While CoH has pretty strong solo play, even at higher levels, half the fun is teaming up (and more than half is teaming up with folks you know).
That said, teaming is a crap shoot. It’s difficult to tell, unless you’re doing the team picking, whether an invitation from someone to join a team is a good idea or a bad idea.
Rule #1: If the person couldn’t go to the trouble of coming up with an interesting comic book hero name, decline the invitation. “Fredasdfasdfasdf” is probably not who you want to run around with. It’s up to you whether proper capitalization counts.
That said, I dearly wish that there was a way to tell something about the person inviting you in, short of /telling them back to say, “Hey, what level are you, and what are you doing?” Which, I suppose, would be the proper and intelligent thing to do, but it’s annoying that there’s not some sort of facility to do that. (If there is, somebody clue me in.)
Rule #2: You do not want to be the highest level person in the group. Either your presence will skew the mission difficulty upwards (if you’re the leader), or else you’ll simply get the lowest experience rewards. In either case, it’s not a good thing. From a personal levelling standpoint you probably want to be mid-low in the group, though, obviously, not everyone can do that.
Now, there are things you can do with Exemplaring that I don’t yet fully grok. But, in general, if the rest of the team could either be your Sidekicks, or close to it, you probably don’t want to run with them unless they’re people you know you’re going to have fun with (because you know them).
Rule #3 (aka “Doyce’s Law”): Don’t be afraid to say “This is just nuts, let’s leave” about a mission — or, for that matter, about the team you’re on, if it’s clear that they’re not a disciplined group. Undisciplined teams are inevitably dead teams. Missions that start out all red and purple are not going to get easier further in. Teams that don’t recognize that aren’t smart, and dumb teams are inevitably dead teams, too. Suck up the time investment and quit, before you throw good online hours (and experience debt) after bad.
Okay, enough nattering for the moment.
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***Dave Does the Game
Hmm. Doyce and I were just discussing Rule #1, right around the time you were posting.
I don’t understand why, when I decline an invitation, I always receive another invitation from the same guy 20 seconds later. Do they think I’m accidentally declining, and I really want to join? Or do they think I’ll join just so I won’t have to keep declining their spam invitations?
At least one guy asked why I was declining, and upon receiving my explanation (regarding unpleasant experiences with blind-invite groups), understood my trepidation and discussed the group and its plans. I joined and had a good time. In fact, the three of us remaining at the end all independentley added the other two to our Friends lists!
Still, I’d rather group with people who are friends outside the game. I had more fun trashing bozos with Dave tonight than I had taking down orange cons with the earlier group.
I definitely have more fun playing with people I know IRL than with random strangers, but I’ve not had too many bad experiences with pick-up teams. One thing you can do to get the team you want is to form your own team! Use the “search” button and it will show you all the players who have “seek team” turned on. It starts out by showing you all the players in your zone, but you can filter it to show certain archetypes, levels, or zones. If you are standing in front of a character, you can click on them, and it will show their level, archetype, etc., in one of the little info windows (the same one that shows how much health an enemy has left when you’re fighting him).
That’s the Target window, and it’s invaluable. If your teammates are in range, you can also click on them in the display and get them to pop up in the Target window, which is how I knew yesterday that the team I’d been invited to was 2-4 levels below me universally.
Which may have worked out okay in some other situation, but wasn’t what I was looking for at the time.
Yes, I get repeat invites sometimes, and it’s a bit annoying. I’ve had folks ask why I wasn’t teaming, and the answer is usually (stop me if you’ve heard this one) that I’m not sure how much time I have on, so I didn’t want to get involved in anything big. But, then, if it’s just a hunt, the time investment is not all that great.
I am not inclined, myself, toward forming teams (at least not yet). I’ve done it a couple of times, and I prefer not to have to do cat herding. That said, the group I was in last night ended up with me as the team lead after the first disastrous encounter, and I managed to guide us to victory with disciplined pulling and support work, so perhaps I have a knack. Maybe I should go into management …
Of course, I also ended up staying up a lot longer than I’d intended leading that group, but it worked well, and I half-levelled Psi-clone to 8.5, I believe.
Speaking of teaming…
Roben now has the same mission that Velvet has.
Gang leader.
Yeah I wish that when the box popped up it would let you have look at the team like the team box shows. That way you could better determine if this is the team for you.
