Preferred SL playstyle?

[Carnolus]

Well, what I generally do is a mix of both passive and very aggressive. You NEED to relay stuff to command. It has to happen for them to know what’s up, that’s when the passive comes in. You sit back, tell them what’s up, maybe fire off a few shots, maybe save a marine from being drug off.
Aggressive is when you’re standing near the front, yelling out “WEST! CHARGE IT BOYS! LETS GET EM!!” And light the Xenos up. This gives general direction, and a guy who charges in fully expecting you to have their back. I haven’t been proven wrong so far with this tactic. You show your guys you mean business, you’re not a pansy and you’d fight for it. If I go, I generally have 2 thirds of my squad rolling up behind me ready to kick ass.
Fire teams are pointless unless you’re on FOB and sending backup to the front. They over complicate things. If you just say “BRAVO NORTH!” They all know they’re going north.

Talk with your marines. Please, any SL that reads this please for the love of god have fun with your marines. Even if they don’t want to talk, try and pull it out of them. When you talk, RP and banter, you’re giving more fun, making your team more responsive on comms, and showing them that you care about what they say! If they feel like they matter why wouldn’t they charge that line with you? You have their back.

[biscuitsakimbo]

So marines will usually base their SL style on their personality quirks rather than conscious choices, BUT if you are playing in certain ways due to conscious choices the difference between the two playstyles depends on how you conceive of the job; are you there to be the top grunt, leading your standards by buffing them with Issue-Order and robusting Xenos with your weapons, or are you there to facilitate command's plan of action by acting as a vessel for the marine's two most powerful tools (CAS and OB)?

Realistically, a good SL should strive towards a synthesis of the two playstyles. They aren't at all mutually exclusive, mainly because both depend on cooperation that may be more or less viable due to the varying skill levels of marines in all jobs. In a perfect world we would have squad marines robust enough that an SL would never need to fire his weapon, but in reality your marines are gonna miss kills, get themselves killed, kill you with FF, etc. In a perfect world we would have Staff Officers who don't OB dozens of marines at a time, or bad SLs that hog the CAS and then laze poorly, but until then we'll need to rely on basic weaponry. I would go as far as to say that even having a 'preferred SL playstyle' that fits those two archetypes (passive or aggressive, we'll call them) is indicative of a lack of skill, because in any given situation one of those two roles is going to be the one you need to play.

I came to this realization watching Aestel 'Rose' Wellick play SL yesterday. During the push into Lambda, she spent a solid 10-15 minutes struggling with bad SOs, a feeble Req department, and bald standards destroying beacons as she tried to coordinate an essential OB. It paid off big time, killing a Prae, all 3 boilers, and multiple smaller castes. She never fired her weapon during the process, while my own squad's bald SL was so focused on getting kills that he got himself captured immediately, costing us his kit. And because Rose is robust as fuck, she essentially solo killed an Elite Empress not ten minutes after her huge OB. If you find that you have a particular playstyle, in reality you might need to work on one of your skill areas to become a complete Squad Leader.

[Heckenshutze]

Attack, attack until the end of times then attack again, kill all the enemies or die trying, as a team.