How to herd and play on a herding team (i7)
By
Dual_Mask,
Posted on: 2006-07-30 24:30 in Player Guides
I forgot to mention the other great advantage of herding; done properly, only the herder is at risk of dying. Use it, and your squishy may never have to faceplant again.
Has anyone read this? Does anyone have any comments?
Not a bad guide to playing with some safety, but I would refer to it more as corner pulling than Herding.
Typically in most MMO situations Herding suggests larger numbers than are found in a single spawn and in CoH/V once you have a medium or larger sized team there is very little point gathering more than 2 Spawns of Critters as your half your AEs wont hit all the Critters and if you get more than 17 your Tanker wont be able to hold the aggro on them.
Using LoS to concentrate Critters and allowing the Primary Tank to establish the Aggro is good tactics, but the limits placed on AEs and the hard Aggro cap of 17 Critters sort of makes Herding in CoH/V a little anemic.
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As a herder, I find it best if I first ask the team if they want head on or herding. If they would like a little herding action I tell them where I'm planning to herd to(I love dumpster diving dreck, or the little corner the middle of dom) then kindly ask them to stay out of sight until I ready in, I'll usually ready in, wait for the first person to attack, then I footstomp to reaffirm my aggro.
One odd thing is that even if it seems you lost aggro on a mob, if you kill your current followers quickly the ones going back home will all of a sudden come after you again. Here's an example: I was on a team with two SS tanks(one inv/ss, one fire/ss), a kin/dark def, and two fillers that were outside. The two tiered room in the back of bobcat mish right before you open the door where bobcat is, easily had 50-60 baddies in it. I ran around the room and angered all the mobs and tried my best to kept a really tight group of massive proportions. When one mob would break off and start to return I would hop over and hand clap or footstomp them, then jump back in my original pack and knockout blow one of them(great punchvoke) and keep the pulling going. I finally got to my herding spot and readied in. With a nice fulcrum shift, some tenebrous tentavcles, and a few foot stomps that mob was history, next thing we know there's another pack coming around the corner and we quickly dealt with those out only to have a third group come in. When the battle was over I went back to see what was left and there were 3 single stragglers scattered about, otherwise it was pretty much an entire room pull. Granted I miss the taunting capabilities of yesteryear, but this worked quite well.
To me, my job is to keep the squishies alive and let them do their job, I could have used a good tank many times during my defender's career. Even when pulling a single mob, I like to keep them close to me so I can manage aggro to the best of my abilities. I'm also here to absorb the alpha strike, and to make sure any heroes that get a little ornery and wander off aren't annihilated. Grouping/Herding/Corner pulling are a great aspect of tanking to me, it makes cone attacks and AoEs more effective, it makes the healers job easier when all of the baddies are in one place and heroes aren't scattered everywhere fighting their own battles, and it helps a tank do his job.
I wish alot of more people would read this. TONS of people I have been teaming with lately, Tanks being the choice of preferance, DON'T KNOW WHAT HERDING IS. Even worse, They don't know that gettig agro of mobs and running behind a corner is MUCH BETTER for alot of your teammates like the Defenders, controllers, Blasters, Kheldians, and some of the scrappers. We have AOE's and we hit ALOT more people with it if they are packed in close. Defenders and controllers have a HELL of a time keeping everyone healed if everyone is spread out like spilled paint. Staying Close and fighting together is a proven GREAT tactic, as opposed to just running in and having long range mobs not catch agro to the tank.
Great Guide. Sometimes herding up Nemesis hurts due to their AoE's.
I have noticed that alot of tanks are not taking Taunt, because it makes them take more damage. The stupid thing is that some of them don't choose taunt, and then run into the middle of a room not intending on herding. Having a tanker of my own I often wish I could tell people how to play. Obviously I'm not going to do that. BUT.. If I need to start telling people how to adjust to the team *I* am on, You better believe I'll show a tank how to tank...
...on my BLASTER.
Running into the middle of a room and not being able to catch agro of the majority of mobs is the death of teams that occurs EVERY day. This guide is bound to help alot of people.
Herding is a viable tactic and it increases safety for the squishies. At the cost of total boredom because no one but the empath and tank are doing anything. Just sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a herd to arrive.
