you. Then they would camp the King's Row hospital so they could pound you some more. Toughened us up it did! You and your starbucks drinking, radio mission, base teleporting easystreeters can use some of that, let me tell you!" [/end overly sarcastic useless old man rants ]
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<ul type="square">[*]King of the Streets (Leading Safeguard and Mayhem Missions)

Few things strikes more fear in the hearts of pick-up groupers and leaders than the prospect of a safeguard or a mayhem mission. You sometimes see players specifically putting "No Safeguards" in their search comments. And group leaders slyly sneaking off to a nearby Detective to reject the mission without telling their team that has been doing invincible police band missions with ease. (You can do that, by the way, you're never FORCED to do a safeguard or mayhem, just tell the detective you aren't interested and get back to normal policeband/newspapers).

So what's all the fear about? Why are safeguards/mayhems (SG/M) so challenging and imposing?

There are a complete book of reasons, but here are 3 of the most notable.

* Control Issues

SG/M are the one mission type in the game where *one* teammate can ruin just about everything for your team. Few SG/Ms just "work out of the box" with no planning, tactics, or discussion unless the team has previously done a few missions together. It's the one type of mission that requires the group leader to have a pretty strong handle on things. And that one aspect alone is enough to deter most people from attempting to lead one, or to lead one with a larger group.

* The Timer of Doom

Quick, take any SG/M, then remove the timer. You've instantly created a situation that's bound to go much much easier for the team. It isn't that the time limit or the timer are bad things, but they are troublesome because of the effect they have on you and your teammates. Some people get nervous, some people start to panic, some completely go beyond their normal attack pacing and blow through all of their endurance (leading to other problems). Priority one for a team leader is simply getting people to calm down. Getting them to realize that there's enough time to take care of everything. They don't have to do anything stupid, or take unnecessary risks, if they just take things down with a systematic plan.

* Consistent Aggro and Endurance

Aggro sometimes seems to come from every direction in SG/Ms. Luckily it isn't as bad as when SGs were first introduced and enemies from a block away were aggroing on your team. But the consistent aggro/fighting in these missions tends to take a pretty hefty toll on overall team endurance. And that's an area that leads to a lot of problems. Specifically in Mayhems, whether its a Longbow ambush or some other critical thing, 'stuff' always seems to happen right when your team has the lowest amount of endurance to deal with it. Whether through communication, powers, inspiration tossing, etc., try to find a way for your team to efficiently approach how they burn through endurance in the SG/M.


Combined Tips

* The Crux of SG/M: Killing Speed

The universal theme of any SG/M: Killing Speed. It's the concept to burn into the minds of your teammates. More than defense, more than crowd control, more than holds and heals... SG/Ms are won and lost on killing speed. You don't get time bonuses until things are dead or destroyed. You don't open up side missions or finish the overall mission until things are dead. The speed at which your team can take things down is the single greatest factor of SG/M success.

* Team Make-up

As the case with everything, you never need a certain type of team to do these missions, but certain types will find them easier than others.

Damage, AoEs, and Damage Buffing: Tier 1 stuff. Again, killing speed is usually the first priority. Blasters, Scrappers, Kinetics, Sonics, Empaths, Rads, are all fantastic choices.

Control, Defense, and Chaos: Tier 2 stuff. Not as important for the primary goal of putting things on the ground. But this group (tankers, controllers, stormers, force fielders, etc.) is the group that keeps everyone alive so they can complete the primary objective. In other words, tier 1 allows the mission to be completed successfully. Tier 2 allows the mission to be completed successfully on higher difficulties. You could take a group of 8 blasters or 8 stalkers and dominate any SG/M on heroic/villainous. But would you do the same on invincible/relentless? Probably not, unless the group has played with each other for quite some time. The trick is balancing tier 1 and tier 2 in such a way to make things as efficient as possible.

* Difficulty Slider

Difficulty in a SG/M is really a measure of how much you trust your team, how much coordination the team has, and how well they handle endurance issues. Outside of the obvious (higher difficulty = more and tougher enemies). Higher difficulties bring longer battles, which mean even more endurance issues since it takes more endurance per battle. This may lead to more resting and recovering. All of which adds time. The challenge of the higher difficulties then isn't necessarily the harder enemies, but the fact that everything takes more time than it would otherwise. When in doubt, trust the fact that the SG/M will be harder than you think it will be. Your invincible/relentless team you put together might really only be a rugged/vicious team in the SG/M, depending on the circumstances.

* The Warm-Up

Whenever I plan to do a SG/M mission, I very rarely tell my teammates about it in advance. I usually just form up a team for a regular police band or newspaper mission. Then once the mission is over, it's time to jump into the SG/M. This is for a few reasons. 1) I need to check out the teammates I just brought aboard. How they play, how they work with each other, and if I need to throw any info out so that everyone can work together better. 2) I need the team to see for themselves how they work together. You want them to have a bit of confidence in themselves as a unit before they attempt something like a SG/M. This one factor alone is usually the only thing between a person that says "No way, I don't do Mayhems with PUGs ever!" to the person that says "Sure, let's go for it!"

Because of those reasons, I always try to use the warm-up mission. And I sometimes try to make the warm-up pretty tough just to show the team that they are pretty good. (Then when I exit the mission, I may fly over really quick and lower the difficulty to rugged/vicious before the SG/M begins).

I almost never advertise on broadcast or anything with: "Forming up a SG/M team, send tell!", because of the reasons above. And for the same reason, if anyone leaves right before the SG/M, I tend not to replace them. If there's only 5 players... then it's 5 going in for the SG/M. No rule says you have to have 8. You just don't want to run into something odd with bringing in a new player that you don't know anything about. "That blaster? He's actually a 3-year old playing, and daddy just left the room to take a conference call the moment the SG/M begins..." And I've seen even worse... people that will Leroy-like fly straight to the bank after the team agreed on another strategy, or people who quickly jump around the map, bringing armies of Longbow ambushes down on the team... just to be a griefer. You have to watch out for things like that, and be pretty quick on the /KICK button if you have too.

* The Maps and the Focus and the Team Lead

"Somebody" in the team needs to know what's going on. And it's all the better if that person is you, the team leader. Check out vidiotmaps (http://www.vidiotmaps.com/) for the maps for the SG/M maps (choose the "print out" option). That'll tell you all the key locations. The team is willing to follow you a lot better if you look like you know what you're doing and where you're going. Speaking of maps, make sure that all the players know how to use their own in-game maps. One time-waster that frequently pops up is the calls of one or two teammates saying "Where are you guys?"

If you don't want to do it yourself, then nominate someone to be the battle lead. i.e. someone that the team follows around by default. This is to cure the problem of 6 players all going in separate directions, with one flying over to the fight vandals, another on his way to a side mission, another flying to get the badge, etc.

All this relates to the team focus. You have to make careful choices about priorities and what the team needs to be doing inside the SG/M. This is probably the toughest part people have about leading these missions, because the team can succeed or fail depending on what you choose. You're constantly trying to estimate things in your head, taking your team's killing speed into account. Is it better to hit those vandals, or let them go and go to the side mission instead? Is the "resisting arrest" bonus worth it to fight these PPD troops, or should the team just go to the bank? You'll get a feel for these trade-offs the more you do SG/M missions, but you do have to make these choices.


Safeguards Specifics

* Five minutes to throw-down

To start, for both SG/M you tend to want to get everyone into the mission at the same time. If any of my teammates are suspect, then I just won't even select the mission until everyone is over at the entrance and ready to go, just to prevent the loose-cannon from entering early.

In the case of Safeguards, you have exactly 5 minutes from the time you enter the mission until "The Bank is being robbed." It's an invisible timer. But, and this is the big BUT, the bank begins to be robbed once someone gets close to the bank, regardless of how much time is remaining. This is a key point that 90% of teams don't pay attention too.

Most people believe that you have seconds to get to the bank before it's robbed, but the truth is that they have seconds only because they immediately fly to the bank (Catch-22?). Having said that, most teams do just fly to the bank. But it's important to know about the 5 minute timer and how it works. This is especially useful at lower levels when everyone doesn't have travel powers. In that, you can use that 5 minutes to calmly walk down the street, doing a bit of fighting, and safely arrive at the bank.

Also, for the kheldians out there, there is almost always a quantum gun using something waiting right at the bank entrance.

* Bank Tactic 1: Get Ready and Wait

This tactic involves getting the team inside the bank, into that first little lobby room by the front door. It's a natural bottle-neck here. So you just set-up shop and wait for the thugs to finish robbing the vault. To escape, they all MUST get past your team in that front entrance area, so you just wait for them and crush them when they come. This can backfire on higher difficulty settings, if you overestimate your team's ability to handle a lot of foes coming at once, along with the main boss from the vault.

* Bank Tactic 2: The Steamroll

Most teams operate the bank on a steamroll basis. Just head in and start killing everything. Work your way down to the vault and blow up the remaining enemies and boss before they get away. The critically important thing to remember if you use this method is to be sure to get everyone in the lobby and upstairs. You probably won't make it down to the vault before they break in, and once they break in the situation changes to "the thieves are getting away". Once this happens, anyone left upstairs becomes a thug with loot and will run towards the door. If you miss anyone, they'll have a straight shot to the door and then to the get-away van, all while you and your team are downstairs busting up the boss.

* Bank Tactic 3: Cutting off the Head

This is the riskiest of tactics, and it becomes more and more difficult as your team gets larger. However, this is a great tactic when soloing a Safeguard, if you can do it quickly. The plan is to enter the bank, fly through the lobby, but don't fight anything. Just head downstairs quickly to the vault and engage the boss and his crew. However, for this to work you MUST get there before they bust open the vault. If you do it right and take down the boss and his crew before the vault is broken, then you win. In this case, the thugs upstairs never get their loot and never start to run. Then you can casually just go back upstairs and take them out. A word of warning, I've often had times where we fight the boss and his crew and knockback one 'through' the vault door and into the vault. In this case, you can't hit them and they'll continue to bash the vault to destruction while you sit there looking confused.

* The Emergency Loot Recovery

Every once in awhile something does go wrong and that random loot stealer does get away. Never try to search the streets trying to figure out which way he ran. It takes too much time and you'll rarely find them. Just immediately get the team to fly to the get-away vehicle and wait there. You'll see them coming from pretty far away. Now it's time to play goalie. It's the 30 Fir Bolg mission on speed, since if if just one touches the truck, it's all over. Then just hope you have some glue arrow, immobilizations, holds, et cetera to slow them down while you stop them. You rarely want to be in this position, but it isn't as hard as it's made out to be if you have to proper tools to deal with it.

* Secondary Missions and Vandals

To gain access to the secondary missions, you first need to get a key from the enemy group. You can find the location(s) for these key groups on the vidiotmaps maps. They are always of the same enemy type as the bank group. i.e. If the team is level 17 doing the Skyway SG mission, then both the bank looters and the secondary mission enemies will be the Lost. This is useful for team planning, because you can get your team to focus only on the important enemies (in the case of that Skyway SG, seeking out the Lost instead of wasting time with the Trolls.)

The secondary missions give time bonuses in the range of 4:00 minutes to 8:00 minutes for completing them. But they do require time to get them done. A usual plan for SGs is to hit the bank, then all the secondary missions, then the vandals, then clean up the map if you want. But your mileage may vary here. Sometimes it's wise to break off from the plan and clean up a few vandals, if you need some quick time, and if your team has the ability to finish them quick. Is it really worth it if you take more than 90 seconds to deal with the vandal group when you only get a 90 second reward?

Whatever happens, just come up with a plan and get everyone to stick to it. If you want the team to ignore the vandals initially, then tell them up front so everyone is on the same page and no one starts screaming "OMGz, vanDals!! We gotta get 'em NOWz!!"

* The Mobile Emergency Van

Face it, with all the stuff going on, people will die in SG missions. But the heroes have it so much better than the criminals in this regard. All hospital trips are respawned at the emergency van. Make sure everyone knows this. They can be back to the battle in seconds. You never want anyone just hanging around doing nothing, unless they are sure a rezz is coming fairly quickly. In fact, depending on the location of the team, sometimes it's better to go to the van just for the full health and lack of stun that you'd get from an awaken.

(More on Safeguards from ParagonWiki: http://paragonwiki.com/Safeguard_Mission )


Mayhems

* The Destructive Stuff

On to the villains. Mayhem missions are about one thing and one thing only: Mayhem! It's about causing destruction. If you just do that, you'll rarely run into problems. When people run into problems in mayhems it's usually because they DON'T cause enough destruction. Again, this is where killing speed comes into play. The faster you are at blowing things up, the overall easier everything will go.

* The Slow and Steady Method

The usual 'best' way to do a Mayhem is to calm down, take it slow and methodical. This method usually goes Outdoor Destruction --&gt; Side Missions --&gt; Bank Heist.

For outdoor destruction, slowly walk around town and blow up everything in your path. Take out PPD blockades for "resisting arrest" bonuses. Take out Longbow ambushes as they appear. But most importantly, take out the objects.

Object destruction is the easiest way to build up time in a Mayhem mission. After destroying a certain number of items, you'll receive a time bonus. The number of items needed scales up based on the number of teammates. So while you may only need to blow up 1-5 while solo, you'll need a lot more in a group. An important thing to keep in mind is that you only gain the bonus from an object group once. And you need to keep a bit of a mental tally to remember which bonuses your team has obtained and which they have not. Or you could just not worry about any of that and blow up anything that moves, just to be sure. ;D

You can easily build up tons of time using this method, and you'll get comments from people that "A Mayhem has never been this easy," or "Wow, I didn't think we stood a chance, but we're doing great," or "This is the best Mayhem team I've ever been on." But you didn't do anything special, or use any voodoo magic... all you did was to convince the people to blow up a few cardboard boxes. ;P

* The Sly Sidemission Method

Slow and steady is the best, but it's also the slowest. And some players prefer to jump into the sidemissions first for a little more action.

The first stop is usually the police precinct. You can always tell the building because of the handy sign with the police badge. And the door is always open, you don't need a key to enter. Once inside, blow apart all the PPD on the first floor then head downstairs and clear that place and blow a few (or all) of the jail doors. You'll pick up about 3:00 minutes bonus time for your "jail breaking" efforts.

