Watch Dogs: Legion guide — How to skip recruitment missions and recruit people faster

As our review says, the single best aspect of Watch Dogs: Legion is the way you can fill up DedSec with people from all walks of life. Builders, anarchists, accountants, hackers, and professional hitmen can all rub shoulders in your safehouse, and every single one is playable. However,  recruiting them in Watch Dogs: Legion can be a little time-consuming.

The general method of recruitment is to talk to them and accept their mission. This may either be far more difficult than expected (hello, van ambushes) or may lead into another mission. And unfortunately, at least one of those missions had a habit of bugging out for me. When you just want to bring a living statue into your crew, you might not want to go through the hassle of sneaking into a secure area and hacking a thing.

Good news: you don’t always have to.

Quick recruitment

As far as I can tell, the way Watch Dogs: Legion decides if a person will join DedSec is based on a sliding scale. If you have them tagged as a potential recruit, then once their opinion of DedSec gets high enough, they’ll join. The crucial part there is “once their opinion of DedSec gets high enough.” While recruitment missions are an easy way of pushing that invisible bar, they’re not the only way.

First, you want to grab the Deep Profiler upgrade in the tech tree. This lets you analyze potential recruits and see their schedules, as well as potential vectors for recruitment. The latter is what you’re after, and it’s generally at the very top of their deep profile. They might be investigating a cryptofarmer, or being hassled by someone. (This is also the method you use to turn people who dislike DedSec, like Albion agents, into those who might like you enough to give you a recruitment mission.)

What you want to do is highlight one of those Deep Profiler opportunities, tag it as an investigation point on your map, and hightail it over there. Most of the time these are public areas, and you’ll be given a prompt to wait until the target appears. Do so, and then you’ll generally have a very simple thing to do, ranging from knocking them out to just walking near them and hacking them. And if their opinion of DedSec is already reasonable, then this is generally enough for them to phone you up and ask to join.

Using the living world to recruit in Watch Dogs: Legion

Not all of the Deep Profile vectors are so easy, mind: changing arrest warrants means sneaking into police stations and so on. But more often than not you can find a very quick and easy way of pulling in a recruit that doesn’t involve a lengthy mission in a restricted zone.

Take him down, and Megan might be willing to join up.

Of course, you might also come across things like this in the wild, as that’s just the joy of Watch Dogs: Legion. You might see someone being arrested at an Albion checkpoint, and a cursory glance will indicate that they’re the brother of someone in your tagged list. If so, then freeing them is a really easy way to score some points with your prospective recruit, and is quite possibly enough to push them over the tipping point into joining you.

In short, recruitment missions aren’t the only means you have of recruiting people. You can pull them in by improving their opinions in the living world itself, and this is often far faster, safer, and easier. Especially with the Deep Profiler pointing you directly to those bits.

For more Watch Dogs: Legion guides and tips, be sure to have a look at our guides hub.