Herding vs. Non-Herding: TIME FOR SCIENCE!

I've been having a discussion with someone (he's a hero you don't know) on the topic of "herding". This strategy is not just regular herding, but:

For each spawn:
* Tank either picks a spot and announces "herding to here, stay back", or "jumping in, wait for spawn to condense."
* Tank then either herds spawn to that point, or jumps in and gathers.
* Tank announces "come get some!" or something similar, and everyone attacks the spawn.

The key points to this are that:

* No one attacks or moves up to the spawn before the tank gives the go-ahead. (You use macros, not typing, for the announcements.)
* You clear the spawn, then the tank picks the next spawn and repeats.

According to my correspondent, this technique is much faster than other ways of clearing missions. I am, at the very least, skeptical. However! This sounds like an opportunity for SCIENCE!

Herewith, my proposal:

THIS OFFER IS NOW PARTIALLY LIVE. See end of post for details.

Consider the Ouro arc "The Marauder's Cell". Imagine running it with a full team (8 people), with all default settings and a fixed time limit -- say, set the time limit to 1 hour, no inspirations, everything else on default. You treat the mission as a "defeat all"; you clear every group. When you finish the arc, you you screencap the final report window, and the team window, showing all teammates alive (so rez time/hospitals are counted). We thus know how long it took.

Now... You do this three times.

In one run, you do not designate a specific tank, you just run the mission without any organized tanking.

In one run, you designate a specfic tank, and you use the "herding" strategy described above.

In the third run, you designate a tank who does NOT use the "herding" strategy described above, and who uses tactics such as corner-pulling at most five times. You run at whatever rate you feel comfortable with, you split if you want, whatever.

You then post here:
* Your group composition (AT/primary/secondary, level)
* Rough level of enhancement of each team member (SOs, common IOs, set IOs, purples -- just a ballpark figure is probably fine).
* How long each run took you.
* If you are post-I19, which toons on the team had inherent fitness.
* How many individual deaths, if any, you had on each run.
* How many team wipes, if any, you had on each run.
* For each run, how much fun you felt like you had.

In addition, you post a global handle, to which I send 25M inf. I will send that once per team which runs all three missions, but if you do it again with a different team, you can collect twice. (I leave it to you to decide how to share the wealth out.)

Starting Thursday, November 11th: Up to four teams can run the trial and collect a reward. If there are problems with methodology, I'll start over with improved methodology. If the methodology works, I'll add a few more runs without changing it.

The prize per completion of the full three-run trial will be 25M, with a limit of 100M total inf available for payouts. This will be a preliminary test of the methodology to see whether there's obvious holes we missed. After that, I hope to do either six more with the same methodology, or ten total with fixed methodology. Ten runs should be enough, I think, to have preliminary data.

Note: You keep all your loot. I am not trying to hire you to farm purples or something. You keep the loot and inf from the runs.

Please post feedback on methodology. PLEASE DO NOT ARGUE ABOUT THE EFFECTIVENESS OF HERDING. We are not interested in your anecdotal evidence or your theories; we want HARD DATA.

Edit history:
Added the "defeat all" requirement.
Added death/wipe counts.
Added "all players alive at end".
Added "no insps".
Added "how much fun".
Clarified tanking strategy.
Went live for initial test runs.
Clarified that players keep loot.

You would be better off finding a mission that is a defeat all... trust and all that.

You should figure in deaths as well - part of tanking style that way is safety not just kill speed.

Thats my 2 inf.

I am open to suggestions for a better mission choice. One of the people I was talking to has a "no AE" policy, so we can't just do a custom one. And you're right, we should add death counts. (But, ETA: The person specifically told me it was faster to herd.)

Yeah, my argument had been that given aggro cap, this elaborate practice was just wasting time, but I was assured that it was faster, and that this SG's groups were the fastest out there. This totally fails to mesh with my experience, but I figure it makes sense to use SCIENCE!!! to resolve the question.

Since the claim was very broad -- that this technique produces faster runs, and that missions run this way are faster -- I'm not too worried about generality for now. If there's backpeddling to "well, it's faster for this specific enemy group", we can mess with that then.

Map is going to have a huge impact on what method works best. Troll caves don't allow Drill Sergant tank to maximize his team commands all that much whereas office maps are great for picking a nice spot to aggro two mobs together at once.



On an 8 men team this hallway will spawn two mobs. One mob in the room to the right, the second mob standing in the hall around that corner on the left. Now teams steamroll this corner all the time, but I think a tank who uses the Drill Sergant method of tanking, holding the team back until the tank picks the time to attack, would have an slight edge over tanks who rushing it. Rushers would risk fighting two mobs on both sides, not concentrating debuffs and controls on the same mob. AOE immoblizes and patches (tar glue) could slow the rushing team down mobs stuck in the hall while the team is fighting in the room, or vice versa.

Other corners and crannies found in office map could give a small edge to the Drill Sergant, the Troll Caves give a small edge to rushers, Sewers can go either way.

I know you said no AE, since someone doesn't want to do AE. You make the rules though, in AE there are some nice transition maps, office-troll cave-sewers. You can also pick this style of map and set it to random. That way when each team runs it, they face a different map, and different terrain has to be utilized and overcome.

Good luck with the test, I think you should be more specific about the two tanking styles that aren't Drill Sergant. I don't really see that much difference between the two styles.

Marauder's Cell IS a defeat all mission.

Just thought I'd mention that.

But, it might be a good idea to pick one that does NOT include an AV fight, as that can skew the results depending on how effective the team is against AVs.