So why do teams usually do choose to do this first? 1) The heroes have it easy. When a villain dies in a safeguard, the "hospital" sends them straight to jail. This isn't very fun when only one or two villains fall by themselves. They first have to break out of their cells. Then they have to fight their way out of the precinct, which they usually can't do themselves. In many instances, the entire team will then have to run over to the precinct to help out. You can completely negate this headache by simply taking out the precinct first. Now if anyone dies, they'll have a carefree walk right out of jail back to the street, without having to worry about fighting their way out.
2) Second, there is occasionally a villain NPC waiting in prison. If you bust them out, they'll be all to happy to help you finish the rest of the safeguard. Their AI is usually cruddy and they have a habit of going off and getting killed pretty easily. But they can be buffed and healed just like your teammates, and are generally pretty good about helping you take down a lot of objects.

As for the other side-missions, just like the safeguard missions, you can find the groups that hold the "keys", take them out, then jump into the nearby mission.

The side-mission method is trickier because now you have to be a lot faster. You need to deal with the sidemissions efficiency, while leaving yourself enough time to deal with the bank. A very efficient team is probably good with about 4:00 minutes remaining to take out the bank. A slower team might want to save upwards of about 8:00 minutes for it. The worst thing about the bank is that you need to defeat the hero to win it. And the hero sometimes takes FOREVER to get down to you. So feel free to run towards the front of the bank and bring the fight straight to them. You'll kick yourself for hours after having your team fight that pesky hero with seconds left, watching the time tick away when only an extra 10 seconds or so would have secured your victory. And you know that any number of choices (not getting enough objects, getting too many objects, doing sidemission A, not doing sidemission B, etc.) might have led to a victory for your team.

To avoid the time crunch, some teams have been known to combine the slow and steady method with the sidemission method. Masterminds, who are one man mobile battle platforms, especially in the higher levels, are perfect for taking out objects. So some teams will let one or two masterminds deal with the objects, while the rest of the team deals with the sidemissions. The masterminds alone are usually enough to rack up well over 20:00 minutes of bonus time in object destruction.


* The Bank Rush Method

The trickiest, quickest, and most difficult method, is also the method used by the vast majority of Mayhem teams, and one of the main reasons many players try to avoid Mayhems in groups. This method involves rushing the bank first.

I'm not going to say that this is an incorrect method of doing Mayhems. It's not, but it is much more difficult than the average pick-up group can handle. Here's why:

1. Ambushes: Longbow ambushes are based on map location. Enter a certain sector of the map, *poof* you trigger an ambush. This is why the "Slow and steady method" is usually the easiest. They only hit one sector at a time, and only deal with one ambush at a time. When you rush the bank, you cross probably 3-4 sectors easily. Causing 3-4 ambushes to gun for your team. This creates the familiar "Longbow Death Squad" of 20-25 super troops that flood the bank lobby gunning for your head. This is one of the reasons that the evil griefing player can ruin things for your team, just by Leroy-ing around and training the entire map of ambushes to your team. Have that /kick button armed and ready.

2. Jail House Blues: You haven't cleared the precinct. So when the team does wipe, it ends up in jail where everyone has to bust themselves out. Then fight in the holding area. And if that wasn't bad enough... here comes the Longbow Death Squad, who has followed the team all the way from the bank to the jail, just so they can beat you down some more.

The usual result of this is a hilarious circus of team wipe after team wipe and mounting debt.

Having said that, it is indeed possible to rush the bank. But you do have to have a lot of confidence that your team isn't going to wipe, and you need to have an above average amount of AoE powers, attacks, holds, etc. The trick is to use that same room that the heroes would use for a bottleneck in a SG mission. In this case, you're bottlenecking from the other direction. Shortly after you enter the bank, the Longbow will start to arrive. They'll come inside in small groups, so you can get the jump on them while they are entering. And when they all do enter, they are all conveniently bunched up, in perfect form for AoE destruction. Unleash all fury on the super-squad, and once it's done, you're on easy street and free to finish up the bank without too much trouble. But try to do that without a lot of AoEs and a team that doesn't know what its doing, and you'll be in for a world of hurt.

(More on Mayhems from ParagonWiki: http://paragonwiki.com/Mayhem_Mission )[/list]

<ul type="square">[*] The Field Marshall (Leading a Siren's Call Hot Spot Team)

As promised, the Safeguard/Mayhem update is still coming soon for insight into what many players consider the most difficult tasks for a pick-up team/team leader.

But for this update, something that isn't as tough to execute. But it is quite possibly the hardest activity in the game to recruit for. It's leading a Hot Spot team in Siren's Call.

Back in beta, I was part of the group of people that really began the organized sewer team, and the organized hazard zone runs (which have started to pick back up thanks to magic salvage, especially the ole Perez Park street sweep). Along with SuperTeams and this thread that refuses to die, it's nice to see some things continue to stick around. So, I can only hope that we'll see more organized teams going after Hot Spots in Siren's. The devs would really have to put in a LOT more incentive for winning and holding the zone, but it's fun nonetheless, so I hope more people will get involved.

But why bring this up now? A few reasons.

* In a few days (6-15-07) is the start of one of the occasional Double XP weekends.
* Fighting in a Hot Spot in Siren's usually brings in a good amount of experience. And with a decent team this coming weekend, players will easily crush xp at such a rate to ignore any incoming debt.
* Longbow and Arachnos are both dual type salvage opponents. Meaning you get both tech and magic salvage from them.
* While it's similar to a hazard zone team, there is a "goal" to the entire adventure and the warzone/PvP do make it a bit more entertaining then the usual hazard zone steamroll which can quickly become boring.
* Historically, players tend to completely avoid PvP zones during Double XP weekends. It'll probably just be your team and the local NPCs.

Background: Siren's Call is a warzone area between the forces of Arachnos and the Longbow. Just about anything here can be applied to most PvP zones. But Siren's is consistently the most popular and the toughest (if your team fares well in Siren's... they'll probably do pretty well in any of the other PvP zones).

The battle for control of the zone takes the form of neighborhood fights between Longbow and Arachnos forces. These are the "Hot Spots" and they are indicated on the map via the red waypoint. The state of who is winning is indicated by the bar in the navigation window. Blue for heroes. Red for villains. When the Longbow win a neighborhood battle, for instance, you'll be informed that the "Heroes win a neighborhood battle." And the indicator bar will become a little more blue, and less red. When the bar becomes completely blue or completely red, that side will win the zone. And the navigator window will indicate which side is in "control" of Siren's Call. Sadly, controlling the zone really doesn't mean all that much. The main effect is to allow heroes or villains to use the special stores at their bases that sell temporary powers. If your side is NOT in control, then they cannot use the stores. Because there is relatively little incentive to actually win or control the zone, the majority of players you find in Siren's Call are there for straight up PvP: usually lone solo types built and specialized for PvP. Non-mission Hot Spot teams are a bit of a rarity.

Heroes and Villains are not Longbow and Arachnos, but they can still influence the events in Siren's in a number of ways. One way is to run missions. Each side has a contact at their base that will hand out patrol and door missions. Completing these will either buff your side or debuff the enemy side in some way. It's a nice way to help out in the war effort without actually getting your hands too dirty in the Hot Spots or dealing with too many of the PvPs if you move fast from mission to mission. The missions are always against either Longbow or Arachnos. (Note: Since Siren's Call missions scale to the level of your team, they are also a good choice for to team leader looking for something unique to offer a team that they haven't done hundreds of times. Many players have never even ENTERED the zone before.)

A much more direct way of helping is to simply enter the Hot Spot battles yourself and give a hand to the hapless Longbow or Arachnos forces, the subject of this guide update.


Recruiting for the Battle: You thought your recruiting skills had a workout before. Probably no task in the game is as hard to recruit for as a Hot Spot team. Why? 1) Overall people prefer door missions to outdoor hunting. 2) Most players are deathly afraid of PvP zones regardless of how much actual PvP takes place. 3) PvP zones are unfair. No matter how much defense you have, no matter how much your prepare, you and your team will die and you will die in ways that you don't see coming and that you have no way to defend against. Dealing with a PvP zone means to start from a frame of "It's not fair, get over it!" And a lot of players can never get to that spot. So don't be discouraged when 90% of your invitation tells are coming back rejections. If a player is overly afraid of debt and dying, then they probably aren't the type of player you want for this adventure anyway.

The way to get past that is to emphasize the positive, especially in your recruiting tells. Target the roleplaying/us. vs. them aspect: "We're on our way to smash the Longbow resistance in Siren's Call!", "The forces of Paragon need our help to protect the zone from the Arachnos!" Target the selfish desires, "We'll be going through the enemies so fast that the XP/salvage will be rolling in!". And if nothing else, target the overall fun and uniqueness of the adventure because it's something that very few players have experienced in a team setting.

So who do you bring? Treat a Hot Spot team as a perma-invincible/relentless mission. Meaning that you'll want as many buffs/debuffs as you can track down, as well as high damage potential for killing speed. It's the same effect as doing an invincible mission with a pentad team vs. doing the same missions with an all-defender or an all-corruptor team. Damage mitigation is important, but its on the second level of priority for a variety of reasons. All perception powers such as "Tactics" are great to have for early spotting of stalkers and other stealthed enemies. It's even better when you have multiple powers that you can stack.

One of the true bonuses of recruiting for a Hot Spot team is the level spread available too you. The minimum level for Siren's Call is level 20 for both heroes and villains. Everyone who enters the zone is automatically exemplared/boosted to level 30. Meaning anyone from 20-30 can join in and be at the proper level to earn XP. Anyone over level 30 can join in and, because they are exemplared down, will still earn salvage drops (as well as tons of influence). So your effective pool of potential teammates is primarily from 20-30 and also from 31-50 for those looking for salvage, influence, and a good time. It's a rare instance of the game where a group leader really doesn't have to worry about sidekicks/lackeys... assuming your team is pure Hot Spot fighting.... if you switch to Siren's Call missions then you will have to worry about sidekicks since the mission adjusts to the proper level range.


Engaging the Enemy: Hot Spot battles aren't tough and are very similar to hazard zone fights, with a few exceptions.

Always get your team to stick together for reasons explained at length in other parts of the guide, aura coverage/efficiency being one of the most critical. Work from top-down, if your team can knock out the bosses fast, then everything else falls down easily. Likewise, if your team is fighting 8 separate minions while ignoring the bosses, you'll run into lots of problems.

There are four Hot Spot sites. Three of them are pretty straight-forward, however, there is the one problem spot, the southeast spot. The problem with the southeast spot is that the Longbow and Arachnos forces start really far apart, and make little moves to actually engage each other. Since most players in Siren's Call are there more for PvP and talking smack than actually winning the zone; once the southeast Hot Spot is activated, it can literally sit there for hours with nothing happening in terms of zone progress. Here, you really need to get proactive with snipe-pulling and other tactics to actually get the two sides to fight each other.


The Help: Ultimate success and failure in Hot Spot fighting really comes down to how you use your help. You have tons of Longbow and Arachnos there to help you, but you have to USE THEM.

They will fight for you, but sometimes you literally have to drag enemies right on top of them for them to realize something is going on and jump in. Much like corner pulling requires teammates to be completely out of the line of sight, using the helping forces is sometimes a difficult concept to get across to some teammates. You may find yourself constantly telling teammates to "back up" so you can get the Longbow and Arachnos involved. Sure, a solid team of 8 that knows what they're doing can probably take on the Hot Spots by themselves without "waiting for back-up". But at the same time, a nice group of 2-3 can really do some damage in Hot Spots if they make intelligent use of the Longbow/Arachnos armies.

Consider them much like mastermind pets for your entire team that you don't directly control. You can heal them, which makes it a good tactic to try to get as many of them in range for an aura heal. You can buff them. Putting Force fields/sonic shields, disruption field, fortitude, etc. on the bosses and some lieutenants of your side is always a good idea. It's well worth it to keep track of the bosses on your side and to keep them buffed up and healthy. And you can cover them with aura powers such as dispersion bubble, shadow fall, steamy mist, etc. Much like mastermind pets, they are also cannon fodder. Don't fall in love with the pets so much that you neglect your actual teammates (like many masterminds are guilty of).

Properly using the Longbow and Arachnos is aggro splitting at its finest. Stand right in the middle of them or right behind them and pull the enemy right into them so they'll take the initial aggro and start to split the aggro between their army and the members of your team. With good timing, you'll make it out with your teammates doing pretty well, and many of the Longbow/Arachnos army still standing. Your side an the enemy side will get reinforcements occasionally (although they rarely seem to come right when you need them).

It honestly doesn't take much to win a Hot Spot. The Longbow/Arachnos start off roughly equal (not counting global buffs/debuffs from missions). The addition of a few heroes or villains throws that balance out of the window. That's why even 2 players can do some damage in Hot Spots if they use the armies well. That is of course... until other opposing players get involved.


The Gnats: Gnats are annoying pests that bug you, but really don't do much to stop your actual goal. That's why in this case, the gnats are opposing players in Siren's Call.

Most often they are the typical PvP type: solo, built for efficient killing, notably cowardly, opportunistic, and ruthless. Villain side, stalkers usually fit this mode. And as a hero, probably 80% of the villains you'll run into in Siren's Call are stalkers. This is a good thing and a bad thing.

The first thing to keep in mind is to set the priorities for your team. If your priorities are missions, then do those. If they are Hot Spots, keep your team focused on Hot Spots. If the focus is PvP and hunting down the most wanted, then do that.

One reason this is important is because of one of the key rules of PvP zones (and that same rule for just about any team situation): Stay close together with your teammates and friends. The solo gnats have zero interest in taking on a team. They wait for specific chances when someone is alone to strike. They will rarely attack you when you are with your team. If your hero stands unstealthed, alone, in the middle of a pack of Longbow, no one in their right mind is going to mess with you (outside of trying to teleport foe you out...), it would mean instant death for them after their first strike. They wait for you to engage in the hot spot battle, and for the Longbow/Arachnos forces to be distracted by the battle. That's when they sweep in to try to score an easy kill. The closer you are to your teammates, the more likely they will see the opponent come in to get you and be able to help. Or quickly respond with a heal, de-mezz, etc.

But even in this best of chances, the gnat never sticks around long. They want to take you out in 2-3 hits and if they can't, they'll jet out of there because it will then become dangerous to them. Now comes the key part of your control of the team priorities. If you're a Hot Spot team, ignore the gnat, recover, and get back to what you're there to do. What usually ends up happening is one or two hot-headed teammates will go chasing after the gnat... which separates them from the team and the armies... and sets them up for easy pickings for the other stealthed heroes/stalkers they didn't know about just ahead. Safety is always in numbers.

