Watch Dogs: Legion Characters – 7 Tips To Get The Best Recruits

The big selling point of Watch Dogs: Legion is that just about any character you encounter in its futuristic open-world London setting can be added to your squad of hackers, provided you put in the work. But anybody who’s taken a profiler out onto the street knows that there are a lot of people who wouldn’t be all that helpful to DedSec as it fights fascism and organized crime. Some people are more talented and more useful than others, and finding them is a job unto itself.

There are some shortcuts you can take, though. If you know where to look and you’re willing to put in the effort, you can grab some high-quality recruits. Legion also helps out by making good recruits a little easier to come by at points. But really, the trick is to build a well-rounded team that can fill a lot of roles. To get that, you’ll want to explore London and learn where you can find different kinds of people with a variety of perks and weapon loadouts.

We’ve compiled a few quick tips that can help you get a quality DedSec team together without spending hours profiling every Londoner walking down the street. Here’s what you need to know to get good hackers, drivers, and brawlers in short order to build your resistance. We’ve also got a bunch of tips for starting out in Legion that’ll help you build your resistance.

1. Liberate Districts For The Best Recruits

You can use your profiler to scan anybody in London and evaluate how useful they’d be on your team. It’s something you should do often, as you never know when someone might have an interesting skill or an item that turns out to be very helpful. But the most reliable way to get some of the best operatives on your DedSec squad is to complete objectives in each of London’s eight districts in order to turn them “Defiant.”

It’s worth noting that liberating a district can be a lot of work. It usually requires you to complete several objectives, with some being a little easier (like hacking Albion billboards in unguarded areas) and others requiring some infiltration (like freeing prisoners from a police station). Once you’ve done that, you’ll usually open up a special mission related to that district. In Westminster, for instance, you’ll sneak inside Big Ben and use a spider bot to hack the clock’s holographic displays to knock out some Albion propaganda.

Completing all the work in a district gets you a high-level operative with special perks. Westminster earns you a spy with some slick combat moves and a host of special gear, including a spy car with hidden missile launchers, a silenced handgun, and a spy watch that can disrupt enemy electronics. Other district operatives include a getaway driver, a roboticist who can summon drone bees to attack people, and a hacker with a bunch of passive perks that make all your network infiltrations go a lot smoother. While your other operatives will largely come from random encounters in the world, liberating districts is a reliable way to get some of the best characters in Legion.

2. Bagley Tags Recruits You Should Check Out

As you progress through the story in Legion, Bagley will start to make recruitment a little easier. Running around London, you’ll start to see recruits marked with green dots over their heads and on the map. This marker indicates higher-tier potential agents you should check out, who usually have useful skills to round out your team. There’s a catch, however–these recruits only appear for a limited time, and if you don’t profile them when you can, you can miss out on them or find them harder to win to your side.

When you see green dots, you’ll definitely want to profile them and see if they’re useful to you. It seems that you can save these recruits to chase them down later, circumventing the ticking clock–but you do have to at least locate and profile them before the timer runs out. Once you do, you can complete their missions and bring them aboard at your leisure.

3. Some Recruits Are Tougher Than Others

You’ll notice when profiling recruits that they sometimes have a red “thumbs down” icon near their names. That indicates that the person is not a fan of DedSec. The more thumbs down, the worse their opinion of the group is. Members of the authorities such as police or Albion soldiers usually have a lowered opinion of DedSec, but it can apply to anyone, and you can’t recruit that person until you raise your standing with them.

This is where the Deep Profiler comes in. You’ll need to buy this upgrade in the Gear menu, but once you have it, you can unlock more information about potential recruits. You’ll see a few ways you can help them, like erasing their debt with a loan shark, to raise their opinion of the organization. After that, you can use the Deep Profiler to see the person’s schedule and find them in the city, where you can talk with them to initiate the recruitment process.

Characters in London are reactive, though, so just as your actions can raise their opinion of DedSec, you can also lower it. Hit somebody with your car and they will be less willing to join the resistance, for instance, so it’s worth being careful how you treat people.

4. Look For Team Perks As Well As Individual Ones

As you’re decking out your DedSec team, you’ll be tempted to look for players with cool guns, special hacking capabilities, and unique items. Those will be good when you control those characters on particular missions. But some characters get perks for the whole team as well, and while they might not be the best operatives to take into an Albion base or a Kelley gang hangout, they can still be very helpful to your resistance movement.

If you fail a mission, get too hurt, or find yourself grabbed by the cops, the character you’re controlling when you’re injured or arrested will be put out of commission for a set period of time if you’re playing without permadeath mode engaged. Recruit characters like doctors or lawyers and you can reduce those timers–a doctor will help your team recover from injuries more quickly, while a lawyer can reduce arrest times. There are other handy perks that can help your whole team more effectively escape cops or earn more money from hacks, so keep in mind the benefits of some recruits that might go beyond using them on your next caper.

5. Learn The City For Good Recruits And Watch Your Environment

As you start to put together the team you want, you’ll probably find gaps in your roster that you want to fill with characters who have specific skills. There are a bunch of unique types of potential characters–not just skilled hackers, but powerful brawlers, skilled drivers, drone-controlling roboticists, and more. When you find you need specific skills, you might also discover that profiling random people on the street isn’t an efficient way to find what you’re looking for. There are tricks to finding operatives of various types, however.

First, if you’re looking for characters with a particular occupation, look around the environment for likely places to find them. Construction workers let you call highly useful cargo drones, so having one on the squad is a good call–and as you might have guessed, you can find them on construction sites. Look for hospitals to recruit doctors and police stations or Albion sites to recruit authority figures. Complete brawling challenges to find strong fighters.

Certain kinds of people also hang around particular London districts somewhat reliably. Tech-focused hackers like Camden and Nine Elms, while government types are usually in Westminster. Places with parks and tourist attractions, like Camden and Westminster, also have their fair share of street performers like magicians or living statues (who have some fun, useful perks–like the ability to hypnotize onlookers or hide in plain sight). Explore and pay attention to where you are so you’ll know what kind of recruits to expect in a given area.

6. Uniforms Make Life Much Easier

Perks and weapons from certain recruits are great, but don’t overlook how handy the clothes of a given profession can be, as well. A lot of areas in London are restricted to people off the street, and you can get yourself attacked, arrested, or even killed if you wander into them. But with the right look, you can infiltrate many of those locations much more easily, and the right recruits can get them for you.

As you might expect, among the benefits of getting a cop on your side is their ability to blend in with other cops; the same goes for Albion soldiers, construction workers, and doctors. Prioritize getting some useful uniforms early on and you’ll make it easier to finish some tougher missions or to reach lore items or tech points hidden in restricted areas where you would otherwise be hunted.

7. Avoid Crappy Perks

It might not be immediately obvious if you’re not looking closely, but not every perk is positive. Some operatives might have drawbacks that can make them tougher to use in certain missions. This doesn’t necessarily mean you should dismiss them out of hand, but it’s important to pay attention and know what you’re getting into with certain recruits.

There are a host of features of different elements that can make your operatives harder to use. Gambling Addiction and Shopaholic will see you losing money at random moments as your operatives use DedSec funds to feed their vices; Low Mobility means an operative can’t move as quickly or climb as easily, which can make getaways tough; and Hiccups make staying hidden during stealth difficult. You’ll also see characters with Death Wish or Doomed characteristics–these are people who are much more likely to die on missions. Doomed characters can keel over at random times, while Death Wish characters are more likely to get killed in action when fighting. They may have useful perks or aspects that you need which make the tradeoff worth it, but make sure you know what you’re getting before you do the work of recruiting a new character to the team.