Squad Leader Archive
Thread: Strategy and Tactics Discussion
- A guide. Someone who knows their way around well. If this is not you, I'd reccomend reading up so you can at least know what to expect.
- A tank, hopefully more than one. Jedi are weak, I like Mdoc/Mswords or similar for this job.
- A rezzer, hopefully more than one. This is often also the tank.
- A smuggler. Concussion shot for the win. (not required but verrry useful)
- Damage dealers are kinda a given, but you definitely need that.
- Use corners to your advantage. Hide everyone behind a corner, let the tank pull agro and run behind the corner, ambush whoever comes around it. Don't press into a room until all are dead or one left.
- When triggering spawns (for getting keys) use the ambush technique.Have one person trigger the spawn then run to the group (who are waiting safely behind a corner somewhere). Take care of the agro one or two at a time.
- Mutliple enemy fighting: this will happen, when it does, primary targets are droids. Get the smuggler to mez all the humans until you are ready to fight them. When fighting multiple droids all in one room send a melee tank on each of them, if they are being meleed they will not aoe. Get everyone else focusing fire on your target (having the group target you works well for this). *note* The melees on them need to be able to take care of themselves, i.e. can heal and tank well.
- Take your time moving through, but be aware that enemies could respawn on you at any time, so be careful.
AOE Grinding:There's a lot of potential for strategy here. The easiest, and most boring, implemetation requires a strong jedi. A strong melee tank with aoe attacks and aoe taunts can work also. For this, get all melees on the lair and let your designated tank lead the attack. Make sure to give them plenty of healing. Everyone else just aoes the lair. Takes a strong group with good healing for this, and not a lot of thought.
Non melee aoe: Something I'll be exploring more soon with a level 50ish group but, some ideas:
- Good healing is required. AOE heals from multiple sources are crucial. Medics will hesitate to use their aoe heal, but let them know with everyone doing it they'll be ok. Also make sure the medics watch each other, if one gets a lot of agro, help them heal.
- Keep everyone within 15m of the medics. (I believe this is the bacta spray radius)
- Keep everyone fairly tight and aoeing the lair. I like to set the group at about 20m out.
A few experimental techniques I need to work with. I don't promise these will work, but they sound good.
- Create two nearly equally damaging 4 person groups, each with healing power. Set them 15m from the lair on opposite sides of eachother. Have each group always aoeing the lair. The theory here is that all creatures will be in the cone of at least one of the groups, and ideally both.
- Create a line formation. Rank you squad in damage. Set the person who gets most agro in the front. Line up everyone behind them. (the line should look like it's pointing at the lair) The idea here is also to increase the number of agroes in everyone's cone. With one small group, creatures often swarm behind their target. Hopefully a formation like this keeps them all in most people's cones.
General PVP: (situations like camping Theed because you're bored) More input needed here.
Defending: Keep everyone close together. Concentrate your fire. Do not allow anyone to try and chase stragglers, when you move, move as a group.
Attacking: With good odds, a blitz can work well. Concentrate fire and pick off targets one at a time, hopefully you get a few before the defending group can react or organize their defense. With bad odds, try to pick off people. If you can get their people to seperate from the pack and set ambushes for them, you may be able to slim down their numbers before they realize there's a full blown assualt force on them.
P.S. by odds I mean who has more people/who looks like a stronger group.
Base Busting: More input needed here
Also:What has been your experience with mass pvp aoeing as opposed to selecting single targets? Things that could make this work well are: commandoes hitting long range aoe KDs, stopping shots, and cripples. Carbineers alternating full auto area and suppression fire to inhibit enemy advancement. Any thoughts?
Phew, alright, as I said before, feel free to comment, ask any questions, disagree with me,or above all, add your own experiences for these and any other situations...
Message Edited by TireeG2 on 09-20-2005 10:21 AM
, I think I can post this here and still be save:Laying Siege to Bestine
From SWG Wiki
These are some tactics I, Liongtsiao Huang from Ahazi, recommend my guild as well allied rebel guilds for PvP in Bestine.
Taking Bestine ....
Depending on your strength and numbers, either shuttle to the shuttle port or swoop into Bestine.
To have an interesting and meaning full fight, dont camp the Starport but take the Imperial Base on the Hill. Even with just regulars or outnumbered you will be able to hold your self much longer there then if you fight in the city of Bestine itself.
If you shuttle into Bestine, move out of the city as fast as you can and charge around the city to the base on the hill. If you swoop dismount in sight of the base and charge it from the far side avoiding contact with the city.
Wipe out all NPCs and hold your ground at the base. As soon as the base is clear, slowly descend down to the bazaar till you can see the starport entrance.
Always have an eye out on the base. Prevent any player to declare at the imperial base, to keep your back clear. If a player or a group declares at the base retreat to the base and scare them away. Always try to have the higher ground.