They'll always go after the high priority and easy to kill targets. Buffs/Debuffers/Healers are usually priority one. My force fielder for instance runs around with dispersion bubble on: pretty much a huge "come get me" sign. The good news? The Force fielder is both the weakest defensively and most defensive set possible: because of personal force field. When personal force field is on, it really looks exactly the same as the personal bubble given by dispersion bubble. It's pretty hard to tell the difference between the two. And a lot of force fielders are really good at toggling it on-off-on-off, stumbling around like wounded gazelles, and baiting hapless enemies into de-stealthing and attacking them. Then it's usually the force bolt to the face followed by a pouncing by an angry team. Other sets have similar tricks. Just because you're easy to kill doesn't mean you're defenseless.

They'll taunt you on broadcast in their 3rd grader way. Feel free to cut off broadcast and just talk to your team if you want. If you choose to respond, be sure to point out that for all their PvP prowess, they are pretty much useless when it comes to actually winning the zone. They can at best delay you, but rarely can they actually stop a Hot Spot team from winning the zone. Their ultimate goal is simply to frustrate you to a point that you don't want to continue (and to boost their PvP rankings).

The law of life in PvP zones is that you will die. In unfair ways. In ways that you can't defend against. And in ways that will sometimes frustrate you. Take the lumps and get back to having fun. It isn't the end of the world. The more you can convince the team to ignore the occasional debt and have some fun with it, the better it goes.

In very rare situations, you'll fly into the Hot Spot ready for action, and on the other side of the street you see ::gasp:: a group of gnats. Yes, a Hot Spot team of your enemies. Now it gets interesting. Here, you find a truly fun PvP situation where people will actually stand toe-to-toe and fight you and your team. However, it's also that issue of priorities again. Players are hard to take down. And you don't win the Hot Spot by beating players. You can be the inferior Hot Spot team and still "win" because you spend the majority of your time focusing on fighting what you are really there to be fighting. I've had entire team vs. team encounters where oddly enough, both teams understood this concept. And for the most part, ignored each other in terms of truly attacking the opposing team. Sure, some force bolts and other things to delay the other team are thrown out. But the majority of the effort went into buffing/healing your Longbow/Arachnos army while simultaneously debuffing/attacking the other army, and occasionally throwing out something to distract the other team to buy your side more time.

It's pretty comical sometimes to see two teams racing to a Hot Spot. Each one landing and immediately getting to work buffing up and prepping their armies before someone "sets it off". These rare and sometimes extended battles are the true extension of a Hot Spot team experience. And some of the most fun you can put together for a pick-up team. And on a weekend like a "Double XP weekend" it's also a gateway to some great salvage hauls and one of the most entertaining ways to go from 20-30 ever conceived.[/list]

[ QUOTE ]
i know this is kind of resurrecting a near-dead thread, but i had an experience recently with a pickup team on infinity which was amazing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not quite near dead.

There's plenty of SuperTeaming going on these days. My stuff has been of the private small-team variety for the past year or so. But I'm getting pretty close over the next few weeks to doing a projects that will be a lot more public.

But in terms of the kheldians, did you happen to get in touch with the Kheldian SuperTeam guys over on Freedom? It has slowed in recent weeks, but they should still be around.

One of the major differences since I originally wrote the guide so long ago is that I finally started playing on the villain side of the fence. Here's a few tidbits from that angle:

The Villainous

Grouping in CoV is just overall tougher than in CoH. For a variety of reasons. The ATs are much more solo-focused in CoV, and to some extent so are the players. CoV tends to have a higher population of newer players. And the missions in CoV, being a bit more advanced than CoH, tend to pull out some unexpected and painful surprises.

To begin, start with your own character. It's extremely helpful in CoV if you, the group leader, take it upon yourself to play a team-focused type character. Because you can be certain that most people aren't. Take the initiative to take recall friend. Play as a strong buffing corruptor (like sonic resonance, cold w/shields, or thermal w/shields) or something like a force field mastermind. Take the leadership powers. It will make things so much easier on you and your team if you can provide some strong positive buffs to them, and ways to taxi them around the Rogue Isles at the low levels. Just the mention of recall friend is sometimes enough to get people to join at the pre-travel power levels.

With your good team-focused character together, it's time to recruit using some of the tactics mentioned above in the guide.

You'll get a feel for different enemies and how high you can crank the difficulty scale. Much like CoH, the measure is usually in the amount of buffing. The more buffs you have from corruptors/masterminds, etc, the higher difficulty you'd tend to be able to do. Enemy has a lot to do with it as well. Snakes on relentless, basic cakewalk for most teams. Longbow on relentless with tons of ambushes flying around, perhaps a bit of trouble except for the most well buffed and coordinated teams.

Who should you recruit? You can build for defense, but keep in mind that the overall defense is lower than CoH. CoV and the solo-centric nature of the ATs, is built for offense. You want to have shields and buffs, you'd like to have heals, but your primary concern is putting enemies on the ground before they do the same to you. Think like a crazed villain in this regard.

As to specific ATs:

Strong corruptors: The cornerstone of most great teams. Sometimes you'll just run around with 8 corruptors when the mood strikes you. Good corruptors are good buffers who multiply the effectiveness of the entire team. Yet, they remember that they aren't defenders, they are there to do damage and strong corruptors are good at choosing the correct targets to fight (read: boss) and taking them down quickly. Strong corruptors, and corruptors in general, are tough to find sometimes. And you're recruiting skills will get a good workout trying to bring them aboard.

Weak corruptors: You'll run across a lot (and painfully a LOT) of weak corruptors. They tend to come in two types. The defender-centric, also known as the thermal corruptor who does nothing but fire off his incredibly weak warmth heal and describes himself as a "healer". Or the solo-blaster-centric: the type who is more solo than team and really avoids his secondary. Most notably found as cold or thermal corruptors who skip their shield powers.

Weak Masterminds: We'll start with the weak mastermind because it's what you'll run into most often. Masterminds take a lot of skill to play to an extremely high level. Probably more so than any other AT in both games. Just look at the Mastermind forums and the amount of /binds people can set-up to control their pets in just the right way. Most mastermind players don't come near the level of skill found on the mastermind forums. Weak masterminds, like many CoV players, are mentally stuck in solo mode. They happily buff their pets and not the rest of the team, for instance. Weak mastermind players, much to their namesake in the comic book mastermind sense, are a bit overly cowardly. In solo-mode, they are used to hanging back, letting the pets take all the danger. And a lot of that carries over into team play. When the corruptors and brutes are right in the thick of things (and the aura heals are up near them), there's the mastermind a half-mile behind the team, nowhere close enough to catch an aura heal or for anyone to pull aggro off of him when he gets into trouble. Asking some masterminds to "step up into the thick of battle" is, to them, asking too much. You'll explain about aura heals, about aggro splitting, and all the rest, and they'll still stay back miles behind the rear.

The last point about weak masterminds, and a great source of annoyance for most pick-up groups. Statesman said it himself when CoV was first released. With CoV's comparably weak defense, Masterminds are the tanks. For one simple reason: you can always make more pets. The pets can run in and if they do nothing else but take some of the alpha strike, then they really help the team. After dealing with a few weak masterminds, the ones who are insulted when you ask them to sacrifice their pets for the good of the team, you'll really start to get irked by watching your quality teammates hit the ground again and again. While the pets are back in the rear with barely a scratch on them. It's a lot easier to make more disposable pets than it is to invite more teammates.

Strong Masterminds: Are the opposite. They buff their teammates appropriately. They use pets to take alpha strikes and sacrifice pets when necessary for the good of the team. They trust the team and position themselves in the best location. In essence, they are good teammates. Not people who think of teammates as extra pets that they don't happen to control.

Dominators: Doms have a pretty bad rep in CoV for some reason that I can't explain. But I've always found them to be useful and sincere additions to any team. Usually solid contributors, the only bad thing to speak of is that you can sometimes run into dominators with the ichy AoE trigger finger, all to eager to rush in and draw all possible aggro right down upon them.

Brutes: The same can be said of brutes. While some brutes get "Fury-rage" and eagerly run from spawn to spawn in a fury-building death rage, most brutes are good teammates ready to jump in and help. You'll find yourself having to explain positioning to some brutes. When the brute ends up on his own "scrapper-lock" island, fighting alone when the rest of the team is a few yards back. It doesn't do the brute any good when he isn't anywhere near the aura heals. Sometimes you'll have to have a quick team meeting to decide how you want to operate in situations like that. Usually the two choices boil down to EVERYONE going into the thick of battle, right behind the brute. Or alternatively, everyone stay back in a bunch, and the brute waits to pick off anything that comes close. With the offensive nature of CoV, option 1 is usually the most productive.

Stalkers: The teammate black-sheep of CoV. Stalkers are shunned a bit by many team leaders. While many are extremely skilled and team-oriented, the vast majority of stalkers are extremely solo focused and tend not to make the best teammates. (The AT also attracts a wider proportion or younger and newer players).

Really skilled stalkers, like really skilled masterminds, are notably rare, unfortunately.

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Now all of this in this intro is geared towards the average pick-up-group setting in CoV. This isn't to say never invite stalkers. If you're running a SuperTeam that consists of 5 ninja stalkers and 3 ninja/trick arrow masterminds, then you'll probably do amazingly well. But in a standard PuG, where no one knows each other beforehand, you tend to be better off going in another direction.

And it isn't to say that certain combinations won't work. ANYTHING will work. You can put together an 8 stalker team and do well, much like an 8 blaster team in CoH. But it requires a great deal of leadership, planning, and direction from you. As well as skillful foresight in the use of the difficulty slider and mission selection. Such teams just aren't going to work "right out of the box."

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That's it for this update. I'll touch on some other CoV stuff in another issue. But the next update will probably focus on one area that many players have had tremendous problems with in a pick-up-group setting in the year since the original guide was written: Safeguards and Mayhem missions....

From all of us in the business of SuperTeams, I want to offer a hearty congrads to all of you and what you have accomplished.

You mentioned it earlier in the thread, but yes, to most of us the "big deal" here is the fact that you all coordinated and scheduled this with the 8 of you over such an extended period of time. That, from 0-50, is something I have personally never done and rarely seen accomplished.

Playing effectively, crushing invincible missions. Everyone does that, and the team make-up is nearly irrelevant when you have a group of skilled players. But doing it with one consistent group is the stuff of legend.

You may want to post a quick link to this thread in one of the SuperTeam threads in my signature, so that everyone who hasn't noticed this thread will have a view of how SuperTeaming is truly done.

Best of luck on the CoV run, and please keep us updated with the progress.

The official "it's been three months, time for the bump for this quarter" bump.

Back for a little addition:<ul type="square">[*]More on Finding Exactly What You Want - A few people have asked about how you go about finding that perfect teammate addition that you're looking for.

My method (if I don't spy them standing around Atlas or other popular places like trams) is to just ask them with tells. But this is sometimes a tricky issue, especially with defenders/controllers.

You may be looking for quality defenders such as sonics, force fields, stormers, and the like... but it's important to remember, if you've never played these types, that they go through their entire lives with people 'searching only for healers' or finding out they don't heal and /booting them from the team. So when you come along asking "Hey, what type of defender are you?" *BOOM* there goes the door slammed in your face as they knee-jerk assume that you're looking for a heavy healer.

Another method I use is to ask for something off-the-wall directly. In the case of defenders/controllers, I like to use trick arrow/sonics because there simply aren't many of them around.

Team Leader: Hey, our team is looking for a trick arrow defender for a mission. Interested?
Defender: Sorry, I'm actually a kinetic defender.
Team Leader: No worries, you'll be a big help for us too...

90% of the time, they'll just tell you what they actually are when they reply. Or in my case, they'll tell me who they are not (read: low level empathy).

Sometimes you'll get something like this:

Team Leader: Hi, we're looking for a radiation defender for a mission or two. Interested?
Defender: Sure. (Ok, I still don't know anything about him)
Team Leader: Great, hey do you happen to have accelerate metabolism by any chance? We can definately use that. (Time for the check...)
Defender: Nope, sorry, don't have that one yet. (Still no answer...)
Team Leader: No worries, I'm sure you have rad. infection, that'll be a big help too us. (Still haven't sent an invite over)
Defender: Umm... I think those are in the rad primary. I'm dark/rad.

It's a lot like the conscious-leech and unconscious leech situation again. Some people honestly don't know and assume that you when ask for "rad" that you'll take rad-anything including secondary. Sometimes you have to ask specifically for the primary to get around that. Other people "do" know what you want, but they figure to themselves "Hey, he may be looking for trick arrow, so I'll say 'yes' even though I'm really an empathy/arrow... what's he going to do... boot me?"

It's a lot of running around, yes. But you rarely want to be stuck with someone that isn't what you're looking for that day. When you want a endurance buffer and later find out that they are a pure-healer. Or when you want a scrapper-like tanker and you get a mass aggro holding one instead. Or for some reason you want a precision single-target killer instead of the mass AoEer.

It's many many times easier and less painful for all parties to simply not invite someone in the first place than it is to have to remove them after they join. [/list]

[ QUOTE ]
Wow... this is a good read... a really good read... it's so odd how you described someone (whistles innocently) in quite a few of the scenarios

I fall into the Good Time category hehe

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks for that, deadboy. Good times, good times.

::and a quick first page snap for the thread, since the "How you know you're in a pick-up group" thread was stolen from us, this is all I have LOL ::

I'm finally back to this thread. Thanks for all the positive comments, guys. I certaintly appreciate it.

From Liquid827

[ QUOTE ]
The "slightly overconfident" leader is a good point. Often my team will spot the next mob and someone will say something "this is gonna suck" or "we need a healer for this". Unless they are ABSOLUTLY right, I'll usually throw out something like, "sweet, this is a gonna be a good fight." I find that if I let people know that I'm looking for that adrenaline rush, or that challenge, then they start to have more confidence AND begin to find fun in the challenges you face.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's crucial. If a team doesn't believe it can do something, they're probably right and they'll likely fall on their faces. One thing I continually try to get to the bottom of is this: What are people so afraid of?