Also Dave…you did do a good job of reigning in Komarr Saturday. So you do do a good job with the team leader thing, just that since we are novices (with extensive guidance from Doyce and Jackie) I can more then understand the desire not to be in charge.
Yeah. Though I’m usually still more of the “offering helpful comments from the side” sort of guy. 🙂
I don’t know if this applies to COH or not. However, it works in World of Warcraft and worked in Dark Age of Camelot and Star Wars Galaxies:
In those games you can do a /who character name i.e. /who Laurelanwyn would return Level 50 Dwarf Paladin Ironforge to indicate my level, my guild and where I am at currently. I make no promises that it works in your environs but it does seem to be a common thread.
WoW does have a “push” so to speak to group up to get high level quests or instanced dungeons done. I have the advantage of being able to always group with Rick or to group with our guild. We ended up in the guild we are in currently because some of the people that we were in a guild with in DAOC and SWG we’ve followed around from game to game always talking in RL about what server we plan to be on. Some of those people painstakingly researched the “big” guild that we are in now. As with RL there are people in the guild that aren’t fun to deal with but for the most part everyone is really nice and does a good job to help people out or just be supportive in guild chat.
Personally, I think the fact that Rick and I play the game together is a fun thing. I also think we have it better than some of our in game friends who have problems with the wife/girlfriend (insert appropriate gender) because they don’t play the game. That being said, I think Margie would like the game too. 🙂
Some how it ate my guild name which is Morgantis. So Level 50 Dwarf Paladin Morgantis Ironforge.
Probably because guild names are hemmed by < and > symbols, which HTML interprets as a tag and blah blah blah… the web page ate your guild. =)
Too bad you can’t use symbols in guild names or else it might be funny to have some kind of HTML in-joke as a guild name. Like <WHUPASS TYPE=can VALUE=open>.
And speaking of WoW guilds, I’m trying to make a guild of male dwarves on Uther populated by Grabthar and the sons of Wharvan, so if anyone feels like creating a silly alt with no other redeeming value than to play out a Galaxy Quest schtick, send mail to Grabthar.
Okay, that rule #3 is actually Lee’s rule.
Doyce’s rule is this:
If you get a blind invite, send a tell back to the guy and ask ‘what’s up?’ If he can’t communicate to you intelligently about what his purpose in grouping up is, decline. Period. The ability to communicate with a modicum of skill is one of the best litmus tests in the game for weeding out crappy leaders.
Same things goes when building up a team — send tells first, by checking out folks in the Find Team window. If they can’t hold a two-minute, four-tell exchange without to establish interest in an intelligible manner, do not invite them.
There are exceptions to this rule — I have even experienced one.
One.
Draw from that what you will.
((Dave, you can use the Find Team window to do a directed search for a person, by name, regardless of what zone they’re in — that will tell you level, AT, and that kind of stuff about someone sending you and invite.))
How to not die as much in a team:
1. Every group has one puller, who may or may not be used in every fight. The puller is the person who attacks first, or draws fewer mobs back to the group than are in the cluster. If you are not the puller, DON’T PULL. That will just get you and your friends killed.
2. Don’t wander away from the group. Curiosity, cat. Figure out who is leading and follow them.
3. Stay within healing range of the healing person, if you have one. In my experience, good defenders have more tactical know-how than average scrappers and blasters, so being near them is usually good in any case. YMMV.
4. Don’t wait until the last possible second to use a healing inspiration or activate a self heal. If, at that least second, you are held, get hit by surprise, take an especially hard lick, or any one of 20 other things go wrong, you are road kill. If you’re down enough that a portion of the heal isn’t going to go wasted, heal thyself.
5. If you are getting beaten like a narc at a biker rally, back off. Run, if need be. Most fights are not Little Big Horn. There *is* an exit. Acknowledge that you are still going to get hit for at least 10 to 15 seconds after you break off, if not more. Plan for it.
6. If you have area of effect (AoE) attacks or defenses, be judicious in their use. When you attack 10 mobs at once, they tend to think that isn’t funny and remember who did it. AoEs are fine toward the latter half of fights to put things away, or when a group has a lot of them as a whole and they are sufficient in the aggregate to wipe things out. But if you let loose with one at the beginning on mobs that take time to kill, you are likely to pay for it, usually quickly. (Which isn’t to say I never do that, but I do it with a goal in mind.)
