Hello there, I’m not the best player there is, still struggling to find people for weaves 100+ every evening, but I have over thousand hours in the game, and I usually see the common mistakes we all make regularly which cause the death of the whole team.
Here are some uncommons things you won’t see in other guides.
Wanna win ? Just follow theses guidelines =>
Don’t help your teammates :
A lot of people do die “trying to help” others. Sometimes, it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Consider some stuff before “helping your teammate”.
Reviving in the middle of the horde, not only makes you unable to deal damage for the rest of your team, but also place you in a vulnerable position. Which enchance the chances of a team failure.
Reviving while the downed ally is still being focused by enemies, will often result in death of the revived either during the revive, or right after. Consider killing the enemies that surround him instead.
Getting out of position to revive a downed guy which is far is OFTEN a very dangerous thing to do, especially is there are specials around. Consider staying with your team, and let the sucker die instead.
Reviving someone where there are specials around and/or a tornado. This is usually the start of an horror story that we all experimented at least once.
Consider that you 100% surviving is better than a 50% chance of revive, except if you won’t be able to continue the map without the downed guy (like losing the battle wizard in highest weaves, with only tanks staying alive).
Die :
Sometimes, you have to die for the better.
For example, your team is far and you aggroed a patrol.
Sometimes, you are “forced” to go forward in order to escape some perillous situation (a tornado, a huge line of monsters, etc). Remember that going forward bring usually more risks to your team. More enemies, a boss triggers, a patrol ? Sometimes, take that freakin’ tornado, so your team don’t have to handle a lot more things that they can manage.
Don’t take items :
Who needs a pot, a healing, or a bomb anyway ? Sometimes, going to get a healing badly placed also means losing that same amount of heal. This is known as “Not being greedy” (aka “the Phobe effect” in our group). We all know that one guy that lose team time to “go into that house for healing” where it’s really important to go fast in the game.
Don’t heal yourself:
Heal the guy that you need the most at the specific situation you’re in. You play better than the other downed player ? Maybe you’ll manage staying alive more than him with temp health. Maybe he’ll just be an hindrance so ignore him. Maybe he’s the one that deal boss damage. Maybe he can’t take more punishment that you can. Maybe he have heal share. Maybe you’re not a key player. So consider not healing yourself.
Don’t try to save your medikits:
Use them when you feel the need to. You have 10 hp left, but no downed state ? No need to wait for a downed state, use the freakin’ medikit. People won’t always be able to revive you in the worse situation, and thoses worse situation needs all players alive.
Shoot through your teammates:
If the situation requires this.
A flamethrower that a slayer can’t handle ? Shoot through him. An injured dwarf is better than a dead dwarf. Of course, if your teammate is at 1hp it could cause somme issue. But again, this is more about adapting to the situation.
A horde that your tank is keeping at bay, do poison him/her with the horde, it does way less damage than taking hordes hits anyway.
Take damage:
Trade damage for a very important objective is common. A special can wipe your whole team, push, switch to ranged, kill, take SOME damage, but kill it.
A tornado is coming to get you all, jump in it and save your comrades.
Health is a resource, and should also be spent wisely when the team requires it.
Going down in a beastmen horde/ambush is already a death sentence. They kill you much faster than the other 2 factions in the downed state too, so you better just concentrate on survival.
This simply isn’t good advice perse since reviving is many times just necessary. I suggest you to use your ult to revive in a horde. Many do make space or are able to rev while moving. It’s important to disable the chaff while your teammate gets up but that can be done by spamming pushes for that second or if you’re good the ult timing will do the trick.
Letting teammates just die will most likely just make them quit and being one or even more man down really hurts the chances as well.
I would debate this, and it’s going to boil down to two things:
Pub play: This a vastly different skill set than pre-made play and generally is about managing chaos and requires a certain level of self-sufficiency.
Pre-made play: Which is normally about averting chaos. In theory, people know others’ playstyles, so there’s less guess work.
That being said, every action, individually, put into a cumulative whole, should be about helping your teammates. This is why four man “stick together” groups or if a split must happen, going 2 and 2 is a fairly common practice; it allows easy segmentation to help if things go south. If played well, pulling out of position to help a teammate shouldn’t happen, and if someone is out of position, it generally means someone else is as well (generally, but not always). That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t not help; it simply means you need to weigh the situation.
Many of the situations you listed as “not helping your teammate”, do in fact help them (killing fodder, letting the storm focus a down teammate, etc) as it puts both of you in a better position to help each other.
Rather than a “How to win” guide this is more like a “how to avoid losing really hard by avoiding these mistakes”.
And i disagree that there is a need to go fast, quite often slow and steady taking minor detours for valuable potions, bombs and healing does you far more good than rushing only to trigger a horde+boss+special when you have no supplies.
