Tips to those new in grouping.

Those of you experienced in MMO land will find grouping more flexible and forgiving vs the old tank,healer, fillers builds. Though it isn't necessary to have a Tank (Brutes for instance) or healers. It does help progress in xp.

Now on to my tips.

As a group leader.
Communicate with your team. Give guidance on your objective. To wait for others to load in the instance. To rest....simply put keep your party in check. A silent leader will get hesitant behavior or the opposite. Your squishy may pull when nobody is prepared...resulting in his death or everyone else (causing loss of players out of anger). Hesitant players who should be charging in sitting back and doing the wait and see thing...and if a healer...problematic.

You have a Brute on your team (Villain side). Ask if he has Provoke...this can determine how your team will run. A person with good defense and provoke can turn your run into a smooth one if you use them correctly. Provoke is a AOE taunt...which means your aoe dps can go nuts without fear. Your healer can move in to support the provoke man without worry someone is going to nuke him outa his boots.

Two things I have noticed besides leaders not leading.

1. Not designating or establishing who is point man to follow.
2. Not designating who pulls. Depending on situation sometimes a dom pull could be better. Or even a corrupter using max range strike to sucker mobs around a corner for the brute.

You have a team that lacks guidance...you invite problems by mr.hesitant or mr. antsy .....resulting in instaces where more than one group gets pulled. Even party splitting in two directions cause they don't know who they should follow.

Flex your Kick ability after fair warning (or not if you are just Villainous!). If you are guiding and setting base ground rules for the group. Don't tolerate the non team player.

For example: Party is moving and pulling groups of mobs...then mr.Stalkerimcool goes off to a entirely different set of mobs and does his stealth attack thing...what happens? Your main group gets pummeled by the second group thanks to MR.Ithinkimcoolstalker.

Warn them to stick with team and to support your puller...they dont comply..KICK!

one bad apple can cause a party to lose its cohesiveness. No reason to tolerate such ignorance after fair tactful hints and or warnings of behavior. It is no fun to lose people due to dumb members...and at the same time spend time rebuilding your teams.

Anyone else like to add to this...I know there are stickies..but lately it seems there has been an influx of clueless or poor leaders....So I had to get this out... I already posted this in my home server but I think this is a better place to get this out there.

No not at all. Just an example if they have some other useful skill it can help. In other words know what your tank brings is what it comes down to. This way you can roll your party with better success.

Now at higher levels these tips are not really necessary since most have enough experience by then to understand do's and don't stuff.

I am mainly targeting those new to the group thing in this game. Taunt though is single target is it not? I chose provoke myself for the Aoe on it. this way my Cor's and Dom's can aoe to their hearts content .. as a secondary tank in parties I use it to pull mobs off the ranged pack in the back of the team to.

Even without taunt or provoke. It's good to know if your Main Tank so to speak is able to hold agro by multi mobs or not.

it's only tips....no hard lined template on how to play...only tips.

I would like to emphasize this is only tips to new to the game and grouping. And I used examples above. It isn't a Brute must have X skill or fail. I would never exclude someone just because I think the build is wonky. I try to adapt to what I have and play accordingly.

It's auto-hit as well, isn't it? I think Provoke still has an accuracy check.

If I remember correctly, Taunt is an auto-hit power. Meaning that every time you use it, it will hit everyone in the area up to the maximum number (8 or 12 or 16, I honestly can't remember). Provoke is not auto-hit, so you must slot accuracy in it.

Now, I'm not sure if Taunt works the same for Brutes as it does for Tanks... but I think it does.

Try this:

Taunt

vs.

Provoke


This should be the same information found in game. Taunt is better than Provoke in every way. Also, both powers have a maximum target cap of 5.

At launch Taunt was single target so most tanks took Provoke instead, although I'm pretty sure that was changed before CoV launched. I'm not sure if the short descriptions were fixed to match, but Real Numbers should tell you the whole story.

Well thank you for the links. I swear by my short descr. in game it had no mention of aoe on taunt.

Thanks for the info. I will switch over to taunt when I can. Could me using COV install have something to do with the descriptions outa wack?

And going back to the original topic, as a frequent team leader myself, I can attest to the fact that communication is key to a team's success and enjoyment.

That said, I also try to be as light as possible on orders. Some teams are steam-rolling death machines, acting autonomous, without any outward input. Others require meticulous planning in order to succeed at your objective. With that in mind, unless I see that the team is struggling a lot, I don't consider it necessary to appoint a lead man or designated puller.

And while we're on the subject of differing team potentials, you never know a PuG's difficulty treshold until you've already done a mission. For that reason the first mission I run is always +0. Nothing is more frustrating than going into a high-difficulty mission only to see that you cannot complete it without huge amounts of frustrating. Generally, though, every team can do a +0 mission with relative ease, and from there I can raise the difficulty to something more appropriate. If the team had a couple of close calls, I'll stay at +0. If the team beat everything in a decent tempo and everything went smoothly, I'll go to +1, and if we just brutally steam-rolled everything, it'll be time for +2 or maybe even +3.

In other words, always adjust the difficulty to the team, don't expect the team to adjust to the difficulty. By having an easy first mission you have a chance to see how good a team is and can pick a difficulty that is challenging without being frustrating and everyone's much more likely to enjoy themselves.

Could you please stop refering to healers? There is no AT in game called a healer, and no sets that are dominantly healing.

While we're on this subject. While I was doing stuff in Grandville yesterday, I saw someone broadcasting for an "SB corruptor" yesterday. It broke my heart to see a powerset reduced to just one power like that.