While descending into bestine deploy your ranged fighters in a fire line behind you while melee and jedi sneak into the city to lure out the imperials. I do not recommend fighting in Bestine itself, always try to lure them to the base where you will have the high ground. Make two or three fall back lines, where you fight for a moment to fall back to the next, luring them further out of the city and more into the range of your ranged professions.
Watch out for cloakers! Your firelines should be at least groups of three or four and should always stick to each other. Cloakers use hit and run tactics to scatter your troops. Use the plain field to lay suppresionfire (area attack, 120°cone from the carbineers) around the base to uncloak them. Shoot the Spawn around the base with those attacks.
Try not to loose any men inside the city! With fighting along the hill you can give your docs cover fire from uphill while they resz your players, without endangering them to go into bestine.
As additional option you can place a PvE forward outpost on the far side to the city as declaring point.
What this will gain you?
First of all, by not camping the starport you give the imperial players an opportunity to rally their troops and gather for more reinforcements, while you also give rebel players from AH the opportunity either to swoop in from AH or to load into the shuttleport with a clear destination, while distracting the imperials attention from the shuttleport. This will even the fight and make it more interesting.
Second you avoid the lag in the city as well as that you give your ranged and regulars an option to stand and fight as well as to kite up hill.
Further with holding the imperial base you have a clear retreat point in case your troops get scatterted in an brawl with imperial players. If the fight gets tough, fall back to your next defense line till you have all your troops gather at the base again, concentrating fire and defense.
With a lot of ranged ppl you can use the high ground to your advantage snaring and rooting your attackers who also have to charge up hill again loosing speed giving your ranged more time to shoot them.
A fights in NPC cities always go in waves, by cleary letting the imperials gather at the starport recruiter you can guess their soon to be numbers, giving yourself the opportunity to perpare for an incoming attack.
After each wave of attackers the imperials usually appear at the cloner and while they rally again you can heal and resz your own troops. You avoid any zerging since a single player needs to long to run from the cloner, declare and return to the fight at the imperial base, so in most cases the imperials will rally first before staging another attack.
If you clearly hold the imperial base there is only one place where they can declare, again giving you a clear estimate from where they will attack and how large their numbers will be.
And last but not least: Have fun!
P.s.
I have a stragety for defending Anchorhead too, but so far never had the possibilty to try it out so I havent written it down yet. Might do that for this thread so other can see if it works to report on it.
EDIT:
Using this tactic, in a group of 6 regulars, having a TKM/Doc as pointmant and tank and one jedi who was build more for stealth I was able to take out 4 jedi in an equal size group of imperial jedi only, before they were able to take us down.
When we regrouped and returned they kept cloaking/force running around too afraid to get in range and had to trick us into an ambush where then suddenly twice as much jedi as our group uncloaked, when we carefully approached.
That was btw. before everyone had 4000 CM in their template to heal, so we were depended on our two healers in our group.
Message Edited by _scout_ on 09-21-2005 08:10 AM
The Rebels on Ahazi know all about not trying to camp the Bestine Starport. Especially one of their Squad Leaders. :-D
(more meaningful post when I'm not supposedly working)
That was a really impressive post _scout_, had to reread that several times. I believe most of that can be applied to other situations too. Some of the ideas I really like in there:
-Controlling Declaration (couldn't think of a good way to put that): Knowing where all the recruiters and nearby bases are seems very important. Also, I likethe idea of dropping a base to service your own force.
-Taking high ground. Many melees lack decent terrain neg. You might be able to split up the opposing force a little too as the jedi with and without force run try to charge you. Lots of advantages there anyways.
-AOEing cloaked jedi. I had not heardof this before, if a cloaked jedi gets caught in an aoe, that breaks cloak?
The cloak jedi problem kinda disturbs me, sounds like a difficult thing to fight. Does anyone have any tips about how to manage cloaked jedi?
I'm very partial to ranged professions, and I think that if used well, could have a huge advantage over jedi. Has anyone had any success with coordinating roots and mezes when fighting jedi?
-Controlling Declaration (couldn't think of a good way to put that): Knowing where all the recruiters and nearby bases are seems very important. Also, I likethe idea of dropping a base to service your own force.
Base to declare... yes, i currently carry a pve base deed with me for that reason. Though, it's a bit of luck, sometimes you place one and it has no recruiter outside.
What i made good experience with are turrets from both sides... at one battle i even gave one of my men several deeds to keep a pattern of turrets in front of the SF base we were attacking. Of course, a static defence is always bound to fall against players, but if it keeps them busy for 10 minutes, that might very well be the 10 minutes of countdown till the base blows.
-Taking high ground. Many melees lack decent terrain neg. You might be able to split up the opposing force a little too as the jedi with and without force run try to charge you. Lots of advantages there anyways.