Of course, I'm sure there is a level of bias for me since I've been playing for a little while and I generally don't care nearly as much about xp/debt as a newer player, for instance. But, seriously, what's the worst that can happen? You hit the dirt, take a two minute run from the hospital, and blow off that debt within the next 5 minutes.

I've had so many teammates that leave immediately after their first death or the first (and only) team wipe. It really boggles my mind about what is so utterly frightening about a bit of debt?

[ QUOTE ]
One thing I did not see you mention (though I may have just missed it) that I try to do when recruiting is to know each teammates power sets. Unless I'm looking for something specific, I don't care what they are before I've sent the invitation to join. But as soon as they join and are in my zone I right-click/info.

[/ QUOTE ]

Another key point. There was a large thread recently about if it should or should not be done (checking info), but it really isn't a question for a team leader. Info is checked all the time, every time. The team leader needs to know, because he/she knows that most of the teammates probably don't know (see the number of times teammates ask "anyone have recall?"). Someone has to be the person who understands the entire capabilities and potential of the team, and that person usually is the team leader.

From JordanVailo:

[ QUOTE ]
Team leader: Alright, Ta/A Defender, you should pull and drop an oil slick a little in front, while ice Controller drops an ice slick behind us for an escape route, then Fire tanker should use a Burn patch on the Oil Slick. Then the Device Blaster should run in and put caltrops on the Oil Slick for increased longitivity.

Me: But wouldnt it be more effective to put down the Ice Slick and the Oil Slick at the same time and the same place, while Fire tanker goes in and drops a burn? That way, we keep the guys together, do great constant damage, and have the Device Blaster throw down Caltrops in front of the squishes just in case?

[/ QUOTE ]

Nice way to put them in line. That first strategy from the team leader is priceless. Why don't they just say, "Ok, we're about to start the mission, everyone go grab 4 awakens so we have enough."

It may be new-agey mumbo-jumbo, but it's true: Effective teams plan and concern themselves with what they are actually there to do (aka destroying the enemy). Ineffective teams plan and concern themselves with avoiding death, debt, and the hospital.

<ul type="square">[*]The Slightly Overconfident - A good team leader is slightly overconfident. You have to believe that your team can do the task you assembled them to do. There have been plenty of times where I was the only member of the team that believed something could be done, while the rest of the team howled their objections. "Don't worry, guys, I trust your skill. All we have to do is X, Y, and Z, and we'll be fine "

When the team is facing a sea of enemies and your teammates are making statements of "Wow, look at the number of enemies!," You're making the comment of "Yeah, no doubt. They're going to need more guys. "

I find myself teasing a lot of my teammates on the issue of inspirations. I tend to pass a lot of inspirations around and I quickly find out who is using inspirations and who is filled up with no empty spots. Upon investigation, I sometimes find that they don't have empty slots because they are holding on to a bunch of awakens. "Put those awakens in the trash where they belong ", I tease at them.

Part of this is the slight overconfidence. "Of course you won't need awakens, it's not like anyone is going to die. " Another part is just sound strategy for getting things done. People holding on to awakens won't get useful inspirations that can be used too... you guessed it... keeping the team alive in the first place.

Likewise, most teams can survive many chaotic combat situations, if they trust each other, stick together, and work with each other. If they are expecting the worst, running away at the first bad sign, and doubting everyone around them... then they probably won't survive that situation.

You want to get your team to believe that something can be done. Remember; however, that a big source of your slight overconfidence comes from your own experience. You probably know it can be done, because you have done it before, easily, with other teams.

But it's a balance, you always want to know the limits of your character and of the team you assembled. Some teams are better than other teams for doing specific tasks. Some players are simply more skilled than others. You want to be cocky, but not arrogant. You want to be slightly overconfident without falling into actual overconfidence and hubris. You want to confidently take your team through impossible odds and lead them to the other side victorious. You don't want to confidently take your team through impossible odds and lead them to team wipe after team wipe.


[*]The Indirect Commander - Never confuse control with controlling. I very rarely, if ever, directly tell teammembers what to do. The almost universal response to that is for them to take a ego shot and have the knee-jerk reaction of doing the exact opposite of what you want. Case in point was the literal 15 minute argument I once had with a dark defender inside an 8-hero mission because she refused to switch on her shadow fall power. She never did throughout the rest of our time together. And I was partially to blame because of the way I went about getting her to do it.

Never, ever, tell, order, command, or demand that your teammates do anything. Offer advice, suggest, think out loud, but never directly tell them to do things. Ideally, you want to try to convince people to go your way, while having them think it was their brilliant idea in the first place.

I do a lot of what I call indirect leading: using indirect statements to communicate key under the surface things. Some examples.

After recruiting a new teammate to our team that already had two force fielders: "Bob (a sonic defender) decided to join us, guys. I had to invite him. Just once I wanted to see the ridiculously unfair advantage of double bubble + sonic shields." With this I'm saying a) to Bob, that he has a clear and expected role in the team he just joined, b) to the force fielders, don't slack off just because Bob showed up, and c) to all three of them, this "ridiculously unfair advantage" only comes with the synergy of the three of you, if any one of you slacks off.. it won't happen.

The power synergy complement: "Wow, glue arrow, tar patch, and snow storm / rain of fire and holds / steamy mist + shadow fall + maneuvers... work together so well, this is great!" Because of your skill with working with teams, you know that because of either stacking or synergy, certain powers really work well together. And your teammates might not be privy to this information. You have to find some kind of off-hand way to let your teammates know which powers their teammates have, and how they can work together.

A great time to use the power synergy complement is when your teammates are NOT using synergy to the best advantage. I might make the comment of "Wow, great teamwork back their with that holding before the fire rain," during a mission. When I know full well it probably wasn't great teamwork, it was just a fluke. But now my team thinks that I think they are actually strategic combat masters, and now they have to live up to the hype. You'll start seeing the blaster in later battles literally looking over at the controller, waiting for the hold/immobilize to come up. Then *Boom* there is the rain of fire right on top of the held foes. Perfect combo. "Man, you guys are great, how do you have that timing down so well. Have you two grouped together before?"

To Pete: "Great placement on that acc. metabolism, Pete. You got all eight of us with that one." a) About me, I'm unnaturally observant. I notice everything, including a quick count to see that their are eight little acc. meta icons by all the names on the teammate menu. b) Pete now has the hype, he's gotta produce in the future. c) Everyone else now has become conscious of the fact that Pete is working hard to position himself for the buff, so they have to do their part to help Pete out.

Others:

"Great, job combining fire on that boss, guys. You really took him out fast." (Whether it really happened or not)

"Wow, thanks a lot, that rain of fire gave just enough distraction and chaos for me to finish them off before they got me." (He probably didn't even realize you were in trouble when he launched the attack. But now he's learned about the value of distraction/chaos as a defensive tactic.)

"Nice, howling twilight saves the day again, I love that power!" (A quick reminder that our defender has howling twilight, what it does and how it works)

"I love the hold/stun resistance of dispersion bubble, I'm not getting toggle-dropped much at all when I'm inside it." (I may be actually getting mezzed just as much as before. But a subtle reminder to the team that dispersion bubble does have a small mezz protection... and a reminder to the team to stick near the force fielder and vice versa [aka the guy with dispersion bubble about a mile behind the team])

There are tons of ways to be an indirect commander. Just find unique ways to tell your team things without literally telling them.

[*]The Thankful / The Apprentice -I'm thankful for teaming. I've been doing it since I started the game. Soloing is mind-numbingly boring to me, and I have a lot of respect for everyone that solos. I simply cannot do it. Since I only group, if players didn't join my teams then I would have no way to enjoy the game. As such, I'm extremely thankful for all my teammates, and I let them know it. In a world where the same level 10 hellion is going to do the same attacks a year from now, every team is unique and entertaining in its own way, even when things are going bad. Sometimes even more so when things are going bad.

Likewise, I'm always learning things from teams. There are always new strategies to uncover. New power combinations that you've never thought of. And new unique ways to do things that were formerly boring and dull. It's not always about how much you can get them to work together. Most of the time it's about what your team can teach you. And can teach you more than you think.

[*]The Buck Stops with You (The Responsible) - The leader is responsible for everything in the team. The ups and downs, good and the bad. Not the empath who missed the heal. Not the blaster who ran away when shooting the boss could have saved the team. Not the tank who didn't jump on the void seeker or the boss. You are responsible.

Step up and be responsible for your time in Paragon. Every few months some new AT or power combination becomes the "whine" magnet on the forums. Whether it was storm defenders 8 months ago, or force fielders at the beginning of 2006, or claw scrappers, or tankers, or trick arrow, or whatever. The common complaint is always the same: "I'm not as effective as I want to be and no one wants me on their teams." To which we reply, why are you leaving up to everyone else to define your team experience for you? Not a single day in my near two years of playing time have my storm, force field, or trick arrow defenders ever had a problem getting on a team. Why? They don't wait around for someone to invite them. They slap open the teamseek, and get to work on their own team. One of the unspoken rules of teaming is this: The group leader is never gimp. At least if they are, they'll never hear it from anyone on the team. I've never once had the situation of someone joining my team, looking at the AT, and saying "Eww... a trick arrow" and leaving immediately. You will never see that in your life. Team leaders, like kheldians, are given a lot more benefit of the doubt that "maybe they know what they're doing" and new teammates will give you the chance to prove yourself. Completely for kicks, one of my invulnerability tankers does not have a single toggle defense power, straight passives. And it works because I make sure to surround myself with defenders and other heroes to fill the gaps and I use a number of tactics to take advantage of the build. Your teammates will begin to see that some of the qualities you bring as a player, can go beyond the limitations they perceive for your build. Some of my friends tease me that the tanker is simply leeching off of the group. To which I respond, "There wouldn't be a group if it wasn't for the tanker."

The more I thought about why people really don't like to lead teams, it really boiled down to this point right here. Most people don't want to be responsible. Then, if things go wrong, they can always fall back on the usual convenient excuses: "It isn't because of me," "I could see this coming," or "It's a pick-up team, what do you expect." Pick-up teams only go bad when all the players involved refuse to take responsibility and they allow them to go bad.

But when you are the group leader, when that star suddenly falls on you, then there's no where to hide. Now when things go bad, you only have yourself to blame.

If you are on someone's team and you don't like the way it is going, then leave. No one is twisting your arm to make you stay. If you're leading a team and despite your best efforts, you don't like how things are turning out, then leave and form another team. If your team falls flat on their faces, then humbly except the blame for the defeat. Even if it wasn't directly your fault (see: spaz-blaster aggro gainer), I can guarantee you that you had dozens upon dozens of opportunities to indirectly change that outcome. Anything from the team make-up, to difficulty setting, to strategy/tactics, to simply choosing a different mission altogether.

The more you choose to be responsible for your team, the less you will blame teammates for bad situations. You'll stop telling yourself "Wow, that was bad." and start asking yourself, "Ok, what could I have done to make the situation better?" It's still a learning experience for me to read the pick-up group thread, because (after I stop laughing) I stop to ask myself how I would have handled a situation, or what could I have done differently. The more you choose to take responsibility, the more likely you are to make use of all those tools in your team leader bag in order to give your team a more positive experience.[/list]

Welcome aboard, here's a guide about grouping and team leading (mostly geared to pick-up groups). If you don't have much experience with the game or leading teams; then I highly suggest you first check out "What I'm learning on how to lead a group" and "Philotic Knight's Combat Handbook". (Also, "Little Things I Wish I'd Known", "Guide to Team Roles" and "Guide to Team Invites and Team Search / Seek") Those will give you a large amount of great info, tactics, and strategy for leading teams. And they do it much more compactly and to the point than I present here.

This guide is about a lot of the little details of team leading that are sometimes rarely mentioned and discussed (and there are a LOT of them). This is not a manual, it's a reference. I don't expect anyone to read all of this in one sitting... I sure didn't write it in one sitting. In fact, it's written in a way for each part to be read individually.
It's been a good while of finishing up a group session in game, having an idea and jotting something down about it, over a long period of time. Check out a section now, then come back later and read another. Each is semi-independent, even though you might begin to see how some of them directly and indirectly influence the others. Think of this as 13 mini guides about pick-up group leading... that all happen to be in the same post.

You might even say that some of them even contradict some of the others. And you'd probably be right. I don't think about ALL of these every time I'm running a team. But pick-up teams have a way of bringing out these different qualities at different times.
Some of these ideas will make you stand up and cheer, others may strike you as overly manipulative and something you would never do. But ALL are qualities that most group leaders have used in one time or another.

A little background on me: While I beta tested for CoV, I'm mostly a City of Heroes player and the guide is really leaned in that direction. But, of course, you can take everything here and easily make it work for the villain side too. I don't post a great deal, but I've written a few guides from time to time, mostly on the issue of grouping.

<ul type="square">[*]The Good Time - The team leader is the "good time" center of the team. Everything is fun, everything is exciting, every random errand is an adventure. Most of my characters are literally bursting with fun. I have random cheesy jokes for every situation. I'm excited about literally everything. Things I do. Things my teammates do. Other random situations, etc. I probably overuse smilies. Everything is kept light, funny, and filled with energy.

One tactic I sometimes use is to complain about debt. Not that I have too much debt, but too little. I go on and on about how the devs keep seeming to nerf debt and the debt cap. All while adding new debt badges. I mean really, how do they expect people to get the bigger badges with new characters when they keep nerfing debt. I build upon how I need to be more vigilant about dying and setting a debt schedule, etc.

Of course, your teammembers will look at you cross-eyed. But it serves two purposes. One, it shows them your focus is on a good time overall, and helps shift the focus of the team. You're showing your teammates that death really doesn't matter to you that much at all, and by extension, neither does debt and experience. You're promoting the fact that your reason for being here is to hang out with your teammates, have fun, and blow up some enemies. The second reason, especially if done early, is to completely undercut any experience/debt related whining. Once your teammates realize that you don't care about debt, and in some crazy situations might actually be looking for debt, you'll rarely hear any debt related complaining. If that doesn't work, you can sit them down, pull out your old man cane, and tell them stories about pre-I2 City of Heroes and what "real" debt was.

(Now, of course, your team probably is blowing through invincible missions and racking up tons of experience. But it's a good idea to shift the focus away from that aspect. The more you can distract your teammates from that, the better.)

