[Kholai]

I've seen a lot of guides on how to build a character, or spend your skill points, but I've not seen much on how to play them. So, having spent a few days wondering about some of the people I've partied with, I've decided to write a few suggestions on something the vast majority seem to lack. Teamwork.
Teamwork can make a two-person team with it kill twice as fast and twice as safely as a five-person team without it, and is vital to playing in any party, and especially kingdom quests.

#1. Your role.

Okay folks, you've picked your class, you're getting the hang of all your moves and divvied out your stats. Now you're in a team. So what do you do?
Well, it depends on your class.

Warriors: Whilst endurance heavy fighters are the best team-fighters, even full Str/Spr warriors should be able to handle taking Aggro. If your party mates aren't warriors, and are being attacked more than you are, then you're not doing your job right. Sneering kick to attract the attention when needed, if you're afraid of taking damage, you really shouldn't be a fighter.

With a cleric in your group, if you aren't taking most or all of the damage, you're dividing their resources onto other party members that are, making everyone more likely to die. With a mage or an archer, remember that you are made of steel, they are made of paper and straw respectively, without you, they die.

Something else to remember as a fighter is to be careful what you attract to your party. Sure, one red enemy might be okay, but luring three over at once is just going to cause problems.
Remember, not everyone else plays a fighter, attracting two enemies and expecting the mage to tank one while you take the other is like expecting them to revive you when you die.


Clerics: If you aren't healing, you should be hitting. If you aren't hitting, it should be because you're using your buffs. If you aren't doing any of those things, you'd better be dead or something. Against strong mobs opponents such as in KQs, then keeping your distance and healing whenever necessary is frequently better than trying to fight yourself. If you get hurt and need to heal yourself, that's one fewer heal that's going to reach people who do more damage than you do.
A cleric in a large group is like baby-sitting an army of lemmings, they will all try to get themselves killed. Get to learn your timings well and you should be able to take care of one or two people no matter what's hitting them, and with maximum points into Decrease SP-Consumption, you should be able to keep that up for as long as necessary.

A cleric can pseudo-tank if necessary. Any enemy that can't deal more than your Heal amount every three seconds cannot kill you unless you mess up or run out of SP. Use this to your advantage when in a party without a fighter, and take the attention of your targets. Chances are you've got a better HP than any mage or archer in your team.
In the situation that your teammate does draw aggro, a swift Bash can sometimes recover it.

With a good party of Fighter, Mage, Cleric and sequential allocation, where their damage isn't as important, the cleric can also serve as the party vacuum cleaner, scooping up the drops in the wake left by the damage dealer, and healing as necessary.


Mage and Archer: These are grouped together because their role is nearly identical. You are the paper tigers of any group. If you can't kill something before it reaches you then you had better either leave it alone or get the party tank to hit it first. Long range attacks are great for luring lone enemies away from groups, but always make sure the rest of your party is expecting you to do that.
If you're being chased by an enemy, then by all means try to run away, but at least try to do so in a way that won't aggro anything else. Ideally, you'll want to run in a circle around the enemy, leading them back to your melee characters who are by now probably frantically trying to catch up.
In a mob situation against two or more enemies, don't just attack different enemies, focus your attacks against one, preferably the same one your tank is hitting. The faster one enemy out of two dies, the faster the tank starts taking only half the damage.


Finally, don't just remember your role, remember everyone else's too. If you chug healing potions whenever you get hurt and you're partying with a cleric, you're wasting resources and time. If you're fighting with a mage, don't expect them to tank for you even if they've got three levels on you. If you're a cleric, remember that whilst your additional damage is a good thing, everybody else's job is to deal damage.


#2: Location location.

Always know your party-mates'. If you don't know where they are, then find out. If they've died, it's probably a good idea to find somewhere relatively safe to sit and recuperate, or at very least try and meet up with them as they make their way back to where you were, otherwise they're going to have an awful lot of time soloing their way through enemies they needed to party against to take on.
Something I've noticed a surprising number of fighters do is simply assume that their party-mates are following them like computer-controlled drones, then rush off into the distance. Remember, you move at the same speed as your other party-members. If you start running in a random direction, they aren't going to "catch up".

Always making sure you're near your party mates (at very most Heal range) is one of the most important skills to learn. It's not only clerics who need to monitor their allies.