The most efficient is to really jump in from spawn to spawn and move fast - players can move faster than mobs running to somewhere - but the caveat is that the tank better know how to hold aggro.
Still, knowing how to herd or corner pull is good. Or conversely for a squishy, how to get out of the way of one. It increases your tactical knowledge and allows you to choose when to use it. Corner-pulling is great for separating closely packed spawns that might cause teamwipes. Herding can sometimes be a fun change of pace, if not repeated on a farm ad nauseam.
And the most fun is when you have TWO tanks. One goes to round up the mobs, the other one stays in place with the squishies to take the aggro. Tanks trade off for a change of pace. Mobs can be fed into the grinder as fast as you can round 'em up and smash them, and there's no wait time for the squishies to bore them to tears.
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Ahh true herding - how I miss it!!!
With the i6 changes it was changed from a really efficient way to empty out entire maps for almost every mission to a more tactical role. Sometimes it just does not make sense & is much slower than just jumping in - like in an outdoor map or when there are just too many mobs.
When it does make sense is when the team is a little too squishy or when you find one of those "rooms of death" where you are at a tactical disadvantage if the whole team enters.
I am glad for this post as I have seen soooooo many tankers that are obviously new (although one was lvl 37...) doing the "stand in the middle of the squishies in the corridor & taunt & just stand there" thing.
RULE OF THUMB 1 - Never bring the mobs past the squishies.
RULE OF THUMB 2 - If herding never keep line of site......therefore....
RULE OF THUMB 3 - Never stand in line of site in the middle of the squishies and taunt WITHOUT swiftly moving out of line of site somewhere in FRONT of the squishies.
And yes Taunt is a great tool. Its not 100% needed but it is SO useful I dont know why you would not. 1 power & 1 slot. Particularly when you are herding the situation could be that 14 of the mobs are attacking you but 3 Lts have decided to go for your blaster. 2 options - take the whole mob of 14 to the blaster & punchvoke 3 Lts (very dangerous) OR........
use Taunt!
There are exceptions to that rule though.... I am trying a new Fire/Fire tank that soes very well at herding ....assuming there is a place to herd to and im not stuck with all my team mates just looking at me in the open with no plase to go..... but i lose focus here... the Fire/Fire tank does not have taunt but Dmg's with his aoe constantly. Assuming I get my every now and then heal from a healer type, dosnt realy mater what type except cant be the ones that heal off eniemies, and I can get to my herd point without interferencew from the rest of the team the herding is quite sucsessfull. Though ya got to LOVE the holds that a good controller uses to keep them right on top of me! All the AOE dmg i can drop keeps the herd tight for the most part after the jerd is compleate and between the Aoe attacks from the blasters and the holds.... well its just slaughter time. So in my case for this tank I have found that taunt is not as nessesary.. and yes there have been times were it woulda been handy but they are far outwieghed by my sucsesses. Im not saying that taunt isnt nessassary just that a good Fire/Fire seems not to need it as much.
Closest thing to the "good ole days" of map herding is the crystal titan lake in the Eden Trial...with an Illusionist.
Move well out to the limit of your pull, drop PA and run back along a clear path to a chosen pull spot that will block los. Make sure it's within a 15 sec. run for the returning PA decoys...if you mis-time it and the PA vanishes before the mobs are dealt with, you'll be in a world of hurt and likely will get people killed. (You may want to practice decoy pulling on smaller groups)
The decoys will run to you once out of range and each will drag along 17 mobs. That's three groups of 17 for 51 on a total pull! Now just have a few blasters ready with aoe nukes and cut loose. Great fun like it used to be!
Between the tank(s) and illusion pulling, the blasters on an Eden team are generally kept extremely busy, as is everyone else with mopping up and control duties. It makes what can be a huge boring task (defeating all the hundreds of crystals in the lake) fun and exciting. Just be sure your group is fully aware of what you are doing and are prepared to assist; and of course be sure you know what you're doing as well! 
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Great Guide. Sometimes herding up Nemesis hurts due to their AoE's.
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Been there, done that, and all I have to say is OUCH!