The grand point of this is that, even if you are not, your team has to believe that you are having a blast. Whether you're going on a boring contact run, blowing through a seemingly impossible mission, or vowing vengeance when recovering from a team wipe... always project that you're having the best time possible. Fun is infectious. If you're having a good time, so will the rest of your team.

One team can wipe in a mission and half the heroes quit and storm off in frustration. Another team can wipe in the exact same mission, and everyone is laughing about how bad things went while flying back from the hospital, vowing their vengeance and excited to get back in there. The only difference between those two is the amount of fun projected by the teams.
[*]The Abundant - Working from a mental frame of abundance is key for a team leader. And it comes from knowing that you are a good recruiter. The key belief here is that "There are always more heroes out there to join your team." This is important because it completely eliminates any fear of anyone leaving your team. If your recovery aura empath leaves the team suddenly, it's ok, because you know that you can go out with minimal effort and find another, or a radiation defender, or a kinetic to do the same role... even if you have to sidekick someone up. This also helps when you have to /kick someone from the team. One of the most powerful tools available to all team leaders is the ability to point blank tell a teammate that if they don't like some aspect of the team, they are free to leave.

A lot of team leaders are hesitant to kick some heroes because they think that they need that hero to stay afloat. And a lot of heroes know it. In your time you will run across empaths, force fielders, tankers, and others who smugly do as little as possible in the team because they think that the team needs their "awesome" skills so much that you wouldn't dare team without them. Shake up their world a bit by kindly showing them the door, then using your skill to do the mission without them or quickly recruit a better hero to replace them. If someone has to leave your team, even a critical team member, give them a gracious and heartfelt farewell... while sending your recruiting tells for their replacement.

[*]The Recruiter - You're not much of a team leader if you can't get people onto your teams. So before you even start, make sure you stack the deck in your favor. You'll find more people on in peak play hours and you'll find more peak hour people in the most popular servers.

In my teams, 90% of the people who join me were not looking for a team when they joined. So how do you know if they want to join? Simple. You ask them. The tell is your primary tool for finding group members. Broadcast works as well on occasion, but tells are a much better tool for finding exactly what you're looking for. Also for rarer task forces, consider scheduling a time in advance and posting about it here on the forums in that server's board.

Your first stop is the team seek window. First I filter the level range for the one for which I'm looking. Then I filter the AT choices. The origin filter is fairly useless. And as for the zone filter, I only use that on specific occasions. One being when the search brings back too many results. Then I'll use the zone filter to shrink the list. I try to avoid this as much as possible since the zone filter automatically filters out any heroes currently inside missions, prime targets for your recruiting efforts.

Greyed names on the results list are currently inside groups, while the blue names are currently solo. It would be a tremendous help if the devs would simply implement an option to show only solo players, or an option that shows 'all' the group seekers (the all, task force, mission, arena, etc) ... but that's for a future issue, let's hope.

Your standard tell can be something short and to the point like "Hey, want to group with our team for a mission?" If you can, throw their name in the tell, it helps. Use proper punctuation and good grammar. Yes, if you can't type fast, you're going to learn. Don't kid yourself. From a recruiting standpoint there is a chasm difference separating "Hi, we're looking for a kinetic for a mission. Interested?" and "R U kin? want grp?" Stuff like this does matter. Without knowing anything about you, people will generate sweeping opinions about you and the way you play based on your recruiting tell, and your character's name/costume. And I do the same with potential recruits. Personally (I play CoH by the way), I'm much more likely to send a recruiting tell to a hero named 'Soul Siren' with a search message saying 'sonic blaster looking for a good team' than I am for a hero named 'nightmare murderkiller' with a search message that says 'pick mE NOW i need XP to lvl today'.

If you have specific plan for the team (and you should) mention it in the tell. If you're doing missions say so. Doing a hazard/trial zone hunting run, let them know how fun it will be. Doing a task force/trial, let them know about it and that you're looking for dedicated heroes up for the task.

If you know exactly the type of team you want to want, then you can start using qualifying language in your tells. Anyone that has read the SuperTeam guide knows that I enjoy running some pretty strange teams. My storm, force field, and sonic defenders all host blaster/defender teams and they're usually looking for specific types of defenders. My warshade does straight scrapper/blaster teams. My scrapper is known for hosting all-tank/scrapper teams. And he tends to prefer grouping with the more "pure" looking melee fighters like invulnerability, super strength, battle axe, katana, martial arts, broadsword, claws, etc.

If you know exactly the type of team experience you're looking for, then don't be afraid to ask for exactly that. Since you pay $15/month, and you own the star, and are taking the time and effort to put together a quality team, then you have earned the right. I've had pick-up groups with nothing but dark defenders and dark scrappers, straight fire tank teams, all-archery teams, and a tons of other strange and fun combinations all because I knew exactly what I was looking for when I recruited my teammates, and I wasn't afraid to go out and ask for it directly.

Once you start firing off your tells down the team seek to the soloers, you'll start getting an array of responses. And don't be disappointed if you don't. It's a numbers game, the more you contact, the quicker you'll get your team together. Some will respond positively immediately. Some will reject and say no, but most are thrilled you sent them a (n intelligent looking) tell. If they can't make it, quickly send them a reply to the extent of "No problem. We'll catch you next time." Always be courteous. Just because someone can't group today doesn't mean they won't be a valued teammate next week.

Sometimes you'll get a reply asking you about your team. Don't let these get under your skin. Just because you know your team is awesome, doesn't mean that everyone else on the server knows as well. In fact, as the pick-up group story thread can attest, good potential teammates should ask a few qualifying questions before committing to some strange group. Pick-up groups can range from fantastic to horrific, and they want to have an idea of what they are jumping into. A couple questions is fine, but too many questions might be a red flag that you're recruiting a someone primed to wrestle you for control (the co-captain if you will). A good counter is to always answer questions truthfully and kindly (no matter how annoying), but to immediately counter with a question of your own: "We're all from level 23-25. What kind of tanker are you again?" The reason for this is slightly subtle and it relates to a topic below. But the gist of it is that you are recruiting them, not the other way around.

Tips for the various recruiting level sectors:

1-20: The early game brings its own unique sets of challenges. First and foremost: You never really know if you're getting someone playing on an alt, or someone brand new to the game. It's much easier to assume in the later sectors that your teammates have a general idea of what's going on. You'll spend a lot of time in this sector as an instructor. Sending lots of tells explaining SHIFT-healing, explaining assisting and combined fire, and other crucial pieces of knowledge. When recruiting you'll find that many heroes will not return your tells. But keep in mind that, as a new player, sending and receiving tells isn't common knowledge. Depending on your task and mood of the day, you may not have the time and desire to instruct lessons on fighting crime. So perhaps when you don't receive a reply, you save yourself from having to invite someone who, overall, may not know a great deal about the game.

Because of the Hollows and other reasons, you'll find that your recruiting skills will get an early and draining workout in this sector. Pick up groups are very common in this range, and you'll find that many teams will be going for a sometimes small pool of potential teammates. Sometimes you will find yourself keeping the teamseek open, quickly refreshing every few minutes in the hopes that some potential solo player will appear and that you have the chance to send them a tell before another team does. It's good work that will more than get your recruiting skills ready for the post-20 game.

As for all levels, strive for unique situations and adventures. If at all possible, keep your team out of the Hollows. This isn't because the zone or its missions are fundamentally more difficult than others, it's because of the familiarity. Most experienced heroes have done Frostfire missions dozens upon dozens of times. They can sleep their way through those same boring three floors. Boredom inevitably leads to a bad teaming situation, in one form or another. The Hellion/Skulls, Tsoo, and non-Hollows Outcast missions are some of the most enjoyable in this sector for me, but very few people can pry themselves out of the Hollows long enough to enjoy them. From the sewer network, to Perez, to Boomtown, and Faultline, strive to find unique experiences to offer to a team.

21-40: In my opinion, the most enjoyable time for most groups. There are a great amount of soloers in this range, and you won't have the problem that plagues you for the first half of the 1-20 range, you can always go to the lower range of heroes for sidekicks to fill any gaps. Most players begin to have a solid grasp of both their characters and how to play the game. And, overall, things tend to become easier.

There is a wide variety of content available in this range. From Dark Astoria, Terra Volta, Crey's Folly, and Eden, to Striga Isle, Croatoa, TFs/respecs, and regular contact story arcs (Who doesn't love Freakolypmics?) it's very easy to put together unique packages for teams that players haven't done over and over such as in the lower levels.

41-50: From out of the middle mecca, you can run into a second sometimes difficult grouping range. From out of the ashes, grouping comes back into vogue in this range, mostly from the multitude of arch villain missions available. You'll find yourself once again in serious competition for teammates, and frequently returning to the 30ish and even 20ish heroes for useful sidekicks.

As it was in the early range, the new name of the game is "unique experiences." Get off of Peregrine Island. Get away from the Portal Corp. People have done Infernal so many times they know the smell of his breath. Explore the contacts with the non-PI missions. Get to the Shadow Shard (take recall friend/group fly if you need something to get people to join you out there). Run unique respec trials after level 44. Nowhere is this issue of unique experiences more clear than when you reach 47-48 and you begin to look for level 50 heroes for your team. How do you get a person who is NOT motivated by experience to join your team? If you are level 50, what would compel YOU to join a team? These are good questions to answer for yourself.

A final challenge of this range is the massive and overbearing amount of outdoor missions you run into in this range. Blame the portal corp, blame the lack of content, whatever. The fact remains that you run into a lot of outdoor missions in this range. My personal opinion here, but outdoor missions are team boredom traps. Just like you don't expect a team to do a hazard zone hunt for hours without rest, you can't expect a team to spend hours tracking down every single foe in an outdoor map without getting bored. Bored players are more prone to making mistakes, more prone to give less than full effort ("he just went silent AFK again") , and more prone to get out of there on their own to find something more fun. Door missions have structure. A solid beginning and an end that you can see coming. When confronted with outdoor missions, I try to get the team to take out the AV, complete the tasks/goal, or whatever else is required. Then we head on out of there and on to something more entertaining. Staying forever to hunt down every single foe may prove great for short term xp, but you may lose your team to fatigue/boredom in the long run.
[*]The Sacrifice - You have to cultivate a sense of sacrifice within the team. And it starts with you. Almost nothing gains you more respect in a newly formed team than standing shoulder to shoulder with your teammates when things are going downhill. You could run, but you stay there, buying them time. Doing everything you can so that you can possibly save one more life. Holding the team leader star isn't a job for someone who is afraid of a little debt. And you want to do what you can to cultivate this sense of sacrifice throughout the entire team. Sometimes I work little casual bits about it while I'm talking to the team. "Trust whichever hero is next to you and we'll make it out fine", "We all do what we can to protect our teammates" , "I'll fall again and again if I can just keep one of you alive." Yes, cheesy stuff like that has often came out of the mouths of my characters.

What you're trying to do is to shift the collective mindset away from just killing enemies. You want the tanks thinking, "if I don't keep the attention of this boss, people are going to die." The scrapper and blaster, "if I don't quickly locate and take out the bosses fast then my teammates are going to get hurt." The controller, "if I don't lock down those enemies and debuff them, they will be in trouble." The defender, "if I don't buff my teammates and assist with the blasting/debuffing, things will get ugly."

The core issue here is trust, which fundamentally doesn't exist in a newly formed pick-up team. The quicker you can convince everyone on the team to literally put their lives in the hands of their teammates, the better things will go. The fact is, trust is usually the single ingredient that can separate an amazing victory from a team wipe. Most teams can survive many bad situations if they trust each other and work through it. Give some thought to this the next time you watch the behaviors of your teammembers. There is a key difference between the red life blaster that backs away and flees and the one that turns to the boss and puts their all into taking him down (because he knows that the empath that is standing next to him has his back). Or the scrapper/tanker that manages to fight every single minion available before they finally get around to the bosses versus the one that jumps directly onto the boss/void at the beginning of the engagement. Just like the difference between the empath that stays to buff, heal, and attack versus the one high tails it to the elevator in a pre-emptive move to port the soon-to-be corpses.

A couple more examples of the concept of collective team trust. Take the concept of aggro-splitting. Aggro-splitting means to split all the aggro among ALL the members of the team. Done correctly, the team defeats the mob of enemies before the opponents can produce enough damage to defeat any one teammate. I don't like the tactic of pulling very much, just a personal preference. On one hand, pulling is a symptom of an overly cautious team and serves to waste a bunch of team time. They could use other strategies but there isn't enough team trust for everyone to believe that anything other than pulling can work. Another argument, I dislike pulling because it inevitably concentrates ALL the aggro on a single teammate. That's usually something I never want, even on a tank. You'll often find that your puller, usually a tank, performs their pulling move while running around the corner to rejoin the team. ALL the enemies attack the tank and pull them down to about half health. Heals fly off to help the tank and the true battle starts when the rest of the team attacks. This is the kind of situation that leads many to believe the fallacy that every team needs a tank and/or a healer. Now try the exact same battle with aggro-splitting. The tank runs in first to taunt, and literally right behind the tank is the rest of the team. Some of the initial shots hit the tank, the rest are split between the other seven teammates. When the battle is over, no one teammate is under 80% health (this is talking in general terms here, folks. I can already here the people yelling: "But, but, what about Nemesis?" There are a good amount of non-Nemesis enemies in the game too. ).

Two of my teams that use aggro-splitting heavily are my all-melee tanker/scrapper teams and my warshade's scrapper/blaster teams. In the all-melee teams, I'm usually surprised how much "de-tank" programming I have to do to the tanks. I'll usually find tanks who seem to want to take and hold ALL the aggro; this is in a situation with no healing, and where the other teammates are scrappers (pretty tough in their own right) and 2-3 other tankers. They do this because many tanks simply do not trust their teammates to take a few shots. They try to hold all the aggro, and are the first to fall flat on their faces. I tend to pull them aside and tell them that I expect only two things out of a modern tank: 1) Locate the bosses and other serious threats quickly, and 2) Take the aggro from those bosses while the team takes them out. Sadly, many tanks do not have the skill to do step 1. Once they change their tactics, the tanks just take the aggro from the important enemies and let the remaining aggro split among the rest of the members of the team. It works this way in most teams too, tanks live longer when they focus on the critical enemies and trust that the rest of the team are big boys and girls who can take the slight aggro from a bunch of minions.