This leads nicely onto:


#3: Communication

My wife and I run a fairly simple scheme. If we see something we think the other person hasn't, whether it's a monster we want to kill, or yet another inconsiderate soul leading a train of five monsters up to us, we jump.
Yes, that's it, we jump. It's quick, it's easy, and it means "rotate your camera". We jump in a certain direction, that's the way we're going.
Once we know to look for something, we can look for trains, stray monsters, or in the direction the other person is going in, and take appropriate action, whether it's leading, following, or getting out of the way.

In the same way, don't expect your party-mates to be psychic, and if you want something out of the party, you'd better be prepared to say it. And it doesn't have to be warning jumps, but having some way of telling somebody they've just aggro'd a level 97 God-Monkey when they're about to start resting in their house is going to make life easier for everyone.

Lastly on the topic of communication, be respectful. If you diss the party cleric, they might just stop healing you. If you annoy the mage, maybe they'll wait for you to die before they finish off the enemy with their spells. If you annoy the fighter, maybe they'll just ignore the next enemy that decides to chomp on you.
Remember that some people actually have friends. If you offend the mage who hangs out with the cleric who's friends with the meatshield that takes the hits for you, you might just find yourself in just as deep water as if you'd insulted your party mate straight out, or find yourself deserted by your entire party.


#4: Action!

Finally, participate! It's okay to rest to recover when you have a spare moment, but if you aren't killing, taking hits or healing your party, you're not partying, you're leeching, and you're going to be kicked out. And you'd deserve it too.


Hope this is useful to someone, anyone else who has any suggestions/experience that might help folks, feel free to have your say.

[Neightking]

Dont know why we didnt think of this earlier. This will be very helpful to newbs and vets alike. Read up people this is how it is done.

[Nixkie]

I know man I go into KQ's all the time & everyones been fighting lately I just follow & kill what my party is killing but this one time in the apoline server I was lvin up my cleric with the king slime Quest & every one died but 4 celrics XD we won though cause we all joined together let 1 person attack & the others kept healing her took a bit though & lots of SP postions & stones.

[Gavener]

Great Write up, /bump

[Leedles]

This is a really great post

[Mindistasya]

Ya very good post and also VERY IMPORTANT!!!! Hopefully this will get read and comprehended, and mostly put into action. If you have a good aware party you can do pretty much anything, but as stated each needs to do their part and let others know where and when they are moving.

[x_Ace_x]

Wow, great guide. Very informative, and it looks nice to boot. And the topic; golden. Everyone should know about good teamwork because partying to kill the 97 God-monkey is alot faster than training on the lowly level 2 dust bunnies. It has some real good keypoints of teamwork.

So I guess the only true way to thank you for this guide is by giving you waffles.

[Kholai]

Hey thanks a lot folks. Glad it's getting a good reception.
*Devours waffles.*

Since it's on the topic, I'd like to relate a recent experiences that have happened to me in the Mara Pirates kingdom quest, with reference to the particular downfalls that happened. If anyone has any examples of particularly good or bad teamwork they'd like to share, I think it would keep this alive and maybe provide some object lessons. Plus I'm nosey and like to read stories.

The first time we took the quest, we had the good fortune to have a very good tanker in the same party as me (In part of a name and fame campaign, their IGN is, I believe, Ichdou). We ran through together with the rest of the group. Whenever someone was engaged by enemies, some members of the group stopped and helped them out. The whole group managed to stay close together, Ichdou did his job of tanking enemies, and after a few problems lure the real versions of the two pirates, the fight was won without trouble. Victory with over twenty minutes to spare.

Third time we did the quest was a very, very brief one for the Maiya/Kholai team. Nobody accepted party invites, nobody stuck together, and everybody rushed forward, leaving a great number of people behind when they were attacked and had to deal with aggro. The two of us were among that group, and died fast enough that we got into another kingdom quest of the same batch.

While we waited for it to fill up, we wondered if we'd done anything wrong that time.

Apparently whatever mistake we'd made we made again on the fourth quest. Not three minutes into the quest, again the majority of the group left us in the dust. I tried to keep up with the frontmost group, I tried to wait for two members of my party, who'd got stuck further back, and eventually I was laying in the dust they'd left us in.
What was different this time, however, was that while I was laying in the dust, bitterly bemoaning my lot, a cleric (forgot her name at the moment, sorry, but she was awesome) came with the group that was even further behind than I was, and revived me, and we fought our way to a place of relative safety.
She complained that this always happened to her, that she was always left behind, and that she'd quit several times before now when things got hopeless, which they apparently did quite often.

