Squad Leader Archive

At the master level a squad leader has the following passive group bonuses.

• +60 Group Terrain Negotiation


• +60 Group Burst Run Efficiency


• +30 Group Ranged Defense


• +30 Group Melee Defense

We confer these "benefits" to our group mates (and ourselves) all the time at no cost to any of our pools, they're always on. I do not know if there is a range limitation on these or not.

Group Ranged Defense

This is a hotly debated topic. I think it's one of the main draws of the Squad Leader profession yet few seem to know what it does and a great many believe it's not working. I'm not going to debate that right now, but I am currently taking Noules' post at face value. If you have not read it, or it's parent thread in Pistoleer I suggest you do so:

Group Ranged Defense Works: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=squad_leader&message.id=4561

Weapons Accuracy Test : http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=pistoleer&message.id=14370

In a nutshell, every 2 points of +Ranged defense adds +1% chance that your attacker will miss you on any given shot. It stacks with other personal defense mods that people get from their own weapons professions. At the master SL level (+30) you essentially casue your enemies to miss your group 15% more. That's an additional 1 out of 7 shots that your enemies will -miss-.

It should be noted that this bonus can be nullified if the attacker has very very high accuracy (The "to-hit" cap is +95. If the (attacker's accuracy)> 95 + (Personal Ranged Def) + (Group Ranged Def) + (other mods?) then the attacker is still going to hit 95% of the time and your bonuses will be moot.

I think a lot of contention on whether or not this skill works properly stems from the fact that there's no on screen notification to players that "Mob X has just -miss-ed you due to your squad's defense bonus" or anything along those lines. No feedback leads people to believe that it's not working. If you look at the calculations derived in Noules' thread you'll see that our +defs are rolled in with a whole mess of others, there's no real easy way to say why an enemy -miss-ed on a particular shot, he just hits or he doesn't.

Now we can debate the effectiveness/gimpedness of a +15% bonus at Master all we want. At least now we have a starting point. Big thanks to Noules for his work.

Group Melee Defense

I'm not going to say a lot about this one except that, for the moment I believe that, (a) it works, and (b) it works exactly like Ranged Def (+15% more missed attacks against your groups).

Group Terrain Negotiation

Master GTN adds 60 points to all groupmate's personal Terrain Negotiation (which is how fast they can run up/down hills and crawl speed). My understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong,of TN is that it is capped at +100 and the first 1-50 increases hill speed and the 51-100 range increases crawl speed. The only people that get their own terrain negotiation skills are Scouts (+50)and Rangers (+50). +60 Group TN makes all non scouts roughly as fast as Novice Rangers.

The main value in this skill is that it allows non-scouts (generally medical personal) to travel with your group at the same speed as the scouts. If you've been in a group without this skill you'll often see the radar showing your group stretching out in a long line with the scouts in front and the docs huffing and puffing in back. With just Mobility III (+50 group TN) you will see you entire squad stick together at the same speed. this will get you to your destination faster and reduce the chance of a rear straggler drawing aggro (the ones in the rear are most likey the worst equipped to deal with aggro).

Perhaps future uses of this skill will see more people crawling quickly in battle (being prone does make you harder to hit AND improves your accuracy to hit) and also might allow more combat people to drop Scout and Explore IV altogether and use those skills to bring more firepower to the table.

Group Burst Run Efficiency

Essentially this skill reduces the everyone's cost to use Burst Run. I do not yet have Mobility IV so I don't know how low the cost gets. But at +60 it's +10 better than master scout. I suspect suspect the cap is at +100 but that's a wild arse guess. I suspect any Explore IV scouts (+40) with group BRE (+60) might be able to Burst Run with 0 HAM costs.

On the surface this might seem useful for speeding long planet wide marches. But the time it takes for you to be able to Burst again after running is like 5 minutes or so. In that time people's mind and action are going to regenerate to full on their own. The /retreat skill (Tactics III - provides a short group burst run, squad-leader excluded) is about theonly thing we have for actually speeding long marches until they impliment /forcedmarch.

I think Group BRE's only value is allowinggroupmates to still be able to burst run out of dangerwhen their HAMs are deathly low. Ususally most people will try to escape before it comes to that, or at the higher level battles it won't come to that because high mobs can one hit kill. I don't think it will be a bonus that is taken advantage much if at all, but when it is used hopefully it saves a life.

That's it, that's all we do passively, take 'em or leave 'em, debate 'em till the cows come home. If I'm missing anything here, or you find any inaccuracies at all please post them. If this is accurate and suits please add it to the FAQ.

Thanks for your time,

-Psquire

One other benefit of the group terrain negotiation is for riflemen. They get some good bonuses while in "cover" and will get even better in the future. In cover though they can only crawl. From 51-100 Terrain Negotiation increases your crawl speed to something at least acceptable. If they have Explore III then they crawl at a very good speed. Some riflemen (there are few of them in the game) have enjoyed this while grouped with me and remarked on it.

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Psquire wrote:

That's it, that's all we do passively, take 'em or leave 'em, debate 'em till the cows come home. If I'm missing anything here, or you find any inaccuracies at all please post them. If this is accurate and suits please add it to the FAQ.

