The Many Qualities of the Pick-Up Group Leader

As I've mentioned before, this is a good thread, however it assumes you have some sort of raw talent to begin with.

As an example, a Synapse TF (15-20) we were running the other night was difficult to get off the ground due to lack of interest.

We had a Tanker (me), Fire/Sonic troller (SG mate), Sonic/Psi Defender, and a Kheld (with Nova). With 4 required to start, we were looking for a couple more before setting off. Both the SG mate and I had done a quick Shivan run to Bloody Bay in anticipation of the Clockwork King, and so felt prepared to go with what we had.

Then, after a couple of tells, we get a Scrapper. (paraphrased the following)

Scrapper : Do we have a healer?
Me : We'll be fine.
Scrapper : What level is everyone?
Leader : We're all 17+.
Scrapper (after zoning) : We need more damage.
Me : We have you, a Kheldian and two Disruption fields. We have Shivans for the AV and double sonic shields should mitigate a ton of damage. We'll be levelling up quite quick anyway.
Scrapper : Well just so you know, I'm out after 3 deaths.

At that point, the Leader kicked him. I was in agreement also. It wasn't just the moaning and whining before we'd started, but the knowledge that this would probably continue throughout the TF. To quote our leader "I don't want a second in command". We finished the TF in a shade under 4 hours with a good humoured team that worked well together despite emergency afk's , connection issues and the usual things you can't do anything about.

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.

-H

It should be required reading. It's that good. It inspired me to do the first leading I've ever done in this game. I'm still a soloer/follower at heart so I don't lead much, but when I do this guide is of great help.

WARNING: I bold names.

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

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Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?"

About youre positive negitive reaction thingy ...
if youre 100% positive and crackin jokes 24/7 ive notised somethings bout you Over-peppy and cocky-<bleep> peeps
1/2 the time there Talkin mid-battles, tryin to be funny and what not, missin great chances to attack, buff, or otherwise. (lost some nice buffs to over-chatty toons)
and the cocky thing, no matter how much i ask, will not invite Healers, Damage dealers, Holders, so on, Cause "We can take um!!". Till debt and tempers pile high, Where as the team Dis-bands.... So Bleh

<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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DAMN

I only had to "graze" like 2-3 sentences in your post to say: QFT, QFE, /signed, rock on

I'm always trying to lighten the mood/try crazy [censored]/die a lot/etc, I mean hell, if you're not having fun, then why the hell are you a super-hero fighting the bad guys?

seriously

excellent read though, good job, and keep up the good work, also kudos to everyone else who sees the light here

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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'.

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My level 50 MasterMind's search message is "Cake or Death". What would you think of that?

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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'.

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My level 50 MasterMind's search message is "Cake or Death". What would you think of that?

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I'd be thinking, "We'd BETTER have some cake before we invite this guy (girl?)!"

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)...

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Time for the quarterly bump.

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Hey, Arcas? Are you aware that none of the threads in the Player Guides forum are EVER deleted? So there really is no need to "bump" it at all, unless you just want free advertising.

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.

The problem with large team Mayhems is the bonus time is way to hard to generate. This is probably what leads to the bank rush strategy more than anything. The group can destroy car after car, phone after phone, but the time bonuses never seem to come. I think this needs to be addressed somehow. A Mayhem mission is about mayhem, and the bank rush is the antithesis of this. But it's just about the only strategy open to the large Mayhem team for the best chance at mission success, thanks to those too-hard-to-earn time bonuses.

And BTW, Stalkers have been buffed now so Stalker superteams would be interesting to put together.

WARNING: I bold names.

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!

City of Heroes Freedom presents some interesting challenges and opportunities to team leaders. Free players having no access to /tell, and being unable to form groups are the most important opportunities/hurdles.

WARNING: I bold names.