Items when used well, work wonders, the danger of almost any scenario can be greatly mitigated.
Then there is stuff like this :
This isnt how you win in the first place, you win in these scenario´s by not separating that much in the first place.
To me there is hardly anything more tilting than this, losing half my healthbar when going melee because my team is trigger happy.
I much more like the ones who actually have some skills come help me out in a melee, those without shouldnt be playing on legend+ at all.
You win by NOT getting into these situations where taking damage, dying, giving up on teammates or killing them for the greater good is “needed”.
The problem is how people get into these situations and it’s mostly by not understanding the basics tbh. (AI director sometimes just being a dongliz aside)
Playing way too passively. As far as I’m concerned this is the #1 worst thing you can do as it greatly increases your chances of getting overwhelmed by density, it makes you fight many more hordes than you need to and it makes hordes far more dangerous at the same time. Ever notice that most players fall back for miles from every horde? Ever notice people wasting 3 minutes pinging a healing pot that clearly nobody wants and then dying instantly to the horde that cuts them off?
Lack of crowd control. No, you dont need a shield or heavy CC weapon… you just need to use whatever weapon you have properly. Sometimes a single push is more helpful than spamming your light attack 5 times. On the topic of revives - I’ve seen countless wipes where 2 inexperienced players die to 5-6 trash enemies just because they are desperately mashing E in order to revive you and their block gets broken instead of simply pushing the enemies back (or killing them) first and then reviving.
Slacking with melee. It might seem easier to hang back and spam your ranged weapon into the horde but unless you really know what you’re doing, you are just hurting your team rather than helping it. The more people use their melee weapons in a chokepoint, the safer that encounter becomes for everyone… because stagger. (Yes, I know there are busted flamethrowers and Confetti staff and whatnot)
Obsession with green circles. I see this 100% of the time and everyone who does it is typically nowhere near actually getting the circles anyway. Trying to steal lonely elites that are CLEARLY about to die by your teammate’s hand isn’t helpful, you’re just denying him his temp HP. Wasting your ult every time it’s off cooldown isn’t helpful either, save it for when it’s actually needed instead of wasting it in order to get a green circle that nobody except you cares about.
Lack of awareness and not being proactive (aggressive) enough. You don’t notice this when playing with decent players as they will simply look around and automatically split 2-2 as needed but with most pubs I’m typically the only one splitting away and going to meet the 2nd wave of the horde further away from my team instead of waiting for them to push us from behind and get us all stuck in between two waves.
There are plenty of guides who covers perfect play. But on a side note, thoses situations WILL inevitably happens. This where adaptation and reacting fast comes in. And taking a good decision when the worse comes in, rather than the ‘obvious’ one is needed.
These situations do not happen when the people actually know that they will get “sacked” by rushing into them.
Like 1 guy rushing ahead like a raging pig and getting caught out alone, or shooting his own teammates while greeding for green circles or wasting supplies.
"I was gona die in 1 hit! "
Yeah no "s**t when enemies deal 50+ damage per hit quite often, idea is to avoid that in the first place.
Some people might be alright with it but taking 1500+ damage when one isnt new proves that the person has no idea what they are doing, or that they are seriously too unlucky with specials but that would be extreme.
Thoses situations always happen, one way or another. If not, well you would have a 100% chance of finishing a map. This is mostly not the case for everyone here even if you’re very good and your team is too. Considering that you’ll never have a bad situation is not realistic.
Most of it is built on 1 or several guys being hella dumb which doesnt actually occur that often…i think.
: Someone got caught out and died alone and his team is too far away to really help him.
: You yourself got separated from your own team and got caught out.
Taking minor, and i mean minor, detours to fetch supplies is by no means dumb at all, exactly because shít does happen and a bomb can mean the difference between making it through or not.
This is a a valid one, shít does happen and prioritizing is important.
True just sitting on healing while low isnt helpful, but the real idea is to conserve health in the first place, dont be overly greedy for damage scores and instead go steadily.
Shooting your own teams frontline because you cant be bothered to be useful in a melee and thus feel its better to just kill him/her is ridiculous.
Fine if someone is about to die if you dont but otherwise do not shoot your own team.
Valid case.
The real way this guide should look is more like this :
Dont try to save teammates who run off and get downed alone in a position where they cant be saved.
Stay with your team, dont charge too far and keep bombs handy in case of patrols.
Be conservative with supplies but dont hesitate to look around between hordes to grab nearby stuff, long time players know where to find the goodies.
As you wrote.
Dont be afraid to heal low teammembers but also dont waste healing, they should be truly low and if they keep taking damage while greeding for kills then dont do it as they need to learn to conserve health.
