Teaming is fun! We’ve incorporated the best suggestions from beta players and the best ideas from other MMORPGs into our team play. The result is very satisfying already, and it’s only going to get better from here.

Most parts of SoH can be played solo. Right now, the only exceptions are our two large raids. They contain spectacular fights and give good loot, but players who’d rather solo can earn the same items elsewhere. So, when you do join a team, or a raid league, you know that everyone else chose team play over soloing. They aren’t being forced or pressured into it.

No mission requires a specific team size. Team sizes are flexible up to 10 members. Bigger teams face bigger enemy groups with more elite foes among them. The most challenging battles also scale in this way, rewarding advanced team compositions and tactics, but the default difficulty leaves plenty of room for experimentation.
Our devs have done a lot of combat balance testing while on teams. There’s always more to improve, but missions like Prize Crew are now quite fun for any team size… and quite challenging, if the team leader turns the difficulty up. Do not expect to succeed on the higher difficulties without dying a bunch!

It takes time to form a team, and coordination gets harder the bigger the team is. So the total experience, dust, and items earned are modestly increased the larger the team is. The number of team members determining your bonus is shown under your health bar. Mouse over it to see your team boost.

Team leaders get a slightly larger bonus than team members on the same size of team, but they also have more responsibilities. In raids, the team leaders report to a league leader, who gets another small boost, as thanks for organizing the entire raid. Again, the goal is to balance the reward with the extra effort of managing a group. Leaders can also transfer leadership, set the mission’s difficulty for everyone, kick troublemakers from their team or league, and teleport everyone in the same map to their location to help keep things organized.
Raid leaders get additional extra powers.​

There’s no matchmaking system in SoH, intentionally. Most teams will be formed by talking in broadcast chat or within your supergroup. This design makes it harder to silently speedrun missions with strangers. It encourages making friends organically by doing missions together. Friendly behavior will give you more people who’ll want to do other missions with you later. The SoH community is amazingly nice and helpful overall.

There are several ways to invite people to a team:
• You can click the social button under the compass at the top of the screen to see and invite anyone nearby.
• Right-click on a player, or on a targeted player’s portrait in the upper-right, to invite that person.
• For distant players, you can type the chat command /invite with the target’s name instead of .

As a team member, you can find your team on the map (Press M) and the minimap; they are the little green dots. But instead of running back to them, you can use the universal power Regroup to teleport back to your team leader.
The team leader also automatically has the Assemble power to gather his or her team to them.

Every possible hero has some ability to fight alone, and some ability to fight on a normal team, but even within the same powersets, some are much better at one playstyle. For example, AoE powers like Fireball and Flash of Insight are very strong on a big team, with many allies to buff or heal and enemies to burn at once. But single-target powers like Plasma Bolt and Jinxed are great in intense solo fights.

Unless you choose to disable voiceover audio, you’ll hear the mission contact’s spoken dialog from anywhere in the game, even if the team leader walks away. In addition, each spoken line is recorded in the special dialog tab of the chat window, so you can read it at any time.