It's similar in my warshade's scrapper/blaster teams. There, again with no healing, aggro splitting is a way of life (or death). When my warshade goes to attack first, if everyone is standing behind me just watching, then my warshade takes ALL the aggro and dies pretty fast. Likewise, if my warshade is putting lots of attacks into a boss, and the other 7 heroes are fighting 7 other separate enemies, then the boss aggro will be directed completely at me and, again, I die. When everyone rushes in at roughly the same time and attacks generally the same foes, then the enemy doesn't know who to attack. The aggro is split among the entire team equally, and the enemies are dead long before they can produce enough damage to take down any one hero. But a strategy like this takes a great deal of trust throughout the entire team or it simply will not work. Imagine for a second that you had a team of 8 blasters. Even better, roll up a new blaster and recruit 7 others for a sewer run to test this out. You'll quickly find that the core issue is not convincing the blasters to rush in and unleash their attacks. The true trick is convincing them that the other 7 blasters are going to do the exact same thing. The trick is getting them to trust each other.

In my blaster/defender teams, I sometimes make it a point to tell the blasters that they have a larger role in protecting the team than we defenders. And they respond very well to it. If they work together, eliminate the bosses fast by ganging up on them, and efficiently finish the battles, it saves the defenders precious endurance (and lack of endurance kills many more teams than bosses do). The team isn't just destroying enemies, they are taking out those enemies in order to protect their teammates. As the kinetic and radiation defenders will tell you, there is no better defense than enemies on the ground. When you work to actively cultivate a sense of team protection, trust, and sacrifice, everything just works more smoothly.

[*]The Ring Master - Imagine, if you will, that you run a 'good time' grouping business. Your customers pay you their time and effort and expect you to deliver, among other things, competence, amusement, and experience.

How are you going to deliver that to your customers (aka teammates)? What can you offer them that others cannot? What can you do to increase their enjoyment? What missions are the most fun? Which difficulty setting best suits the caliber of the team? What unique experience can you offer? Why should they join your team for a Shadow Shard mission as opposed to the nearby tank's team for an archvillian mission? Why should they give up time to spend hours with you in a task force mission?

These aren't questions that you have to answer directly to your teammates. But they are good things for you yourself to think about and have answers too. Imagine that you are the ring master and your team and the things your team will do is the 'product' that you sell to potential teammembers. If your customer service is good, and your product is exceptional... then you've already catapulted yourself light-years ahead of the usual group leaders. People will seek you out, from global friends, other characters, and across servers. And they will keep coming back just for that unique experience that they have only known you to offer.

[*]The Skilled - Simply put, great team leaders have a decent idea how to play the game. Develop a bit of alt-itus, make lots of characters on a few different servers. Even if you only play them up to about level 10, it will give you a lot of insight into how the different ATs work. It helps to have some idea what it's like to tank and try to hold aggro, or blasting in a solo or team setting, getting a feel for how things like knockdown/slow/immobilize/etc. change and reduce the incoming damage, getting a feel for team aggro, or scrapping and choosing the best targets to attack, or trying your hardest to control and lockdown villains, or SHIFT-selecting (or making /binds for it) your team for heals and buffs as a defender (you can select teammates by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing the number keys 1 - 8). Some defenders have gotten to know all the little icons are in the team menu. So even without being able to "see" the teammate, they know who has buffs, who needs buffs, who is stunned/sleep/held etc. A quick glance at the leadership buffs even tells you who is in range, and who is off somewhere else. Understanding the different ATs and their different skill sets, gives you a huge advantage as a team leader. You'll know who you need to recruit, what they can do, and how you can get everyone to work with each other more effectively.

Other skills you just get simply from practice and experience. Things like dragging and tossing inspirations to teammates, quickly TABing a villain group to find the most dangerous threats (read: Boss), assist targeting and knowing which teammates to assist, and knowing the layout of maps. One of the fun parts about my trick arrow defender is the practice it gives me in quickly finding the lieutenants and throwing nets on them before they close to melee range. That's practice in taking a wide view and seeing 'everything' in even the most chaotic combat situations. And in turn that skill helps tanking, it helps with storm defendering, it help with controllering, etc.

In most team settings you only really need two or three people in the 8 team group that are truly skilled and know what they are doing. It helps all the more if one of those skilled teammates is you. Some characters, like my storm defender or my human kheldians can simply turn entire combats by themselves, they have the ability to put the entire team on their backs. Other characters have less ability to effect far sweeping outcome changes for a team. But any character that brings a great deal of skill and experience to the table will make a team better.

It's not a question of how little skill, or lack thereof, your teammates bring to the table. It's how much you step up your game to make the entire team better. I spend a good deal of my time wearing the instructor hat. It's one of the ways I put my experience to use. As I explain shift-selecting and team icons to the kinetic and watch as they go from a sub-par buffer to instantly keeping the entire team speed boosted 100% of the time. Or as I get the floor loving fire blaster to pace his attacks, reduce his AoE output, and fight only the tank's targets, and he proceeds to take no damage for the remainder of the mission.

When you're quickly TABing around for the boss and taking him out fast, tossing endurance inspirations around, freeing teammates from holds without them telling you first, and buffing teammates when they need it, your teammates will take notice fast. They will recognize that you are a highly skilled player, become more willing to listen to your control, and become much more likely to group with you again later.


[*]The Planner - "So group leader, what's the plan?" , "I don't know, what do you want to do?" Stop, immediately. Few things can give a new teammate as much of a bad impression in those first precious moments as realizing that you don't have a plan. That you don't even have a reason for inviting them.

Besides having a general idea of the type of team you want to form, try to have a good idea of what you want that team to do once they get there? Are you doing missions, in what zones? Are you street sweeping? Task forcing? Hazard/trial zone hunting? Sewer Team Running? Monster Bashing? Shadow Shard Island Hopping? What ever it is, you have to know what you want the team to do. And it helps if you can include a little bit about your plan right in the recruiting tell.

Sometimes I go to extremes. My characters might run around for 20 minutes, finishing up pesky kill missions just so I can have a mission... a good one... lined up and ready to go for when I start recruiting people. After the team is together, I may choose just to alternate through their missions and never do another one of mine. But I know I need that immediate thing to do when people join the team. It's not good enough for me to say, "Hey, I don't have any missions right now, do you have anything good?" It may be the truth, and it's perfectly reasonable. But it doesn't convey the sense of "here is the immediate task, this is why I'm forming this team." You'll quickly find that 90% of the teammates you run across really don't care what you're doing. If they are having fun, and getting experience, then everything is fine. What they do not want is their time wasted. They don't want to spend a single second standing around because the group leader is indecisive or doesn't have a plan or purpose.

Planning Team-Make-up: Try to have some idea of the type of team you want to assemble. It has an effect on the type of missions you can attempt or want to attempt. Think about the type of teammates you would like to have if you're going up against an archvillian? Who would you like to have aboard if you're facing the Carnival of Shadows, Devoured Earth, Rularuu, or some other mezz heavy opponent? How fast would you like to finish the missions? What kind of teammates would help you defeat the enemies quicker? What kind of teammates will help you do it safer?

Do you want a unique specialized team? If so, are you willing to roll up your sleeves to search for those specific teammates you want? Will you allow friends of teammates to join even if they don't fall into the ideal for your unique team?

How much of a challenge do you want from the team experience, and how much "leading by instruction" do you want to do? Just about any pentad team you form up will have the type of make-up to do most tasks with very little input from you, the team leader. However, if your team is highly specialized, an 8-blaster team for instance, then you will have to put in a lot of time and effort into formulating strategy and tactics, and getting the collective team mindset and attitude to the right place for success. An 8-blaster team simply doesn't "work" right out of the box without a lot of input from you.

In terms of the challenge the team can handle, my storm defender knows that he can put together a nearly random collection of blasters and defenders and that team can go off and do just about any invincible mission, easily. That's a factor of the power of defender buffs/debuffs/healing combined with the blasters AoE/damage potential. However, when my scrapper puts together an all-melee team, the difficulty rarely goes higher than heroic. It isn't that harder settings can not be done with an all-melee team, they can, especially if it is SuperTeam. But an all-melee on anything higher than heroic requires a great amount of team trust and coordination that usually goes above and beyond the level of most common pick-up teams. For an all-melee, it's simply easier, safer, and more enjoyable for both the team leader and the team to just stay at heroic.

Planning Zone Hunts: There was actually a time when zone hunting was common (well, not really, but still more common that it is today). But you can still get a lot of use of them today since they are something unique that not a lot of people do.

First, head over to the zone yourself to get a feel for the enemy types and the layout. Take Faultline for instance, you'll see very quickly that clockwork are in one area, Circle of Thorns in another, and Vahzilok in the third area. You can also learn a few things about the zones just by taking a brief session to fly around. Again in Faultline, there are a couple of ways for a superspeeder to get from the north all the way to the south part of the zone, easily (hint: it's not in the middle).

Determine if you want to fight easy enemies or tough enemies. Easy enemies are better xp (see below), but tough enemies tend to keep teams more interested and engaged. There used to be a time when you could break your team into mini-teams, 2 four hero teams, or 4 two hero teams, but still keep everyone actually in the same 8-hero team. Then the mini-teams could go off on their own and hunt easy opponents, and as long as everyone was in the zone, everyone would share the xp. There have been a few changes to teammate distance/xp and such, but this type of split teaming does still work in hazard/trial zones if you keep the mini groups moderately close together.

Set a schedule and keep to it. Maybe you'll fight for 20 minutes then break for 10 and repeat. Let your teammates know about the time and keep them updated. If they know that they have 5 minutes of fighting before the break, they are more likely to wait for it to leave the team, or to leave to go train. Don't start a hazard/trial zone hunt without a time schedule. You can't expect a team to just run around mindlessly taking out large groups of enemies for hours at a time without breaks (also see Hollows: Atta). In the minds of your teammates, you can quickly move from the "cool team guy" to the "slave driving guy I never want to team with again." Hazard/Trial Zone hunts are a good spice to add to your usual grouping adventures. A little bit is nice, too much ruins the stew.

Planning Task Forces: Planning for a task force can be tough. Even more so if you're looking for a unique team. This is because most people are happy just to find ANYONE to join their task force team. Players rarely have the time to try to put together an all-archer task force or something else that's strange. But there are a few things you can do to help your task force planning.

Schedule and post it: Pick a time in advance to do your task force, then post about it here in the forums on that server's board. The more unique your task force, the further in advance you probably want to post. You have a lot more leeway in a post than you do in a short recruiting tell. Sell it! Give people reasons to come. Ask yourself what would make you join a task force, then work those answers into the post.

Get your list and check it twice: When you lead a lot of pick-up teams on a server with the same character, you'll quickly notice that you run into the same players/characters all of the time, over and over. Some good, some bad. Keep a sheet of paper somewhere and jot down the names of teammates that you really like and maybe a few details about them. This list will grow very large, very quickly. Armed with your list, you can now use one of the greatest task force recruiting tools around: E-mail. Yes, that e-mail. You can open up the e-mail window, type in the character's name, add a subject, and type in your pitch about the task force, it's time, and how much fun it will be (just be sure to get the name correct since there is no confirmation). E-mail has a lot of cool features. One, all you need to contact someone is their name. You don't need their global name. Two, it works for heroes that are offline, unlike regular tells. Three, no one uses e-mail (well... until now). When a person who doesn't even know e-mail exists logs in and has a new message, it's huge. Task force or not, so many people will be willing to do whatever you want simply because you took a quick minute out of your day to message them specifically.

Don't forget the 50s: Every once in awhile, change your team seek viewing to scale up to the high level players. Many of the 50s that hang around are looking specifically for task forces, badges, and other unique missions, and are more than happy to exemplar down for them. Many have the task forces they are looking for right in their search comment. Mining the 50s is a great way to get those last few key teammates for your task force. And you never know unless you ask...

Planning Mission Choices: When every member of the team is begging you to choose their mission next, it is your responsibility to mentally go through the planning process of what the team can and cannot accomplish within reason. For instance, let's say one teammate is begging you to pick his mission next, he is level 10 and his setting is heroic. The other 7 heroes including you are level 12. It's safe to assume that the team can dominate that mission. The is no better defense in the entire game than security level, and the mission should be at best equal or -1 to the majority of the team. Now change it, what is everyone is still level 12 and the teammate is level 14 with his setting at rugged. Now the situation becomes much more complicated. Unless you've assembled a fantastic coordinated team, the mission will probably prove very difficult. And while the teammate is ensuring you that the mission will be "great XP", you already know that many teammates might die in the attempt, and the mission will probably take a lot longer than usual due to the difficulty. So in fact, overall, it probably will not be great experience vs. what else the team can do in the same amount of time. The best bet here is to do one of the level 12 missions instead, or at the very least, get the level 14 teammate to reduce his difficulty setting.

For those teammates motivated by xp: Explain the situation to them. Great xp is a factor of taking on enemies and dispatching them quickly. There are two parts instead of one: The xp you get for taking the enemy out and the time it takes to get that xp. Time is the factor people rarely think about. Sure you can take on purples and survive, but how long do the fights take? How much does the lower accuracy affect team endurance? How much recovery/prep time is needed before and after battles? How many people die in the attempt (debt)? All are factors that can make the "great xp" of tough enemies "not so great." Time is the key. A team of 6 kinetic defenders probably can get "great xp" from fighting deep purples because they can go through them very fast and with very little downtime. A regular pentad team may not have this advantage. Instead of taking on one tough enemy for 15 xp, sometimes it's better to use the same amount of time to take on 3 easy enemies for 5 xp each, for a variety of reasons.

There is planning related to enemy type. Can your low-level team handle vahzilok and trolls? Or should they instead focus on the much easier outcasts and clockwork? Does your team have the mezz defense to handle the Devouring Earth, Malta, Carnival of Shadows, or Rularuu? Or at the very least, have you made plans to send everyone to a contact to obtain extra break frees?

What benefits does your team make-up grant everyone as a whole? For instance, say you have a storm defender teammate and a ice/storm controller teammate. Both have the steamy mist power. Immediately you realize that the team is specially built to handle higher level Circle of Thorns/Demon missions. This is because the double steamy mists give the team a tremendous bonus versus anything using fire attacks.

What about time constraints? If someone in your team has to leave in 20 minutes, do you want to start a respec task force, or Frostfire/Atta mission, or a 20 hostage rescue mission through 9 office floors? Probably not.

