Is co-op too easy?

The problem lies in that there are huge incentives (bonuses) to playing in a party. When the incentive to playing in a party should be to play with other people.

Although granted, I am not opposed to parties seeing a very minimal benefit IF the difficulty for that party is significantly increased, but not to the point of the system being broken.

I mean sure, many games are more enjoyable whilst playing with other people, that is pretty obvious, but it becomes problematic when a party has too many advantages which in-effect makes playing solo detrimental to your character in terms of progression. And this is heightened significantly in races where we have the data that supports the claims that playing in a party is far too profitable, and any event that has party enabled is required if wanting to achieve the best results. Anyone only has to look at various sites such as poestatistics.com or templeofexiles.com etc etc which backs up my claims.

The facts are there and again I am not saying that it should be at a stage where one is punished for playing in a party but what I am saying is that it is a flawed system because at this moment being in a party is always going to be far more profitable and the game needs to be equally balanced for solo and party play. This is no easy feat but something that needs to be addressed.

Now there has been arguments by certain people stating that if you have a well coordinated and focused team that they "should" have an advantage but this again is not an equally fair system but more importantly there is no system in place with that idea. Because it's all about efficiency, and as ladders and events are involved, people will do what is the most efficient thing to win and right now in any party enabled ladder/event that is done by partying. The changes do not need to be significant, but there definitely needs to be tweaks made.

nope, just do harder maps

I think monster attack/cast/movement speed increase should be capped at 10-15% for a full party. I agree that any increase in monster damage punishes melee builds more than ranged.

With a full party I think monster HP should be increased by 20% monster defense by 10% and overall monster damage increased by 20%. To deal with the increased damage a full party should be able to increase player defense by 10-25% by stacking auras. GGG would need to add defensive focused auras or add defensive properties to existing ones.

Increasing monster density would work as long as group bonus XP and IIQ is reduced.

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flab wrote:

Well, the suggestion to limit portal abuse by only allowing you to use portals (that aren't your own) to instances you have the waypoint for is a fairly good one, except what about instances without waypoints? Also no idea how intrusive people will find it.

Other than that, I think one of the simpler things you can do is lower the XP bonus for partying slightly. In terms of survivability balance, you're kinda screwed for options though, I just don't think you can raise monster damage or make them faster, wall of numbers forces more minions, totems, range.

The portal situation is definitely one thing that needs to be changed and yes as mentioned it is very difficult to not completely break partying but at the same time there does need to be some slight tweaks.

I believe lowering the XP bonus could work, but the problem lies with how much easier the game is whilst partying and so yes fixing the portal situation and lowering XP delay helps with the competitive side of things such as races/ladders. But it still does not not change the fact that the game is far easier whilst in a group as well as it being extremely easy to be carried.

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flab wrote:

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VictorDoom wrote:

nope, just do harder maps

Referring to?

if you want harder co-op, and more challenging team play, do harder maps.

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flab wrote:

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VictorDoom wrote:

if you want harder co-op, and more challenging team play, do harder maps.

Rest of the game?

Also don't consider that particularly relevant to balance (which is what I gather most of the thread is about), that map is going to be even harder solo.

hm, well for the rest of the game, which is indeed made way easier with groups, they could ramp up the difficulty, as others have suggested, so as to encourage more teamwork and thinking twice about having strangers in your party.

And they could apply the same thing in maps, as to make them more difficult, but this way the old map problem appears again, we will have to waste more of our currency on maps for them to be manageable.