Herding... How does this work?

Okay, so, I've been on a lot of pugs. Usually, how it works is, if we have a tanker, brute, or scrapper (roughly in that order by preference), that toon charges into a new group, and everyone else follows, laying down AoEs and controls and the like. Ten or twenty seconds later, one blaster stays to finish off the last boss who's been triple-held and debuffed into a pile of soft goo, while the tanker runs on to the next group.

I was in a group last night that was... not like this. The tank would run to a location (say, a doorway), and say "Herding to here, stay clear". He'd then run out to a group, hit them, run back, hit them more, and then say "Come get some", and everyone would start attacking. Ten or twenty seconds later, we'd all sit there while he decided what to go after next and the scenario repeated. (There were a couple of other macros involved, like "jumping in, wait for mob to condense").

Now, since I was on a traps/ defender, I thought it was sort of neat having all my long-recharge powers available for every single pull, but I can't help but wonder what's up with this. Does this work? Does it produce better results in some way? Is there some kind of mechanic here I'm not aware of, that makes this desireable?

It felt a little like watching a WoW tank, who might want to get at least one hit on each of several things before other people attacked, but in CoH, other players aren't as ludicrously squishy -- you don't expect a blaster to get one-shotted by any attack from a typical creature you're fighting, for instance. So what, if anything, am I missing?

it's a vestige of the old days before the aggro cap and various other changes- it used to be very efficient to hang out and let the tank gather up the whole map before the blaster nuked or whatever.

Not all that efficient now.

It used to work much, much better, and some people just haven't figured out that it's not always as effective as just steamrolling mobs.

Basically, back in the day when there were no aggro limits, a Tanker could go into a room, aggro the entire room, and pull them all to one location for the team to wipe out. Effective, if a bit boring for most of the team.

Now, with the aggro limits, it is by no means faster to do this (at least most of the time), but it can be safer. It establishes the Tanker as the focus of the aggro at the beginning of the fight, and condenses mobs so that the tanker can more easily hold aggro. It also bunches things into debuffs better, as you found out.


Now, the problem is that the herding time is time that is spent not killing the enemies, which would've bunched around the Tanker anyways, if he knows what to do. So it's not usual any faster to herd nowadays, though it can be helpful sometimes, especially in tight rooms with multiple spawns, where there is a fear of over-aggroing the room.

This is more how things used to work. Honestly, this playstyle should have died with aggro and AoE caps, if not before.

Before there were both aggro and AoE caps, a Tanker could run off, herd up an effectively infinite amount of stuff (subject to their build's survivability), bring it all back to a corner (so it would pile around to get line of sight), and people could AoE it all to death. It also helped that, in really ancient days, mobs had no packing limits. So you could aggro as many foes as you could survive, they would pack with theoretically infinite density, and AoEs could hit as many of them as would fit in the radius of effect.

These days, playing this way only makes any sense if you're being really careful, like you're working on a "Master Of" task force badge. It's faster just to steamroll. All the Tanker needs to do is get majority aggro control on a spawn, everyone beats the snot out of it, and the whole team moves on. Some folks won't even bother with the Tanker part at all, given enough mezzes, buffs and/or debuffs or overwhelming damage.

When running my kin/arch, I actually find it rather efficient to allow the tank to gather up a good sized group, hit 'em with fulcrum shift, siphon power, and rain of arrows.... next.


.

I do it when I solo with my spines, fire or other AoE scrapper, brute or tanker but that's the only time I bother.

Herding is useful: if the enemies are scattered and your team has a lot of AoE, or if rushing into the room could result in a team wipe due to aggroing 2-3 full groups.

Any tank that insists on herding every single group is wasting time and doesn't have as good a grasp of the game as they probably think they do. But if they form the team, that's their call.

In the old days, not only was there no aggro cap, but there was no target cap either. If you used an AOE, it effected EVERYTHING within its area of effect. Not only that, the enemy NPC collision algorithm was dumber. That is, an aggroed enemy will do anything it can to get close to the aggroer, including jumping into and occupying the same space as another NPC.