I dont try to aggro more than 6 or 7 nemesis unless they are white, maybe yellow minions.
Also, corner pulling or "herding" Neuron robots is fairly dangerous. They deal immense damage and their end drain for electrical attacks can detoggle my shields.
Like any AT, tankers have to know there limits.
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As far as this player knows, this is the most efficient and effective way to clean out whole rooms full of baddies. It does NOT always work perfectly. Oftentimes in caves there is not a good corner to stack the mobs on. Sometimes pillars are used to stack them up. There are variations on the same theme though. The important thing is that noone but the herder draw aggro until the beatdown ciommmences.
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If you have a good team, it is much more efficient to run-and-gun, killing the bad guys where they stand.
A good team has enough AOE/damage to kill things quickly, enough control/taunt to mitigate the alpha round of attacks from the spawn, and enough buff/debuff/heals to withstand the rest of the fight.
It's not hard to get that team composition together via inviting the proper archetypes, for the proper team mix.
Sure, if you only have 1 tank and 1 healing defender, and a bunch of minus-4-to-the-mobs lowbies, then herding may be your only option for safety. But if you build a proper team, killing as you go is measurably faster.
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I'm relatively new to tanking (just hit 30 with my one and only tank on all the game), and I don't know herding, but from what I see it's not that much more efficient than just taking out one mob at a time. With my tank I jump in and take the alpha, then keep taunting to keep them focused on me while running invincible. 99% of the time, there are no faceplants and I get constant praise for being a good tank. I'm not discounting the value of herding...I've seen it in action and it has its moments of being highly effective, but it doesn't seem anymore effective than just jumping in and killing as you go, just as Jitter said.
Herding is realy only as effective as the tank is at hearding the eniemies... ok redundent but bare with me. LOL Ok its like this lets go with a fire fire and the eniemies are strait phys dmg. A fire tank can grab an entire room pull to one spot and set up for a nice aoe nuke. On the other hand yes if the eniemies are a little low yae we can cut though them.... I have found when playing with the SG on TS we do use a combination of the two forms.. herding rooms with high multi mob agro probability and "run and gun" in other situations. But then we have played together alot and we can comunicate via mic so explanations are givin much quicker.... A realy good eneimie to use hearding aganst is the Artimis "not sure it i got that name right" herd all you can into a tight spot AOE and ya dont have to worry about the huge amount of realy anoying caltrops they drop. Best used with a tank that can TP or a buff against slow... SB comes to mind! 
Love that skill!!
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A fire tank can grab an entire room pull to one spot and set up for a nice aoe nuke. On the other hand yes if the eniemies are a little low yae we can cut though them
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Good, balanced, teams cut through 8man Invince spawns faster via run-n-gun than they can if the tank is "herding" them.
8man Invince spawns are already near the aggro cap. So you can't really herd more than 1 and a half spawns. And after you have them together, the best you can do is AOE them all to death...which is what you would do if you were fighting one spawn at a time, anyway.
Herding is not instantaneous. It takes time to get aggro, get them all to come to the corner you are pulling them to, etc.
The time cost of herding does not make it worth the (at most) 30-40% more critters you kill at one time. You can just kill 3 spawns of 12ish faster than you can kill 2 pulls of 17 (when you factor in the time to pull them).
Herding is a mindset that is left over from the early days, when there was no aggro cap, and there was no AoE cap. It is still a valuable skill, and a decent tactic, if your team is not well-balanced.
But it is not efficient xp per minute.
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As far as this player knows, this is the most efficient and effective way to clean out whole rooms full of baddies. It does NOT always work perfectly. Oftentimes in caves there is not a good corner to stack the mobs on. Sometimes pillars are used to stack them up. There are variations on the same theme though. The important thing is that noone but the herder draw aggro until the beatdown ciommmences.
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If you have a good team, it is much more efficient to run-and-gun, killing the bad guys where they stand.
A good team has enough AOE/damage to kill things quickly, enough control/taunt to mitigate the alpha round of attacks from the spawn, and enough buff/debuff/heals to withstand the rest of the fight.
It's not hard to get that team composition together via inviting the proper archetypes, for the proper team mix.