It's the team leader's job to think about these kinds of things. Because, almost uniformly, your teammates are not. Players that don't give some thought to these issues, are known to lead teams into situations they cannot handle and more than a few team wipes.

[*]Action Jackson - Actions really do speak louder than words. I'm usually 'doing' a lot more than 'speaking'. Most players don't want to lead teams, and it really has nothing to do with recruiting, selecting missions, and kicking people. It has to do with the battle-by-battle actions of leading the team. Pointing out where to go, choosing what group of enemies to hit, announcing breaks, calling out the ambush coming down the hall, etc.

If you have the space on your screen, try to keep the map open all the time. This is so you can see your teammates and have a view of the layout.

Try this next time you lead a team. With your map open, as a battle is finishing, just run off in a direction. Not superspeeding or sprinting, just regular running. One teammate will see you running down the hall and turn to follow. Then the other teammates will notice and fall in line to see what's up. Before you know it there's a line of 7 triangles on the map following right behind you.

When you reach a tunnel with multiple ways to go, just immediately pick one and start going down it. It doesn't matter if it's the right, wrong, or best way. It does matter that you made the choice quickly about where to go. Don't stand around telling people which way to go, just start going that way, they'll follow you. You've heard the stories about how people are unconsciously looking to be lead. To 90% of teammates you come across, it won't matter which hall you take in the council base, or which mission you choose for the team to do. It's much more important to them that something is chosen quickly and decisively.

Other tips of action. Use the power icons. With leadership powers on, a quick glance at the team's power icons will tell you who is in range and out of range. Get to know what a lot of the icons represent. When you get really good at it, you'll automatically know that the team doesn't have their force fields on, or that the ice controller has forgotten to switch on his leadership powers and artic air. It's common at the lower levels to have teammates who constantly seem to have low endurance, and when you check the icons... sure enough, sprint is on all the time.

TAB around the enemies to find the most dangerous threats and put your all into taking them out. Get in the habit of noticing the health and endurance bars of the entire team and without people asking, pass out inspirations as needed. This is a crucial skill for everyone not just defenders and controllers.

Come up with a plan of attack and assign roles for opening battles, failing that just do it yourself. You want to avoid that awkward situation of the entire team standing around looking at each other, like wallflowers in a high school dance, each wondering who is going to step up and be the first to attack.

Many of my heroes simply open up most combats themselves. Some, like the tanks and the storm defender are heroes built for opening combats. Others are most decidedly not supposed to be opening combats, but they do it anyway. It shows the team a) I'll take the initiative and the danger, and b) I fully trust the heroes next to me to take care of me. It's not uncommon in teams led by my force fielder to have the combats opened by him, arguably the least defended person on the team. After a quick check to see that everyone is in position and has the proper endurance, there goes a range enhanced force bolt right at the boss of the nearby clump of enemies... and it begins.

All of these action jackson things aren't tasks that you have to do. But keep in mind that most teammembers will look to you first for these tasks. Either you will do them, or the person you assign to do them will, or the person who you allow to take over, from your inaction, will do them.

[*]The Control - Control is probably one of the more sticky areas of team leading. Control is about power: Who has it, who wants it, who thinks they have it, and who uses it (try to ask those questions to yourself in your next pick-up group). Control is not about controlling. Being in control doesn't necessarily mean barking orders and demanding military precision and discipline. The group leader might often let someone else take the "running the team" initiative, but overall authority, overall control, still belongs to the group leader.

Characters in the world of control

The Leech - The leech is simply someone who is not doing everything they can do to help the team. It's an issue of control because your teammates can see it and they'll be watching intently to see how you respond to it. There are usually two types: 1) A leech who chooses to do so, and 2) A leech who doesn't know any better or who can't help it.

The second case is tougher. Maybe a person is continually falling behind and not attacking much because they have a bad connection and terrible lag. Or their cat keeps jumping on the keyboard and scratching their face. Or any number of other reasons. Or take for example an empath that sits back on auto-follow and only does heals. If the team isn't taking any damage at all, the teammembers might get angry at the empath. Pleading with her to attack, pass out inspirations, buff, and otherwise do something with the full endurance bar. But step back for a second. Perhaps she is a new player and unskilled. Just because players exist that can heal, buff, attack, and manage the most chaotic combat situations simultaneously, does not mean that everyone has that same level of skill. Maybe she is focused entirely on the health bars of the team, and she is afraid that if she does anything else, then someone might take damage and die. The best response for these cases (as well as for type 1) is communication. Talk to people to see what's going on. Help them out. If a person isn't pulling their weight, don't automatically knee-jerk assume that they are consciously out to do a little as possible and leech from your team.

But then there's type 1, those who could do more to help the team, but they choose not too. The foremost example of this, and the most known, is sidekicks. As a group leader you have to make your own personal call on the sidekick issue. I try to start it off from the start in the recruiting process. If I expect someone will get a sidekick, I ask them if that is ok in the recruiting tell, in order to save them and myself time if it is not ok. To me, a hero who does not want an offered sidekick is indirectly saying to the team, "Yes, I could take the sidekick and have much better accuracy and be able to protect myself better due to the inherent defense of a higher level, both of which could help you guys out more than I can right now. But instead I've chosen to stay weaker, lowering the team potential, because I want more xp." Stating in the recruiting tell up front, makes a very clear statement that a sidekick isn't an option, it's currency to getting on the team in the first place. Doing this one step up front will save you a lot of grief later on from people giving you statements like "We're doing fine, I'll go unsidekicked for awhile" or "I'm just going to try unsidekicked for a bit and see if I die." Most teams are not in the babysitting/powerleveling business.

How you deal with sidekick issues are a measure of your control and how much you choose to exercise your control. Honestly, I vary. Sometimes I don't care. Sometimes, I allow it for one mission, but I tell them they'll need the sidekick for the next tougher missions. Sometimes, it's my way or else, if they don't want the sidekick, they'll have to leave to make room for someone who does.

Other leeches you'll run into: Defenders/Controllers that don't buff teammates, people running away from on-going battles to be the first to grab a clicky, silent AFKers, people hanging near the rear that do as little as possible in an effort not to draw aggro, and people that just don't contribute near the level of the rest of the team. Again, take them aside and talk with them first, in a polite and respectful manner, in order to see what's going on. If you're really nice, maybe you bring it up in a private tell first, instead of airing out the dirty laundry to the entire team. But above all else, do address it and do something about it. Because whether you realize it or not, your teammates do notice, and they are looking to you to see your next move. If you do determine that the person is conscious leech, get rid of them, no matter who they are and what they bring to the team. Trust that your recruiting ability can bring in someone else to fill that role, or that your team has the skill to finish the task without them. Team leaders are never held hostage by leeches.

The Friendster - As a team leader who owns the star, you have taken the time and effort to put together a quality team exactly the way you want. Your team is probably doing well, and your teammates might be thinking to themselves, "Hey, this team is great. My supergroup member is on, he should come and join this awesome team." This teammate is the friendster, and now it becomes an issue of control. People will go about bringing their friends to the team in a number of ways. Teammates might flat out ask you to invite someone, or flat out demand that you pass them the star. Neither of which you're going to do, of course, but it's funny nonetheless. Other teammates will ask politely if it's ok if their friend joins the party. In all cases, it comes to you to decide if you want that person or not. Ask questions about that person and send them tells to the friend if you need to, in order to gather information to make your choice. One of the first things I usually do is to type the name of the potential teammate into the team seek to find out their level and AT (without having to ask either).

Sometimes you might not want that hero on the team. The reasons are endless. Maybe you're fine with the group number at 4-5 and don't want it to blow up to 8 heroes. Maybe you have one spot left and you are saving it for someone you know, or a hero that is a better fit for the team. Maybe the friend is really low level and you would rather have someone who has access to more powers. Maybe the friend is some random 50 who might drop exemplar at the smallest sign of trouble and blow away the mission single handedly. The point is that you should never be afraid to tell a teammate that this is your team and you would prefer not to invite that hero.

Teammate: "Hey, leader, invite Crazy Bank7."
Leader: "Who's that?"
TM: "He's a friend of mine, a good tank."
Leader: "I think we're ok, besides I'm saving that last spot for a blaster or a damage buffer to increase our total offensive a bit more."
TM: "But he's really good. Just invite him, please."
Leader: "I prefer not too, don't worry, we'll be fine."
TM: "This is stupid, just invite him now or I'm leaving." (abundance)
Leader: "I really would like you to stay, but I can see that you want to team with your friend and I really don't want to hold you from that." (control, abundance)
TM: "Sounds like a no then, ok I'm going to team with him then."
Leader: "Thanks a lot for the help with those missions back there. See ya."
TM: "See ya."

::leader quickly locates a new hero to replace TM::

A lot of people look at that situation and scratch their heads wondering what happened, including the teammate that just left. Why didn't the leader just invite the tank? He lost a perfectly good teammate because of it. The reason is the essence of control: Because the team leader did not want too. Period.

Anyone that has seen the SuperTeam guides probably knows that I put together some pretty strange teams. It's fun. I like the challenge of putting them together, and getting them to work. Blaster/Defender teams, All-archer teams, all-tanker teams, tank/scrapper bar brawl teams... I do a lot of odd combinations. And because of it, day in and day out, I run into friction because people want me to invite their friends who don't necessarily fit the mold I'm working with that day. It's something that has to be dealt with respectfully, yet firmly. If you are putting in the considerable time, care, and effort to construct a team, you get to have it exactly the way you want. Anyone who doesn't agree with that is free to get their own star, form their own team, and do it their way.

I've had more than a few times when I've lost ALL my teammates in masse because of recruiting drama. They had one opinion, I had another, and we agreed to respectfully part company. I don't blame them at all. In fact, it's exactly what they should have done because they deserve to have things the way they want. They got their own star and did it their way. I spent 10 minutes rounding up new heroes and did it my way.

This doesn't mean that you must be inflexible and difficult. There are plenty of times where you really do want that suggested teammate and you happily invite them in a second. But all decisions about team-makeup go through you. If you don't make sure that this is the case, then the team will quickly fall out of your hands, control is lost, and you might as well throw the star to the person who is exercising better command of the team.

The Man-of-Action - The Man-of-Action is Mr. Gung-ho. First in combat, last to leave. All go, no quit. A lot of times, as group leader, you are the man-of-action. But it is fairly common to run into teammates who are all to happy to seize this role. It is sometimes beneficial to have another man-of-action for the team. This means that you don't have to do 'everything' in terms of leading the team around and it frees up your time for other important matters (recruiting, etc.). Unfortunately, the "over eager" line is frequently crossed in this area. Blasters who rush ahead of debuffs to open combats with ball lightning. Tankers who, before the current battle is completed, jump over to the next bunch of villains. Scrappers that start a battle with a new group and, when they realize no one followed them, proceed to drag the enemies back towards their teammates. People eager to rush ahead of the group just to "show off" with their nuke power. Heroes that rush ahead and travel down the wrong cave tunnel, completely by themselves. And people who generally run forward and outpace the endurance of the team. All of examples of the man-of-action.

As stated, sometimes having a man-of-action along isn't necessarily a bad thing. This is sacrifice to its limit, a hero willing to jump ahead and happily take all the debt for the team. As long as they don't take anyone else down with them, this is great! In this manner, one of the best ways to handle a man-of-action is to just let them hit the dirt a few times. Most people don't like to die, and when they realize that they are the only ones going down time and time again, they tend to slow down and allow someone else to open the combats.

The Co-Captain - The well known leech of control is the co-captain. They are most often people that like to team a lot, but rarely have the ability, courage, or desire to form their own teams. The moment they join a team they are already doing their best to snatch a few strings of control at every chance. They sometimes take many aspects of the other characters of control. They may be a pseudo-leader man-of-action, constantly superspeeding ahead of the team and saying "Here" every time they find something of interest. Telling the team that they have located the mission goal while the rest of the team is busy on the other side of the mission in the middle of a battle. They may take the form of a friendster, asking that you invite people they notice looking for a team because they feel that the team needs a better make-up (i.e. a make-up influenced by them). Or asking that you bring half of their supergroup into the mission.

But most usually the co-captain just honestly tries to exert control on the team as often as possible. I've met people who were the newest member of an already successful team, approach the team with new battle tactics or demand that the team alter their tactics to best match their play style. A solid rule of thumb is that everyone is in love with their own powers. Almost all co-captains believe their AT and powers are the best way to handle any and every situation. They are the people who want the missions done in a certain order, at a certain difficulty setting, and demand a mission reset after a single new member joins (after you've explained to them that missions reset on the fly for the third time.) Their verbal communication usually consists of short command phrases: "Stay here, and don't move", "Don't attack until I say", "Pull", "Healers don't attack, just heal", "Don't knockback", "Don't kill the anchor", "Only shoot my target" et cetera.

Again, as with all of these, it's an issue of scale. A co-captain isn't always bad, especially if their orders are actually useful and conductive to the team. Probably the best way to deal with a co-captain is to work on building trust. It's safe to say that the less trust present in a team overall, the more orders and commands are being barked around. Supergroup teams, by and large, don't have large strategy meetings before every battle. They just jump in and get the job done because they trust the heroes next to them fully. Even with my pick-up teams, I usually don't have a long list of commands that I tell my teammates. I have a couple widely general things I may say when the team is formed, then the rest is done mostly through "Man-of-Action/Action Jackson" leading by doing. You can also selectively ignore the co-captain directives that you know aren't really useful. When the team has plenty of defense available, my storm defender and force fielder have been known to just float over and open combats, right in the face of the tank demanding the team hide in a corner while they taunt. When you can prove to the co-captain, through experience, that they can trust the team, your leadership, and the fact that things will just "work out fine" even without their demands being met... then they tend to calm down and mellow out a bit. But, you'll find exceptions to every rule. You will run across people who simply refuse to cooperate when things aren't being done exactly the way they want; to the point of being disruptive and posing a danger to the team. That's when you wipe the dust of the /kick button.
[/list]
(..continued)

All this talk of knockbacking and Philotic Knight's recent force field guide has me grabbing and dusting off this one from the vault. It's the invulnerability tankers worst nightmare...

Name: Paragon High Knockback Club

Shard: CoH

Overall Theme: A blaster/defender team geared to the height of knockback.

Backstory: When the forgetful Doc. K left a volitile experiment running, the resultant gases triggered strange super powers in the students of his senior physics class. Now this group of Paragon High School students have decided to form their own secret club in order to use their new powers for good.