This led to the term "dumpster diving". The herding Tank would run around the entire outdoor map (typically the Boomtown-like map) to gather up every enemy NPC. Then he would jump into a cargo container. All the aggro'ed NPCs would go nuts trying to get at him and pack the cargo container. There might be 50-100 individual NPCs in the cargo container that realistically should only have space for a dozen or so. The Tank would cast one more (no cap) Taunt to solidify his aggro and the Blasters would proceed to drop their (no cap) AOEs. The farming map could be done in 5 mins and be ready for a reset.

Nowadays, we have:
- aggro cap = 17 individuals
- Taunt cap = 5 individuals
- target cap = 16 individuals

If you have a lot of aoe it can be nicer to have the spawns tightly grouped.

I like to do it on my brute, especially when I solo because it makes it easier for me to kill them all--less walking--it feeds my RttC and my fury.

I don't pull them backwards though. I pull them forward. Pulling the 1st spawn into the second spawn and perhaps around a corner to get the ranged attackers in closer.

While herding every group is an outmoded playstyle, there are times when it is effective. It really depends on the team.

There are powersets that really benefit from gathering up large groups: examples include Plant Control with its one-shot Seeds of Confusion, and Shield Defense with its damage buff from large groups and Shield Charge as an AoE attack. A team with a lot of AoE powers may benefit from a herding strategy, especially if the foes are really spread out.

But most of the time, a tank that orders the team to wait while he gathers up a group is not a tank I want to team with.

Efficiency and effectiveness be damned. It's not fun, and as a tank, I'd only attempt it as a last resort.

Yeah, herding like that is usually inefficient now-a-days, although it can still be good in a couple situations;

• when you reach a "room of death". Rooms with a few to many spawns packed unusually tight together. Steamrolling can still work, but accidentally catching the aggro of the other spawns can wipe an unprepared team.
• The rest of the team cannot handle the mobs that are over the (acting)tank's aggro limit. Most likely to occur if a smaller team is running missions at x8. But if you have to resort to herding every other mob, it might be time to lower the settings a bit.
• Coulda sworn I had a third, now I can't remember it.

It's way more fun to herd if the team is good. Nothing like pulling a huge ton of aggro onto a single spot so things can get killed faster.

Herdicane, toggle debuffs and bubble pushing are great ways to make friends work harder or get that touch of vengeance.

With aggro caps you can herd a mob onto your tank as a focal point and transfer that aggro onto him/her and the rest of the team and then pull more onto that spot. That way the aggro caps work on the entire team so you get a nice stream (conga line) of bad guys running to a spot to pwn that lazy emp. If you kill them fast enough the aggro will switch to someone less squishy but over aggro herding is probably the only real way to herd nowadays over steamrolling in terms of any net efficiency (and not always).

Traditional herding is pretty old skool and probably doesn't do much for most teams anymore except the squishiest.

While the aggro cap is limited, this play style still does work. I use it all the time on my tanks, though not at all times. If a tank is pulling just a single mob at a time, there really is no benefit over steamrolling a mob at a time. However, if you factor in the "conga line of stupidity" and a large room full of mobs, herding still works wonders. Example:

I'm on my Ice/ tank and the team comes upon one of the "rooms of death," a room usually so packed with mobs that multiple spawn aggro is common. I run in and aggro the entire room (or a portion thereof, depending on the team) and come back to where the rest of the team is waiting. Due to the aggro cap, only a portion will come at first. However, mobs will "remember" the aggro and come running as soon as a NPC is defeated, constantly replenishing the mob gathered around me. Done right, this can turn a large room into a stream of ambushes (essentially) which are MUCH easier to manage at a choke point than standing in the middle of said room. It also tends to eliminate the ranged-mobs from raining death from afar, which can be much harder to manage as they tend to scatter out of range of most debuffs/AoEs.

Again, if a tank is ALWAYS doing this, there are definitely issues. However, in certain instances, it's still very useful. Now, if you have MULTIPLE tanks, herding from two or more different sources and bringing them back to the main team... well, then some truly awesome carnage can begin.

Beaten to the punch! Glad to know I'm not the only one that still sees the benefit! :P

As I play a tank sometimes, it's easy to get nervous about your team and want to be as careful as possible. A lot of deaths (team or personal) in the pre-20 levels can make folks overly cautious.