Sure, if you only have 1 tank and 1 healing defender, and a bunch of minus-4-to-the-mobs lowbies, then herding may be your only option for safety. But if you build a proper team, killing as you go is measurably faster.
Use HeroStats; measure your xp per minute. You'll find I speak the truth.
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That since the Agro cap of 17. Herding is more time consuming then it is worth. You get the CLOS (congo line of stupidity) and you are killing Mobs as they come to you.
when your taunt duration wears off the excess MOBS past the 17 you agroed will either spread out and go back where they started or they will kill the blaster.
Steamrolling goes much faster, with Bunching instead, bring one to two groups together. for quicker aoe killing. Much more then that and you start getting the CLOS.
Corner pulling is a good technique the "herd to here" and is a very safe technique exspecially if you have a squishier tank who can't take the damage of all those MOBS or Lacks the support toons to properly buff or heal the tank and team.
Unfortunatly the days of Map agroing are over.
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there's also another facet to herding... you don't need to do it on every spawn. Usually its intent is to put them all in close proximity to each other so AoE's can decimate them faster. Some groups are already arranged very tight and pretty although some tanks insist on bringing them to the "to here" point anyway, which is not only a waste of time but may scatter the group more than it was to begin with. Much of the time all the tank has to do is run into the middle of the spawn and dance a jig against a few of them and they're all ready for AoE crunchy goodness.
Ah how I miss the good ol' days of herding an entire map...
These days, I find the team gets bored too quickly with herding unless the mobs are truly out of their comfortable arresting level. When they get bored, they either get sloppy with LOS or trigger happy and you end up having the herd shot at or aoe'd before they stack.
These days, with the aggro limit, I find it more effective to target a near side mob, position myself to the opposite side of the spawn (away from your target and your team), and taunt. This both redirects the spawn's attention and pulls them away from the team. Depending on the spawn and your other taunt aura(s), you can repeat this on two nearby spawns and pull the whole group to you without endangering your team.
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This is intended as a guide to those tanks and their teams who want to use herding tactics to increase the efficiency of their play.
For those who don't know, herding is a tactic used by tankers (and some rare scrappers) for collecting large groups of bad guys in a small area.
It works like this:
1. The "herder" walks up to a corner and says something like "Herding to here". This is a signal for all other team members to get out of the line of sight of ALL enemies. If u cant see them, they probably can't see you is the best rule of thumb.
2. The tanker, or other herder, takes off. In most cases the herder will want an empathy healer to follow him AT A DISTANCE, using heal other. To be most effective, the herder will need:
(a) Some kind of AoE melee taunt, like Mud Pots or Cilling Embrace.
(b) The Taunt power from the tanker secondary or scrapper primary
(c) Strong defenses: a good herd aggroes at least 20 enemies.
The herder moves from mob to mob, brushing up against as many enemies as possible with his AoE taunt. It's best to move FAST, as this gives the mobs less chance to hit you.
3. The Herder returns to his/her corner, taunting bosses as she/he runs for cover. The healer keeps an eye on the herders health bar, spamming Heal Other or just othewise making sure the herder doesn't faceplant. However, AND THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, the healer must get AND STAY out of the range of the taunted groups, so as not too aggro them him/herself and quickly become hamburger.
4. The healer gets back out of the mob's line of sight, and the tank/scrapper herding goes to their corner. The group will start to stack.
5. Once there is a sizable stack (at least 10) the trollers, blasters, and scrappers unleash their fury. First AoE holds, then AoE damage, then the scrappers clean up the stragglers. Sometimes, the herder will indicate the time is ripe by saying "NOW!" or "Ready!"
6. Retack: everyone gets out of the line of sight again, and the herder may need to re-aggro some of the mobs, again taunting any bosses that may be left. They stack up again. Rinse and repeat!
As far as this player knows, this is the most efficient and effective way to clean out whole rooms full of baddies. It does NOT always work perfectly. Oftentimes in caves there is not a good corner to stack the mobs on. Sometimes pillars are used to stack them up. There are variations on the same theme though. The important thing is that noone but the herder draw aggro until the beatdown ciommmences.
I hope that this is helpful. Please post any comments, critiques or additions, as I am certainly open to improving my play!