Just as a side note, I don't really consider "herding" and "concentrating a spawn" (as you described it, jumping into the middle, getting their attention) to be the same thing. I am, as I'm reading, assuming they're doing the second spawn-by-spawn.

This, to me, is herding - "old school" screenshot with a floor full (just about) of Nemesis chasing down ... think his name was White Knight, an /Inv scrapper:

(This is back in I3/I4, so it had *all* the abuses - stacked mobs, no cap, etc.)

Me jumping into a spawn, essentially nailing them in place as I eat the alpha isn't the same thing - I'm just getting that spawn's attention and keeping it on me so the team can unload.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Herding has to be one of the more slow ways to clear a map. If you can just roll it, why go through the elaborate dance of:

"WAIT HERE, PULLING"

<everyone stands around as the tank goes to get a mob that they could all just walk up to and annihilate>

"OK ATTACK NOW!"

There was a time when this was as fast as it could get. However, those days are long gone. If you can't pull more than 2 groups (which with the aggro cap you can't really) then you just introduce a delay into the eventual defeat of the mob.

When I get on a team like that, I don't say anything, politely finish the mission and find a convenient excuse to move on. The Tanker is usually the one leading the team, and I can respect the effort it took them to form. I won't stay beyond one mission and dislike the whole thing, but if it's their ball, I'll acquiesce.

Mind you, if it's my team, I'll explain that we can just manage without herding. If they complain... well there is a kick button.

Herding and pulling aren't the same thing, though. Pulling IS slow, but sometimes the only safe way to take out a group that is too close to a second group or near a boss when you can't handle all of them at once. Herding can be very fast if you have a good team.

But I hate it when some team members ignore the tank's attempts to herd. I'm not talking about when a team decides not to herd - I mean when the tank is herding and most of the team gets back, but one smart **** decides he knows better and short circuits the herding. It usually results in more deaths and more wasted time while the stragglers are rounded up. If you're finding that just rushing in is quicker, then you can probably afford to turn up the difficulty (or your one of those people who thinks spending 40 minutes out of every hour running back from the hospital is good gaming).

Keep in mind that when the tank herds all of the mobs into a tight knot, you're going to get all of them into the range of your AoE attacks making them much more effective. If you don't let your tank herd, then half the mobs will escape your debuffs, holds, etc. Especially these days with all the *#@$!! runners.

I've seen a good herding tank run through missions so fast you feel like your level 40 is gaining exp like a level 10. As in most things, it's the people that make the difference.

Herding by pulling back to spot is definitively slower. Herding forward can be faster. It really is the team synergy that will dictate the speed.

The method advocated is definitely a complete kill of each spawn before starting the next. Most groups were pulled back to a location away from where they started, though some were gathered just by jumping in. But definitely, full kill of each spawn, then tell people to wait, then gather, then tell people to jump in.

And the assertion made is specifically that it is much faster than teams who don't have that pattern -- that no other tactic is comparable in how quickly it burns through missions. I have only anecdotal evidence to the contrary, that being that when I play traps/ on a team with these people, I can do PGT, seeker drones, acid mortar, and probably triage beacon on every spawn, while in most groups I have to do something like alternating PGT and seeker drones, or drop acid mortar a little late in one spawn and then skip it the next.

You also have to take group composition into account. If one of the main damage contributions on the team is a fm/sd or el/sd scrapper and your debuffer is fire and forget instead of anchoring, then you don't need science to see the difference. You can measure the time difference between a team that waits for them to group and one that throws down AoE immobilizes while it's still spread with a sundial. The difference is not subtle.

And a group with 7 energy blasters will gain virtually nothing from any form of grouping things together.

Or a fire/kin fire/rad group will still benefit a tad from grouping, but since the pets don't require grouping and hot feet is not front loaded damage, you can wait longer for the group to come together while doing damage the whole time.

Pulling 2 rooms away around a corner is all about safety, but getting things to clump up is a huge difference for certain characters because of high damage/low radius attacks, buffs, and debuffs.

I'm sure the Behemoth Masters we were fighting last night were waiting for us to group for greater efficiency. However, they didn't have a tank calling it out.

I guess, the key distinction I'm looking at is the Full Clear And Tank Calls It thing; when you kill a spawn, do you finish it, then wait for the tank to call the next one, then wait for the tank to tell you to attack? If not, you're not really doing this strategy.

Merely waiting for things to bunch up a bit takes a couple of seconds. Waiting for the tank to announce the group, move to it, wait those couple of seconds, and then tell you that it's okay to attack, takes longer. Similarly, finishing a group completely before moving on takes a very long time.

I had a group for the halloween tip mission last night, and we usually had two spawns at a time. It would have been faster if we'd been more aggressive about that, though -- because we wouldn't have had five melee types standing next to a behemoth wondering why they couldn't hit it. (I pointed this out, and after that, my contribution was moving away from the behemoths that people were trying to melee.)

The group I was in for some hero tips last night had two tanks, so we played leapfrog pretty much the whole time. One of us would grab a group, and then the other would start rounding up the next group. People AoEd each group down to a couple of bosses, then someone would kill the last two things standing while people moved onto the next group, and the tank jumped to the one after that. I dunno if it was efficient, but it was fun.

Methodology seems stable enough that I'm willing to pay out some inf for trial results. Please screencap your results. Keep the screencaps, but please just post text in the thread, on the off chance that a modem user has fallen through a time vortex and is still using the Internet. We'll go to screencaps if someone cries HAX and anyone cares.