Interesting. I never really cared for high ground, as my group has max. TN anyways and thus moves unhindered. Due to the nature how the game handles line of sight around hilltops, i even have the preference of lower position when being on way with a small force, you can then use LOS (or lack thereof) for your advantage. It's some tricky going, though. Only works when assaulting a base, as the enemy usually is on the plateau of the base then, on a hillslope without plateau this doesn't work.
-AOEing cloaked jedi. I had not heardof this before, if a cloaked jedi gets caught in an aoe, that breaks cloak?
Hmm, i think it doesn't break cloak... but damage is applied to him, anyways, no matter if cloaked or not. (We did that once on a baseassault to catch cloakers...people from the fire support groupduelled and used AOE on each other... cloaked jedi took fire from both duellers. This might sound cheap, but if a cloaked jedi justkeeps turning off your countdown, what else should you do?
I'm very partial to ranged professions, and I think that if used well, could have a huge advantage over jedi. Has anyone had any success with coordinating roots and mezes when fighting jedi?
Thanks for the good tips on base busting Kharast
I've been doing some thinking and experimenting lately and came up with a couple questions and comments.
First, has anybody been able to use commandos effectively in their group? The strength of commando these days is the ability to make any special aoe. Because of this, my good friend is picking up Pistoleer/Commandoas crowd control support for me. The strengths here are that he'll be able to have aoe intimidate / dizzy / warning shot / disarm / my personal favorite, stopping shot, at up to 80m range (using acid stream launcher and range arms). Personally, I could see aoe stopping shot being wildly effective, especially against jedi. It almost makes we want to get two commandos in the group.
I've been practicing coordinated mezzes during pve base raids, but with not a lot of success. I've tried keeping one designated smuggler or sometimes a commando smuggler (for aoe mezzes) with the duty of keeping everyone mezzed. However, for whatever reason, maybe my disorganization, I've not been able to keep any good number of the enemy out of the fight. I'm still going to keep working on this though, as it's a delicate procedure. I'm wondering if anyone has tried this also though.
Lastly, still on the aoe subject. With an attack like full auto area, it only takes abouttwo enemies before an aoe becomes DPS efficient. (what I mean is since full auto is more than half the damage of legshot, if you're fighting more than two people, you'll be putting out more net damage then single shotting alone. On the other side of this though, taking enemies out of the battle quickly, andone at a time, may save your group a lot of damage. So the question is, when, if ever do you choose to aoe in pvp? I hear people talk about fighting both ways, but I'm curious about what you think would be more successful. My take on the situation is that aoe could be useful if you had the cooperation of two or more full groups. This would be quick enough damage that enemy healers would have a difficult time keeping people alive and you could still drop people quickly. For smaller groups though, I doubt that you're going to have the damage output to take people out well. Anyone else have any opinions on this?
P.S. I just pulled off my lowest level aoe group ever, quite proud of myself. I held the highest level in the group, 42, with a couple people also near there. Big contributers to the success of this were a pikeman with sweep and sweep kd, a commando, myself and another BH with spray shot, and several people with bacta spray. Everyone did a great job, it was a lot of fun and great xp. (sorry, just had to gloat a little, I get tired of the people that think you need level 80s to grind).
Message Edited by TireeG2 on 09-26-2005 09:04 AM
First, has anybody been able to use commandos effectively in their group? The strength of commando these days is the ability to make any special aoe. Because of this, my good friend is picking up Pistoleer/Commandoas crowd control support for me. The strengths here are that he'll be able to have aoe intimidate / dizzy / warning shot / disarm / my personal favorite, stopping shot, at up to 80m range (using acid stream launcher and range arms). Personally, I could see aoe stopping shot being wildly effective, especially against jedi. It almost makes we want to get two commandos in the group.
I usually cooperate with a MCommando/MSmuggler for basebusting. Due to his special combination, he's not participating in the focus fire procedure but selects and attacks targets on own regards. Cooperating with him requires a somewhat experienced targeter so the team doesn't break the states he just put on the targets.
I've been practicing coordinated mezzes during pve base raids, but with not a lot of success. I've tried keeping one designated smuggler or sometimes a commando smuggler (for aoe mezzes) with the duty of keeping everyone mezzed. However, for whatever reason, maybe my disorganization, I've not been able to keep any good number of the enemy out of the fight. I'm still going to keep working on this though, as it's a delicate procedure. I'm wondering if anyone has tried this also though.
I fully agree that it's not easy. Anyways, the Smuggler/Commando is able to pull several nice stunts on NPC defence via fakedead... also, don't underestimate lastditch with a flamethrower when at low health...