7. Use assist. Assist is your friend. All you have to do is target a fellow player (usually a melee or the ranged attacker who is leading the ranged attacks). When you press an attack button, you will automatically fire at whatever mob that player has targeted. Best of all, 9 times out of 10, the targeted player will take the heat, not you. That’s what he’s made for. (If the person you’re targeting off of is switching to a new target after the old one goes down too slowly, find someone else to assist.)
8. Ask yourself, “Why, if I have ranged attacks, am I standing in the middle of all the bad guys where they can lay hands on my delicate person?” If you can fight effectively from afar, (or, better, above) stay there.
9. Don’t get too close to the bad guys where you draw proximity aggro by accident.
10. If you have defensive powers (Hover, Combat Jump, ad nausea) or inspirations (Luck), use them. Stay close to players who give buffs when they are buffing so that you have them too.
11. Never *rely* on getting a heal from another player. Never. Things go wrong. The healer may get held, or killed, or be healing someone else, or waiting to recharge, or be out of endurance, or watching a particularly riveting scene from a Gilligan’s Island rerun. When you see that health bar go down, be ready to back off, flee, heal yourself, or all of the above.
12. Some fights are doomed. If you hit something for 17, and he hits you back for 250, you can see the writing on the wall. Don’t wait to be abused. F6 is the
((Dave, you can use the Find Team window to do a directed search for a person, by name, regardless of what zone they
F6 is the
There’s a full description here of default key bindings, including the F6 that Doyce mentions above, and the parallel F8 (whistles and tells the team “HELP!”).
Good stuff. I need to print that page out.
And, since I didn’t say it above, Doyce, very good summary.
Regarding the defender being up on the front lines — sometimes it’s necessary. Rad/Rad defenders have to mix it up a lot more than, say, and Empathy/Energy Blast Defender. Something with the Electricity Blast falls somewhere in the middle.
Actually, since Empathy is nearly the ONLY primary Defender set with a targeted, ranged heal (and, even then, single target) you can virtually guarantee to see healers in the middle of stuff eventually.
Then, just wait til the mid-20’s and up, when the mobs get smarter and go after defenders right away, by PREFERENCE, unless convinced otherwise.
As a comment on #5, a group I was running in (were you there, Stan, or was it a different one? I think it was the Frostfire mish) the other evening ended up being undergunned after the mission started. We ended up being pretty good at (a) hitting hard, and (b) running like hell before anyone died (barely, and sometimes not quite barely enough). Fact is, though, when it’s a matter of numbers, you can beat the bad guys by whittling them down — you heal a lot more quickly than they repopulate, and if there’s a good elevator nearby, you can break off their pursuit, rest up, recharge, and have at them again.
Took us 3-4 forays to take down Frostfire at the end (with one death, at least, mine) but we did it without having to rerun the whole mission.
“He who fights and runs away doesn’t end up with a bunch of XP debt to recover from, and can come back and whoop some ass in a minute or two.”
Actually, since Empathy is nearly the ONLY primary Defender set with a targeted, ranged heal (and, even then, single target) you can virtually guarantee to see healers in the middle of stuff eventually.
I thought that might be the case. And the targeted, ranged heal is pretty nice (and a really quick recycle).
Then, just wait til the mid-20
Doyce has distilled many words of wisdom on CoH teams.
Ian let me know when you’re on normally and I will gladly create an alt to help you with your guild.
Life has me pretty busy these days, so I’m somewhat inconsistent, but if I’m on, it’ll probably be after 9 pm PT Monday through Wednesday. I may be losing Tuesdays (Taoist face reading class) and Wednesdays (Cantonese lion dancing) soon, and regain my Thursdays.
Yeah… what kind of gamer am I? 😉 I used to be a hardcore addict, now it seems I’m casual at best. Case in point, Naivety is still level 5.
You can find me on Uther as Naeve, generally.
Had a great team last night.
2 Defenders (1 bubbler, 1 healer)
2 blasters (1 electric/ice), 1 ice/force)
There was pulling, coordination, there was booting of a guy who charged in a AoE 10 yellows.
It was great to find a group of folks who know how to do a team, other then the current core group.