In the end, there were six of us that were left behind. Four clerics and two mages. Half of this group were below level 20. Sitting there, we considered quitting and joining another KQ, but they had all closed by now, so we decided to make the best of it, even though none of the group was really built for combat.
In the meantime, the front group, which had only one cleric, had finally managed to beat the first mini-boss Mara, with just over thirty minutes left and Marlone still to beat.

So, the six of us fought our way on our own past a number of enemies that we weren't really equipped to handle. The clerics ran as the tanks, sometimes against three or more enemies at a time, the mages dealt as much damage as they could, and they all did an awesome job of working together. The mages concentrated firepower, the clerics healed each other at the same time as fighting off enemies that the mages couldn't deal with yet, and somehow held aggro off the mages. We caught up with the main group from way back in the beginning without a single death, though things were very, very close.

What did the fighter who saw us first say? "Where were you?"
I wish I remembered their name.
"You left us behind."
"We were rushing noob!"
"Why didn't you rush?"

Fighter syndrome: The assumption that everyone's HP is as high as yours. The highest hitpoint total in our little group of six belonged to Maiya the mage, whose scrolled up HP was 480. You can't rush past enemies if those enemies are going to kill you, especially if you're a mage.

Moving on, with the added healing and firepower, we eventually took down Marlone #1, and we stopped to rest, with the first group who'd wandered off congratulating themselves on a job well-done.
Maiya, my eternal party-mate joked "You think it's okay to rest, they're just going to leave us behind again."
I laughed.
They then left us behind, with some of the group with barely 50% of MP recovered.

Thankfully, we managed to keep up with them again, which was possibly a bad move by us, because the groups archers (and sometimes unforgivably the fighters) kept luring monsters back toward the mages.

Finally, the boss fight. Marlone goes unremarkably, and we all stop to rest.
Except the first group didn't much feel like letting us, and immediately goes to fetch Marlone.
It was at this point I got kicked from the server. When I rejoined, I discovered the tanking fighter helpfully tanking a fake Mara. He ignored all suggestions of luring it away, and nobody was helping him fight the fake to kill it in a timely fashion.
After deciding that they weren't going to lure it away, our mages started pelting it with spells, saving a good few minutes it would have taken the mentally challenged fighter to do it alone, and saving the clerics' heal SP. Following this, rather than waste time resting, they once again sallied forth and this time managed to lure the right enemy.

Shambles. Multiple archers and fighters kept getting themselves killed, tying up the clerics with revives, one archer (another who I'd love to find the name for) lured a Mara Pirate Elite over, mid boss battle. The elite killed one of the few mages, and looked set to start working on the archers and cleric back line, so I attacked it by myself, hoping one of the fighters would take it from me shortly.

They didn't. Much of the B Team who'd been with me helped me out until the pirate changed targets to Maiya. I and two other clerics simply ignored the tank and spam healed her to keep her alive, and even then she had to use potions.
A fighter, the same one who'd asked us what kept us, ran up next to Maiya, and.... Rested.

This fighter had 658 HP, Maiya took about a third of her life every hit. If he'd taken the attention off her, or even taken it on before it killed the first mage, then the situation would have been under control in a minute. As it was, we managed to save Maiya, waste time Reviving the mage who wasn't so lucky, and beat the boss.

How much time to spare? 10 minutes. Obviously their rushing didn't work well for them, and highlights just how important it is to be aware of your teammates, both their location, their comments, and their need to recover sometimes, not to mention how important it is to play your role well.

This kingdom quest is both my best and worst experience of teamwork. The B-Team overcoming class weaknesses and surviving through cooperation is something I'm proud to have been a part of. The A-Team's flat-out ignoring the team repeatedly, and flat out endangering it at other times is something that annoyed me intensely.

Well, hope that entertained anyone who could be bothered to read it. More teamwork examples if I come upon them.

[Stefanie]

Pretty good Guide
well actualy the best teamwork guide ive seen for Fiesta

[Talkius]

I give this thread a 5 Star read. Hell, even the Russian judge gives it a 5.

What it boils down to is discipline and I agree with everything you have written on here. Outside of KQ it is hard when you are forst starting to find competent people to party up and work cohesively. After a while you eventually weed out the bad ones and can set yourself up with a menegerie to choose from. Inside KQ is a whole nother matter, it's like russian roulet. There is nothing more satisfying in my opinion then a well oiled team. Outnumbered, outmanned and overcoming the odds. I know this from personal real life events in Iraq. The main things to remember are knowing your roles and always, I repeat ALWAYS remember A.T.D. (A)ttention (T)o (D)etail. Know your suroundings and know your squadmates.