Hearding like that, what I call corner pulling (as opposed to fighting the mobs in place or pulling them forward), works when you need to be very careful. If you have a pug and you want to see how they perform, when you've got some folks with lag, when you don't have as much control as you'd like, if spawns are close together and might aggro easily, those are times when it's reasonable to corner pull stuff away from its spawn point.


Aside:

MOB = mobile. That's one dude.

Spawn or group = lots of mobs all together. Some folks are calling a spawn a "mob" like it means a mob of people. Just kinda grates my mental nerves a bit.

For the most part it's outdated, although there are exceptions. I very rarely herd anymore but I do gather dispersed groups together for AOE and aggro control.

Genesis Man mentioned one situation where more "classic" herding is still useful today; thinning out one of the "rooms of death" by aggroing a large portion of the mobs and then bringing them outside the room. 17 will follow you and gather tightly for your team to AOE and more will follow as current ones die. Repeat this once or twice and that deadly room will be thinned out enough to more safely take down with more conventional (in today's game) means.

All in all it's another tool in a tanker's toolbox; much less frequently useful now than it used to be but still a valid tactic in the right situation albeit considerably less valid outside those few ideal situations. A good tanker has many techniques for managing aggro and will use the ones that are appropriate to a particular group and situation. I'd rarely herd a typical room; those tactics are for situations where the rest of the team would be in serious danger from other spawns.

Good tanks will however bunch a mob into a compact group for the team's AOE's (and to maximize his aura's effectiveness) and make sure they point away from the team (keeping cones and AOE's away from squishier teammates), and they'll do this reflexively. For me it's an automatic thing, I gather a group tight around me, toss a taunt or ranged attack on any mobs targeting squishies and then spread the love with my attacks while the team takes down the spawn. Once the spawn's dead or nearly so I move on to the next spawn and repeat the process.

Going back to issue 3-4, the Golden Age of Tanks, it really was a lot of fun as a tanker to run around a map and herd up 200-300 mobs; pull them all around a corner and then take them out. I recall one teammate asking another on one of those runs what I was doing and the other teammate saying "Making Nvidia more money" as I came around a corner with 300 mobs in pursuit. A Kinetic pops Fulcrum (causing SERIOUS lag) then a blaster Nukes. A very efficient way to clear a map in minimum time in it's day although boring for most of the team. I still have some old screenshots of CMA surrounded by 300+ Freakshow. The game has changed from then however and what was efficient and effective then is usually a waste of time now.

Like others, I definitely "herd" when soloing large spawns, because I can usually use it to both pack more foes in my AoEs, and also sometimes use it to prevent all foes from getting LoS on me. Depending on what you're fighting with what, it's sometimes useful to reduce the heat on you solo.

It's not something anyone I team with would do on a team of more than, like, two people, and maybe not then. Again, unless we were trying extra hard not to die. Trying extra hard not to die is actually very likely to be bad for your rate of reward - it's almost always better to be close enough to dying that you probably do die some of the time. If you never die, you could be going faster.

Yeah, my experience on pugs is normally that the good groups are the groups where people occasionally die, because in XP/hour, even factoring in debt, you're utterly stomping what you get standing around waiting for the tank.

Also... It's FUN to be doing stuff that's a bit hard.

I had a team a while back that had one brute, and one dom, and everything else was blasters and scrappers. We were fast, but not durable. It was fun.

Well place me in the corner herding catagory. On my tanks and brutes, its always grab 1-3 groups, pack them into a corner and let loose. Only times I don't do this are when I know the team will kill fast enough that aggro isn't a concern, or the spawns are all tight enough that aoe's will hit most of a group at once. I will admit I hop onto my tanks/brutes with the mindset of 'how can I make it easier and safer for everyone else on the team" and small herding efforts do work for the most part in fufilling that criteria.

More than one group means going over the aggro cap, which I'd see as a disadvantage, depending on the group.

I guess it's to some extent a tradeoff between speed and reliability, although sometimes the tank off by his lonesome with no support just dies, which is always a sign that it's about to be funny.