Sorry to resurrect this thread, but me, my GM, and our other players are utterly confused by how squads are supposed to work.
I've been carrying around an Iron Horn of Valhalla, and things got desperate enough for me to use it.
We used the stats for Berserker Horde as found in a5e.tools and thats where things went sideways. Notably, in how it takes damage.
The horde has 5 times the base creatures hit points. Cool, makes things simple.
The horde has the Area Vulnerability trait. This says that any area attack against the horde does double damage. Cool, since the horde is multiple creatures, this is understandable.
The horde has the Damage and Healing trait. THIS IS THE BAD TRAIT THAT BREAKS SQUADS. It stats that any action or trait that deals damage, deals 5 times the usual damage. This makes zero sense. One, why bother to multiply the hitpoints the squad has, if I'm going to multiply the damage it takes by 5? It would be simpler bookkeeping just to leave everything as normal. And why is damaged multiplied by 5? The point of a squad, is they become large hit point sinks, as opposed to listing 5 separate creatures on the combat tracker. Plus, as written, the combination of Area Vulnerability and Damage and Healing means squads are taking 10x damage. This makes the squad -weaker- than the collection it is supposed to represent.
As it stood, the demon chewed through the hordes like they were butter, because its claw attacks were doing 5x damage to the hordes - and then promptly had problems when they hit zero points and the Squad Dispersal ability kick in. The demon actually had more issues with the individual horde members than the horde itself.
If I would do anything it would be to combine the two traits, with the double damage for area attacks - and double healing if an area heal is used on the squad.