Group Make-up: 5 blasters (energy/energy), 3 defenders (force field/energy); all are science origin
<ul type="square"> [*]Blasters: The offensive backbone of the team, the blasters will fill a number of roles. The blasters will supplement the knockback effects many of their powers with a sprinkling of range enhancements to increase the advantage. All of the blasters will dabble in the fitness pool and take assault, tactics, combat jumping, and stun. They will use hasten along with powers like build up, conserve power, and boost range to produce brief periods of increased effectiveness, saved for tougher battles. At the higher levels, the blasters may take personal force field and repulsion field, creating a team of eight heroes with these powers.
[*]Defenders: The three force field defenders are the backbone of the team's defense. They will take every force field power since each will find a use. In energy blast, their main emphasis is on the first two attacks and the sniper attack. Two of the force fielders will pick up a few powers from the medicine pool and the other will use the teleport pool to fulfill many of the travel duties for the team. Assault and tactics are also taken, assuring that all eight teammates have these two powers. [/list]Costume, Names, and Other Design Issues: These are, primarily, high school kids. So the costumes aren't extremely 'hero-esque.' Maybe regular jeans and t-shirts with a simple eye mask. Or perhaps Paragon High has a blue/white uniform they could all wear and pair up with their 'hero attire' of gloves and the blue eye masks when it's time for crime-fighting.

Combat Strategy and Power Combinations: There are a few different layers to the strategy of this team so I'll give a statement for each.
<ul type="square"> [*]Blaster/Defender Formation: The standard blaster/defender team formation is always the same, keeping the entire team as close together as possible. In other teams, this helps aura efficiency since everyone is always close enough for the auras. Outside of leadership, aura efficiency really isn't an issue with this team, but the standard formation has a lot of other uses. Anything entering melee range with the team will almost certainly run into one of the three repulsion fields from the force fielders. Everyone is safely within the aura range of the leadership powers and the three stacked dispersion bubbles. With full bubbles, the blasters on the team each have 9 bubbles on them at any one time. Anyone who has ever been on a team with more than two force fielders, knows how significant this level of defense can be, especially with the recent addition of the rarely talked about, but highly significant, mezz protection to dispersion bubble.
[*]Knockback: Knockback is a key component of this team. But, in general, knockback is a pretty advanced concept in a team setting. Many players do not know how to use knockback while in a group, or adapt to other players who use knockback powers, causing many to view it as worthless or undesirable. In fact, knockback (like slow) is a powerful form of indirect defense. Quite simply, enemies on the ground are not attacking your team. They are 'out-of-the fight' for a few precious seconds. Using this effectively in a team is a tricky thing to accomplish. And it will take 8 pretty skilled heroes some practice before everyone is on the same page.

The first adjustment that needs to be made, in terms of knockback, is respecting the blaster/defender formation. The first thing 99% of people do when in enemy is knocked back is to chase it in order to get into range for another attack. This team needs to stay at home. You can't have 8 heroes all running off in different directions. On average, this team will invest much more heavily in range enhancements. That helps a little, but beyond that, if an enemy is knocked out of range, the target simply needs to be changed to an enemy that is in range.

The force fielders are the masters of directed knockback. With a couple recharge enhancements, force bolt can become machine-gun-like in its speed to fire on the incoming enemy lines. With three of these force bolts, and players skilled at picking enemies, the number of enemies entering melee ranged is significantly reduced. The tricks comes after the early game, when repulsion field enters the picture. Now the force fielders will have to choose their targets more carefully, since you don't want to waste the effort force bolting something that will simply bounce of the repulsion field. Another skill is understanding the combat situation. There are times when you want to machine-gun force bolt something to keep it locked down. But there are other times when the combat is winding down and you want to allow the enemy to approach closer so that the team can finish it off.
[*]Damage Mitigation: Detention and Disorient: A last strategy layer involves the other tactics (outside of knockback) that the team can use to mitigate a lot of damage. Three force fielders means three detention fields. Regardless of what you've heard, detention field works just fine if the team has good communication and a proper strategy to use it. Imagine a situation where the team is facing a group of enemies with 3 bosses. All three bosses can be detained while the team quickly mops up the minions and the lieutenants. Or done another way, maybe 1 boss can be detained, the second boss can receive the coordinated attacks from the blasters, while the third boss is being locked down by force bolts.

The team can use disorient in a similar way. All five blasters have access to the stun power. Between them, this gives the team the ability to roll up to any enemy group and stun two bosses and one lieutenant. And the melee ranged blasters are now primed to receive repulsion bombs from the force fielders.

All of this combines (knockback, detaining, and disorient) to give the team a much higher defense than it would seem just by glancing at the force field numbers. But it takes skill, this team is much more involved than just throwing up some force fields and blasting things.[/list]
Alternative Suggestions: A City of Villians group could be made using many of the same strategies with Corruptors (Energy Blast/Traps) and Masterminds (force fields).

Alternates for the hero team: The blasters who prefer not to use the energy secondary may find use in devices. The force fielders could also shift the secondary focus a bit by taking dark blast, rad blast, or sonic blast instead of energy blast.

Personally, I would choose to keep it as listed. I have had the unique experience of, one time many months ago, putting a pick-up team together consisting of nothing but energy blast users. Seeing a coordinated volley of eight Power Blasts fire off and simultaneously demolish a boss, still ranks among one of the cooler things I've witnessed in the game.

Re: Army of Darkness

Thanks for that one, Obtenebrator.

Now this is what a dark team should be. (Oh yeah, plenty of praise for City of Villians for finally getting all the "Netherworld Servant", I'm good-but not really heroes over into the Villian side where they belong. )

[ QUOTE ]
One strength of this concept is its flexibility, you have a plethora of ways of locking down the enemy. In the low levels you're relying strictly on -Acc. Later on you can branch out into Fear (Touch of Fear, Cloak of Fear, and Fearsome Stare) and Disorient (Dark Pit and Oppressive Gloom).

[/ QUOTE ]

This is one of the cooler aspects of the team in my opinion. Especially when you bring up the four stacked tar patches. Of course, the number one critic you'll hear will probably be the brutes. Who, when all the -slow, disorient, and fear stuff flying around, are bound to say "But what about my fury?"

In terms of SuperTeams, I don't think the world has to revolve around fury, like it does for the solo brute. If the team is doing well and crushing everything they come across does it matter if the fury bar is filled or not?

I don't think it does. And I hope that sooner or later, the brutes learn to get along with the dominators.

[ QUOTE ]
Alpha and mezzing. From about level 20 and on, it's really hard for a big team of all Rad Defenders.

[/ QUOTE ]

The other reason I brought up the question is because, in all honestly, I haven't had the experience of many teams being repeatedly crushed by mezzing. And I've been continually trying to turn it over in my mind and understand why that is, and why it's not the case for other teams.

I understand a big part of the rad issue is the overall toggle dependence. One mez and down goes everything. Another part is the lack of front-line aura defense that some of the other all-defender teams have access too. But still, I'm blown away that the mezz resistance from 8 stacked AMs do so little, and that the villains are slicing through the 8 stacked manuevers. What about the issue of mezzing them first? Are 8 stacked choaking clouds really that ineffective also?

You might remember that my usual teams are the blaster/defender pick-up groups led by my storm defender. I never really noticed much of a mezzing problem until the mid-to-late 30s. And even then and after, it's been more mezzing annoyance if anything, because my stormer runs so many toggles that have to be fired back up. Even Malta, who I've historically heard so many horror stories about, have never been much of a problem. I recall my group from yesterday, where I was on my way to the usual 8-hero blaster/defender group. After I recruited two blasters, I suddenly found out that I had to leave. And not wanting them to leave empty-handed, I asked if they wanted the three of us to quickly run through the invincible mission. So we did, in 8 minutes. I opened every battle, I was mezzed a total of three times. Fully sapper drained once. I used O2 boost three times. Whether 2 teammates or 7, this is pretty much the usual mission norm for me.

Here are three issues I've kinda settled on as the things that are saving me.

1. High damage - Things flat out don't live very long for mezzing to be a problem. Two or three people might get sleepy, but the other 5 blow everything away. People always ask me why I lead blaster/defender teams as opposed to straight all-defender. My usual answer is because these are pick-up teams and not SuperTeams. Most non-superteam defenders are very primary focused with little offensive focus. So I add blasters, who are naturally focused for offense, to fill that gap. Lately, I've been wondering about the magnitude of difference between blaster damage and defender damage, and wondering if some of the all-defender teams could benefit from including a blaster or three in the mix.
   
2. Chaos, disruption, and distraction - Since starting my storm defender a year ago, you will not believe how much these three words have been burned into my soul. Pretty much every character I have, including the tankers and scrappers, live by these in a teaming environment.
   
   Like the phantoms in your teams, in my teams my storm defender *is* the distraction, since I open just about every battle. I also add a lot of the chaos and disruption, but my teammates also contribute a bit to that effect.
   
   The opening sequence rarely changes. A quick kiss with hurricane to debuff some of them, but not to forcefull and blow everything away. Then a snow storm on a tough opponent in the center. Then a freezing rain on top of the group. Then maybe lightning storm to finish, before I start my regular attacking.
   
   Around the time freezing rain comes up is when the rest of the team rushes in with lots of AoEs, more debuffs, and generally blows the enemies apart.
   
   The result is that the team only really takes at most attacks from 1/3 of the group of enemies at a time. The other 2/3 are disoriented, running away from freezing rain, or in the processes of getting up from being knocked back. That's the chaos and disruption.
   
   To this day, people still look at me cross-eyed when I tell them that knockback is a key component of protecting my teams. So yes, I was partially serious when I brought up the repulsion fields and repels.
   
   The grand point is that my teams very rarely if ever face the aggro from a full pack of enemies turning in perfect unison and firing on us. Two freak tank grenades won't kill a squishy team, but two coordinated freak tank grenades will. A lot of my characters these days throw a variety of wrenches into that very coordination of the enemy groups. The main benefit we get from this is time. Time to fit in that aura heal. Time to buff or de-mezz someone. And time to regroup if necessary. All because we give the enemies a lot more to worry about besides just shooting at us.
   
   Somewhere between the two extremes of 'keeping everything perfectly and ridgidly close together for max AoE efficiency' and 'knockbacking everything around completely randomly', there is a happy medium ground that offers good efficiency with the added chaos defense. I don't know exactly where it is, but I think I'm pretty close.
   
   (note: anyone spying in on me and TopDoc's discussion here, but is also interested in this particular issue, may want to reference Philotic Knight's Combat Handbook for a more eloquent discussion about it.)
   
3. Third, and finally, many those chaos effects are not toggle dependant. I'll be the first to admit, my usual battle opening is nuts. And it honestly wouldn't work if it wasn't for the sheer overpoweredness of hurricane. I frequently roll right up to a +4 mob of enemies in invincible missions and complete the entire opening without getting hit once. But I do often take some hits, and sometimes I'm mezzed. Depending on when the mezz happens some of the things like freezing rain, lightning storm, and even sometimes tornado are all out still churning away, even as I stumble around baffoon-like. And even then, while I stumble around, the rest of my non-mezzed teammates are rushing in to blow the enemy apart, pass me a break-free, and heal me when I need it.

I know that none of those three are very useful to an all-rad team. And I pretty much agree that all-rads are probably just inherently weak against powerfully mezzing villain types.

My main point of disagreement is that through all this discussion, we're still talking about invincible missions.

[ QUOTE ]
You can't turn down the difficulty enough to avoid this.

[/ QUOTE ][ QUOTE ]
It's best to design Super Teams with solid mez protection and damage mitigation in mind. It's a sad thing to cut through early missions like a hot knife through butter, only to be cut to pieces as you get into higher level missions.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is where I'm still not quite on board. You and I both run teams that press the limits of what's possible, but I don't think that every SuperTeam needs or should run invincible missions all the time.

The best single defense in the game, bar none, is security level. I really have a hard time believing that the all-rads can't take down any 'heroic' mission they come against. I have a hard time believing that any SuperTeam will have a tough time with a mission facing a lot of blues, whites, and the occasional yellow. Maybe they might take some missions, slowly and cautiously, but they can get it done. It won't kill people if one of the teammates takes the extra 30 seconds to visit a contact for enough break-frees to make sure everyone has two. Inspiration work is part of SuperTeaming too.

Lastly is the fact that some teams are simply stronger and weaker against certain villains. There's no rule that they have to bang their heads against the wall fighting foes they don't like. There's more than enough content that people don't have to complete every single Devoured Earth or Carnival arc. And people already reach 50 without ever setting foot in the Shadow Shard.

Even my storm defender practices this with his teams. I rarely do anything from the contact that gives the Carnival missions, aside from those instances when it's time to test ourselves with something harder than normal. We can usually do the carnie missions without too much fuss, but it's honestly much easier to just tackle an invincible malta, crey, or portal mission. So that's what we usually do.

It's possible to design a SuperTeam in a way that mezzing is never, ever, a problem (and maybe we'll post something like that later in the thread ). But I'm sure that team will have holes somewhere that some other villain type can exploit.

[ QUOTE ]
I found a keybind set up that allows you to do the team select and the action in ONE keypress and makes my life as a Mind/Kin troller much easier.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ice_Ember, for /bind challenged people like me, this is the post of the decade.

Re: Tank Mages

TopDoc, I must have been living under a rock or something, I didn't even know about Tank Mages (that'll teach me to disappear for months at a time). Being the nut that I am, the 'first' thing that popped into my mind was "OMG!! Double repulsion field + 4 repels!!" lol

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We use Group Fly and Team Teleport.

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I finally got to experience this just a couple days ago. I noticed the force fielder in one of my teams had team teleport, so I asked him to taxi us a bit over an outdoor mission. He said that team teleport is a bit troublesome to use, then I cut on group fly and said "How about now?"

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At higher levels, you need Phantom Army from the Illusion/Rad Controller to open combat.

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I remember this discussion from when the change was made to bring aboard ill/rad controllers to join the rad/rads. Was it because you needed someone else to take the alpha? Or high level mezzing issues? Or the mission difficulty?

The reason I ask is because I'm curious as to how the offensive heavy higher level SuperTeams can cope with the mezzing issues and others. It is something they can just get through by selecting better missions, lowering the difficulty, and carrying a few more break-frees. Or is it something they really should plan for strongly at the start of the team?