Squad Leader Archive
Thread: This Week's Top 5 Prototype Countdown
1. Put SOMETHING in Novice Squad leader. Suggest: +10 Group Meele Defense +10 Group Raged Defense. Leave the totals; this will stabilize group combat.
2.Add SOME sort of icon indication so players know what they are getting from leaders.
3.Promote – Gives player a TITLE and COLOUR. E.G. “/promote Mike Puller Yellow”
This color shows on the radar, and the title on people while in the group.
4. Add SOME sort of exp bleed for group member kills 10% leader exp for group member kill would be fine.
5.100% Volley fire.
6.New commands PLEASE. E.G:
Save – We can save a player. +30 seconds, target player can't attack, but can't take damage.
To the last man – Players receive 3x attack rate for 10 seconds, then 6x damage for 20 seconds.
Fear – All animal mobs run away from party. Players get 2x damage for 10 seconds
Retreat - Non fatal 15 second burst run.
/waypointTheLeader for every user, gives waypoint of squad leader so they can find there way back to the group.
... etc ... They are easy to make up.
Top 5 issues...
First off I think our top five issues should concern the Squad leaders extreme lack of substantial worth in the game so here goes....
1) Need more group combat related passive skills (ie. Improved defence, Improved attack, and a means for other players in the group to see what the squad leader is targeting).
2) Some sort of a squad leader WP system would be nice that he could send to all players or certain players individually in his/her group.
3) Default round robin looting and harvesting control so that all members of a group can enjoy fair opportunity to loot and harvest enemies (this should also be on a timer for the case when a player chooses not to loot or harvest)
4) Squad leader slide bar to control balancing of bonuses (bonus pool and bonus options would go up depending on skill set and level in skill that this would be granted ... ie. Less mobility for Higher ranged skill or less defense for higher exp bonus ... this would much better mimic real life leaders desired use of tactics and strategy and would give the squad leader a much much better control of group dynamics and desirability)
5) Exp bonuses that allow a group to go beyond the current group bonus restrictions (Roleplayed as a squad leader causes his group to follow disciplined tactics and strategy and therefore they learn better how to take down opponents)
1. Novice Squad Leader ability is silly/worthless. Change to be a FORMATION/AUTO FOLLOW command (ala Shadowbane). This means I hit a button and everyone autofollows me.
2. Volley Fire - Make this a "switch until dead" move, instead of "take 1 shot at this target then go back to whomever you were shooting at before". Almost like an auto assist. I click the button, everyone's target perma changes to what Im targetting.
3. Somehow show our bonuses in effect. The bonuses say they are there, but who really knows?
4. Boost Morale - make this a group HAM heal. Either heals the entire group full HAM or a few hundred points. Make a timer of 10 minutes or so to avoid exploitation.
5. Special Abilities are weak overall.
I said this in my post
"3) The skills need to be fixed and in my opinion be much more helpful to the group. Like I noticed that Scatter Shot only benefits me, and it only does 1 damage to the target. So that skill doesnt help the group and it is broken"
Just ignore that completely...I'm mixing up my professions lol. I don't know why I said that lol
Clearly SL skills and abilities need improvement, but at a more basic level, I agree with most everyone else that SL xp is the thing that needs fixing most. Not only should the XP include bonuses for what the group does (particularly what it does better because of the SL leading them) it also needs to be done such that there is a motivation for having groups larger than 2. The way it stands now, there is little reason for an SL to group with anyone other than their pet(s)...adding people to the group can actually reduce an SLs xp/time the way things are now.
--Ze'ev
1. Novice Squad Leader
This has been stated before, but I think it's more important than what other people are making of it. Every novice skill in the game gives something to the player. For instance, a Novice Marksman is *noticably* better at usingranged weapons than a Novice Artisan. However, thatArtisan could just as easily lead a squad as a Novice Squad Leader.
2.Experience
There's lots of theories going around, but I for one don't think that group size should be such a big issue. A well conditioned, effective, yet small group should earn good xp compared to 19 blithering idiots in your group.
3. Abilities
Implimenting them would be super.
Imagine your the squad leader. You have your squad's tabs on the left side. with thier names gives commands like move, attack, retreat, heal ect. Now picture the little waypoint lines(not the sky beam)you get like when you do /find to look for some trainer and assigning those lines to your squad members towards the targets you need dead. you can click on a target then basicly send him a command to attack a particular target. Or when some guy is real weak you can command him to back off. It would still require the manual work of the of the guys under him but it would be more organized.
Finally i think the master squad should be given the ability to KILL HIS OWN SQUADLINGS. Thats right! some times people don't listen or do something real dumb..... you think vader would put up with it. BAM! your dead! you rest do not fail me again! you know the trigger happy idiot who attacks every single monster and jawa while your in a imperial mission? Kicking him out the group is not enough =) we need to be able to just shoot the guy. As a bonus if you shoot the guy the rest of the squad go up in FOCUS and QUICKNESS. as to give the affect of being scared crapless into doing it right. lol
Okay, keep in mind that I am not yet a squad leader and all I have to go on is what other people say/what the skills are/seem to be.
That said:
1. Novice squadleader is of negligable usefulness. The Sysgroup command is neat, especially if we get the ability to change its color and it gets a beep, but I've always thought of it as anicing-on-the-cake ability, notanythingto make the skill box desireable except as a prereq for the higher branches. Novice squad leader needs a little bit more. I think if we addeither orboth of the following, it would be great:
+5 each to group general combat defense, group general combat accuracy, and group general combat speed.
10% reduction to FP costs (makes far more sense for squad leader than smuggler, anyway).