Dont shoot at/through your own teammates unless its to save their lives and you cant save them in time in any other way. Friendly fire is griefing.
I understand what you mean but I strongly disagree with the notion of not helping your teammates. Yes sure it might be more problematic situations for resing but thats the point imo. I think there are a lot of situations where you can or could kill mobs arround teammates nd res them later. Also downed players sometimes can work as a beacon for other teammates to flock to. To me thats more often than not a better strategy.
A lot of my wipes in QP are when the two differing playstyles here conflict during a run. There are 1 or 2 who like the “push on and plough through” style, and the other 2 are “slow and steady wins the race”.
There’s also a lot of players who have some strange obsession with getting the grims no matter what. Even when I type something in chat like
“Mate… two of you are grey, I’m low health after the assassin and Sienna is waiting to be freed, we can’t pick it up.”
“&*@@@&^% you noob!” … Picks up grim…
Dies.
Drops.
Also, I think a lot of successes are now due to a far more polarized view by many players as to what you can and can’t do. Examples;
Someone down in a double poison cloud, leave them.
Someone downed in a massive horde? Only a few characters classes can realistically and successfully rescue them without simply res’ing them to see them get pummeled into the floor instantly. (I still think being downed needs a buff to damage reduction).
Hook rat and an assassin got 2 players? Kill assassin first. Maybe that’s just my gang who know that but people I play with in QP seem to be making these snap decisions a lot better. This includes retreating from a stormcloud so as you don’t block yourself in, and using a stormcloud to fling enemies away. Extra points for using Rasknit’s teleport bounce to hit you towards his next location.
Use things up. Keeping bombs “just in case” is like the old saying - it’s no good saving for a rainy day if you can’t see when it’s raining. There’s likely to be more bombs, or more healing, or more ammo. Same goes for your ult - I’m not suggesting unleash a BH ult on a slave rat but don’t keep it in case of a special when it might bring down a mauler NOW who’s harassing you in a horde.
Passive-carry people. Don’t heal yourself if someone is bloody useless and you can soldier on without needing to use the healing. Often times that dead-weight-guy swigs all the healing anyhow but you get the idea. I work on the basis that someone who is rubbish at the game but alive is like an actual meat-shield, or a pipe bomb/bile bomb from LFD2… useful for taking some of my agro for a little while all the time they’re alive
There are also little twinkles of magnificence at the moment. I had a glorious QP run with a shade as I was playing FK. That guy always backed up near me when a lot of enemies sprung up, I could see the sword and dagger swinging as I shield-thumped things, we covered each other and knocked specials off each other etc. An unspoken agreement materialized that HE would deal damage and kill super-armour as long as I kept the everything on the back foot and reeling. The other two guys were getting downed, thumped, flung into the distance, poisoned,hooked and clobbered and generally had a rough time - but we knew that to try and intervene would’ve broken the success story we had going on. Trying to coach people in chat is sometimes like asking a goblin fanatic if they’d like some more mushrooms, and attempting to suggest that if they buddied up the same the might have some success and we were branded complete C&@ts for being so selfish and not barrelling into idiotic situations. Yikes.
That other c*%t Shade player is now a permanent addition to my playtime
Painful and messy punishment for mistakes is a harsh but effective teacher - after all this is how we all learned to walk(by crashing to the floor very often) and put food in our mouths instead of rubbing it in our hair,but repeatedly punishing someone in an online game when there is no real opportunity for coaching offered by the game or enabled by the players is going to shrink the player base.
Communication is also absolutely vital. People getting split off because they’re holding the front and none of the other three mention they’re pulling back more is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes it should be obvious when to pull back, other times it’s not.
Friendly fire is absolutely necessary sometimes. And it depends on the class. A BW DoTing up a horde and accidentally hitting you a few times is fine, her killing things faster is more important than you losing a few HP. Unless of course she’s using the Fireball staff in which case she’ll probably kill the entire team
Same goes for hagbane waystalker. You losing 1HP during a horde from the DoT tick isn’t a big deal, especially if you’re in melee. You should be able to keep up a shield of thp to cover for that. Meanwhile the Hagbane DoT is turning what would be 2 attack kills into 1 attack kills for you and thinning out the horde in the back at the same time. The only time it gets dicey is with a strength pot when she needs to slaughter a patrol. In which case you probably will take some damage, but her keeping the patrol staggered and killing them all is worth it.
The FF that is a problem is the BH critting a Xbow shot through your head and nearly 1 shotting you. Hagbane FF and nearly all Witch FF is barely noticeable. You can even see it in the end game screen. Me on hagstalker DoTing up everything normally ends with 30-80 FF, around the same with the witch. A salty or bardin FF at the end screen can easily be 200+ damage with only a few instances of FF.