Lastly, still on the aoe subject. With an attack like full auto area, it only takes abouttwo enemies before an aoe becomes DPS efficient. (what I mean is since full auto is more than half the damage of legshot, if you're fighting more than two people, you'll be putting out more net damage then single shotting alone.
Close but not completely true. You didn't take the significant higher cooldowns of area attacks into account. The breaking point, according to my personal evaluation, is at about 4 targets, but that's more out of the belly than based on hard numbers. (Too many variables, sorry.) If you have pistoleer or BH along so you can alternate area attacks, the thing might look a bit different, but for the carbineer-only, with two enemies it doesn't pay off yet.
On the other side of this though, taking enemies out of the battle quickly, andone at a time, may save your group a lot of damage. So the question is, when, if ever do you choose to aoe in pvp? I hear people talk about fighting both ways, but I'm curious about what you think would be more successful.
I rarely have the situation that i have enough people with area effect attacks in team to make it worthwhile. I occasionally supported with full auto area in huge battles (over 20 people on each side) and my PvP rating grew like crazy... versus NPCs, i generally disapprove the useage of area effect, mostly since it breaks the complete crowd control of the Smuggler/Commando. The increase in damage output is more than offset by the increase of damage inflicted by the NPCs. In PvPthings look a bit different since many of the states seem to be less effective against players. Thus area damage can very well be the way to go.
Message Edited by Sylow on 09-26-2005 04:30 PM
Personally I just recently discoverd how most of the Carbineers are able to spam fullautoarea when I bought some decent SAC pups. Im still running around with simple factory run carbines, so the SAC was pretty high.
For larger scale PvP
... I (now) use fullautoarea as autoattack, especially when I have to face melee templates, jedi tend to focus on fighting other jedi so you get a pretty good brawl when the two sides collided AND you ll be able to use /volleyfire as your mainfocus target but will also hit everything around them thus also partially the opposing support which sometimes tend to be upfront too.
In small group PvP
... I dont go for an autoattack at all but tend cycle between legshot-scattershot with some chargeshots in between if I dont have a dedicated KDer. I let my smuggler do what he wants (needs a good player to see it), while I try to keep my group focused on my pointman ussing the assist passthrough attack. I keep /rally going whenever I have action but my mainfocus is /volleyfire.
Also, I dont have realy realy good weapons so Im mostly not a damage dealer anway, hence I tend to go for my DXR6 Carbine with a 65m range, ugly as hell but an KD applied in that range is just nice as well as increasing my fullautoaree range makes PvP sometimes just like PvP rating farming.
I recently have been in the DWB bit a group where if you have a good tank you can handle even two or three targets at once, depending on the tanking abilities of the template.
I just noticed that the way I play my SL heavily depends on the situation. The better the group, the more I can do besides leading, the more "random"/disorganiced the group, the more I just fullautoarea and type commands/sys/talk along ventrilo to keep them inline.
!
Alright, some really good points there. It seems like the consensus is that area attacks really become useful for large scale battles, which makes sense to me. The big points being that damage output per person will bemuch higher than with single shots, and it's too difficult to do effective crowd in large scale battles. Sylow made a good point that I forgot about, that damage output won't be quite as high if the player only has one aoe. I may get those people to load up with the speed pups to try and counter that a little (as scout mentioned). Carbineers alternating FAA with Suppression is another idea I like.Also, rifleman with FAA or spray shot, yeah that sounds nice. If I can find a couple rifleman I may try to get them to do a concealed aoe ambush. I could see that causing some major havoc.
On another note Ithough I'd mention, I'm working ontraining witha small, kind ofspec ops team. I have a pistoleer/smugglerand pistoleer/commando specifically in mind.
I believe that if I can get all of us working togetherwell, we could dominate small group fights with mezzing and stopping shots (with some damage dealers and medics of course). The commando will have to be careful, and may need to switch to non aoe weapons for most of this fighting,I'm not sure how I could use his skills most effectively yet. I like the idea of leading the attack with an aoe stopping shot to hopefully split up the enemy force. Those that don't get rooted become primary targets as we move to a postion where those that are rooted can't affect the fight. The smuggler then does some precision work by mezzing the mostdangerous targets (like medics, jedi, and crowd controlers).
For larger scale fights I'll try and get the smuggler to isolate people fromthe fight. I'd like him to watch for stragglers that are out of the heavy fighting and mez them (people not likely to be AOEd). If he can keep just a couple people out of the fight then he's pulling his weight. The pistoleer/commandoshould really come into play in the large battles though. The things I'd like to see are: reducing medic and melee effectiveness by putting aoe stopping shot on them. AOE intimidate and disarming shot to reduce enemy damage output.
**As of yetthe latterare all untested and unrefined ideas, it's still yet to be seen if this will actually work, but I have high hopes.
Message Edited by TireeG2 on 09-26-2005 11:18 AM