2.Mobility branch usefulness is limited. Leave it as is for boxes 1 and 2, but make boxes 3 and 4 give +10% and +25% respectively to Group Speed would make this a highly desired skill branch / profession.
3. Add a guard ability. This would place a member of the squad under protection that would provide a small chance (maybe 10%) that an attack directed at them would be diverted randomly to another member of the group. This would help to protect non-combatants like medics. Obviously you can't /guard yourself. This would improve with skill, either gaining the ability to /guard more than one group member, or increasing the chance that the shot will be diverted, or both.
4. Consolidate the group combat bonuses into one skill branch. They are spread too thin to be useful. Also make them more generally effective. Instead of having melee and ranged defense only, give general combat defense, general combat accuracy, and general combat speed at the same bonus rates.
5. Basically just reorganize the skill branches and add abilities as necessary to make the whole profession more balanced and effective.
I will post a thread with a suggested modified skill tree in a few.
1. the way exp is gained needs to be changed to reflect total group involvement rather than basing exp gained on SL damage. Leaders are generally too valuable to put at the front line. Lets reflect that here.
2. Make Sys message more visable somehow. It gets lost easy in the attack/message spam.
3. Leave other abilities as they are; ranged defense, melee defense, movement bonus etc
4. fix the abilities that we already have
5. Master ability; Coordinated Strike. Useable once every 30 minutes. All group members within range of SL's designated target make a simultaneous attack which does not count as an attack in their attack queue. (damage suggestions here??) This attack has significant HAM costs and causes minor wounds to SL. This should be something that people see and go "OHHHH, AHHH."Possibly a graphic that looks like everyone in the group using Full-Auto at the same time on same target followed with everyone throwing grenades whether or not they have them (remember its just a graphic) and then of course , pretty explosions.
No one ever said that it was easy being a leader. Why would we want to go thru with many of these proposed changes? I guarantee that ifmany of the proposed changeswere made, we'd havea galaxy of leaders and no grunts to carry out orders.
Lots of nice posts and Ideas so I won't post everything, heres mine...
1. Being asquad leader is a responsibilty, and we need to take care of the troops we support. I want to see Noivce Squad leader get the Drag Incap/Drag Corpse at novice.... I feel it is worthless I have to spend 20 points in medic just to get this ability when we are the ones who should make sure our men stay alive
2. XP: Yes we should be bonuses for using our abilities, however IMO, this should come with a draw back. If our men die in a battle, how noble is that for us to have them to lose their life when we should be the first to take the hits. Besides tweaking XP to be improved by what we do I want to see an XP penalty for what we do not do. In other words, if you are fighting a MOB and a group member is incapped, you should lose 50% Squad Leader XP for that Kill. If a group member DIES, we lose all XP for that kill. This of course would come with a message telling us why we lost the XP. I say this because I see so many SLs out there getting a group of 20, rushing to the King in the Tusken fort, Killing as much as they can until their group dies, then they run away and get 20 more people and keep doing this... Well this make all Squad leaders look bad and it sucks for the players.
3. Special Abilities... When I first looked at these I liked a few of them and thought they could make or break a group. AIM: This is worthless... This should last a set amount of time, not 1 round, or give a passive bounus. VOLLEY: This should be an auto assist for RANGED only, and this should not be forced upon players to have to kill this mob until it is dead, they should be able to change targets. We should never force a person in a game to do something they do not want. MORALE: I was expecting high hopes for this only to find out it evens out wounds not damage, that needs to be changed.
4. Regen... I have seen a lot of posts about this and I had the same Idea in my head as well.. This is my view on it though. Docs and CMs are here for the health and action, SLs need to take care of the mind, being that things are a lot easier with a leader in combat. We need either a mind cost reduction or mind regen in the follow fashion, 5% regen or cost reduction should go in these boxes, Novice, Leadership I through IV and Master. This leads to 30% of which ever the devs feel is less abusive.
5. With the Terrain/Mobilitiy tree Squad leaders should gave an additional 128 meters of which they can see their group members on the radar. This might be some major coding work, however a squad leader should know where their members are at ALL times, even if the group is broken apart. This doesnt really buff the Squad leader class, however I think it is a very useful tool in long range missions.
Those are my ideas!
Hogetveit Ny'Mortuis
Sunrunner
Squad Leader/Pistoleer/Medic
1.) SL exp is both dumb, broken, and over priced. Nothing as a support class should be based on my damage output period. I'm not in the group to do damage, I'm in the group to make sure the objective is achieved. I would suggest basing it on combat experience but that is just as broken. SL exp should be based on the combat experience of the entire group at a minimum.
2.) What is the point in this profession? We don't give appreciable bonuses to anything. Don't get me wrong, the /sys command is helpful but what else do we do really? Give us some point.
3.) Skill HAM cost should not be based on the number of people in the group. We should be rewarded for having larger groups to lead (it certainly is more work) and part of that reward should be more efficient use of our skills. A per member cost, flat lines our strength.
4.) Every level of every skill should add a recognizable bonus to our group. With a squad leader, a group should miss less, hit harder, take less damage and be more mobile.
5.) We should be able to see EVERY mission our group members have so we can plan our trip. I don't care if that means we get 2 missions for every member or we just see all the waypoints. 95% of my communication issues is trying to figure out who's mission is closest. I get tons of... "We just passed mine" and "Mine is only 150 meters that way." A squad leader should have all the information available so that the squad can be lead intelligently. We need to be able to lead... I spend most of my time babysitting and negotiating. THIS IS DRIVING ME NUTS.