Thanks for your time,

-Psquire

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You forgot about the passive (and immesurable)morale bonus we provide just for being the Uber-qualified Noob helpers, I mean group leaders. hehehe.

Great post Psquire, as usual. This should be added to the FAQ, and the FAQ should have the meaningless posts removed to make it more "official" and easier to read.

Y'all SL's ROCK!

Occamz

Psquire wrote:

Group Burst Run Efficiency

Essentially this skill reduces the everyone's cost to use Burst Run. I do not yet have Mobility IV so I don't know how low the cost gets. But at +60 it's +10 better than master scout. I suspect suspect the cap is at +100 but that's a wild arse guess. I suspect any Explore IV scouts (+40) with group BRE (+60) might be able to Burst Run with 0 HAM costs.

This is correct, if I get a pet in my group I can burst run by myself with 0 HAM costs. Basically a free run every 5 mins or whatever the timer is on it. It's still not that great of a benefit really, and this is why we need forced march.

burst run also increases the time spent running ive found.

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NisiDaca wrote:
burst run also increases the time spent running ive found.

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I haven't noticed this. Burst run lasts 1 minute with a 10 minute recycle regardless of the BRE value (as a note, retreat only lasts 20s).

does being a squad leader allow u to hold more pets, droids, and soldiers at once?

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Noules000 wrote:

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NisiDaca wrote:
burst run also increases the time spent running ive found.

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I haven't noticed this. Burst run lasts 1 minute with a 10 minute recycle regardless of the BRE value (as a note, retreat only lasts 20s).

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Nope, it doesnt inscrease the time you run. Just the cost of using it.



And I second that this should be added to the FAQ

PSquire - As I understood it, Melee/Ranged defense bonuses are working, but not at the level which they should be currently (as you hinted when you mentioned to-hit bonuses can negate them). In fact, I believe the developers have stated that the to-hit bonuses on player specials and on higher creatures do not scale accordingly with the negative to-hit modifiers that defensive bonuses provide (I believe Noules' tests were performed with standard base attacks, which is why we get such great results).

So, when you take a group out on a tough planet or fight more powerful players in PvP, the to-hit modifiers of your opponents at ideal range are so high that any negation really doesn't affect it at all. This seems to be the case of why these skills seem to be of no effect; at the opponent's ideal range the to-hit will negate their worth, while outside of that areawe'd attribute a miss to the enemies' positioning. The good news is that the Devs have been mentioning that this scaling is getting fixed, albeit slowly as not to upset balance in one quick change.

All around an excellent list. I just felt it was mentioning that if it does seem our defensive modifiers are sub-par, help is coming as the dev's have isolated some issues with the system.

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Lagamiso wrote:

PSquire - As I understood it, Melee/Ranged defense bonuses are working, but not at the level which they should be currently (as you hinted when you mentioned to-hit bonuses can negate them). In fact, I believe the developers have stated that the to-hit bonuses on player specials and on higher creatures do not scale accordingly with the negative to-hit modifiers that defensive bonuses provide (I believe Noules' tests were performed with standard base attacks, which is why we get such great results).

So, when you take a group out on a tough planet or fight more powerful players in PvP, the to-hit modifiers of your opponents at ideal range are so high that any negation really doesn't affect it at all. This seems to be the case of why these skills seem to be of no effect; at the opponent's ideal range the to-hit will negate their worth, while outside of that areawe'd attribute a miss to the enemies' positioning. The good news is that the Devs have been mentioning that this scaling is getting fixed, albeit slowly as not to upset balance in one quick change.

All around an excellent list. I just felt it was mentioning that if it does seem our defensive modifiers are sub-par, help is coming as the dev's have isolated some issues with the system.

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If you actually read the dev post on this, what they said was that -active- defenses (dodge, block, counter-attack) weren't scaling properly, not the passive defense bonuses. The passive bonuses do work, and because they stack, they scale just fine for the most part.

If you go for a pure defensive build, you can get +90 ranged defense, plus +30 ranged defense from a master SL. This is superior to the accuracy mod gained by any ranged class except for a part-BH + master carbine/pistol hybrid.

On the range that these abillites effect the group.

From what I have tested, there is no range. I have invited 4 people in my group and they all had no scouting skill at all, but they had to do their harvester runs. I was going to be AFK anyways so I just stayed on. They traveled to 4 different planets, all on different planets at one point. They continued to get the +60 terrain neg. even though their had traveled off planet. Not sure if this is by design because of the code, they are in the group so they get the bonus, or if they are planing to put a 64m range on it. Not sure about other MSL out there but if we really use our abilities in combat we need to be out side 64m of the enemy, or we are a guaranteed one shot kill.

Great post! I have to agree, the passives are THE reason why I picked the Squad Leader profession in the first place. Hmm... maybe adding more passives to the class would be a "fix" to us?

Add passives that give the group better attack values, maybe even damage bonuses?
Something to think about.

Thanks for clearing that up Noules, glad to hear we're working then.