How to bring coop/group-play back

We should raise the monster hp so that they take longer to kill. I dunno, somehow I just want coop and groupplay back in the game. Just got done playing diablo 2 again after blizz con announcement and the coop is so much fun there. Any way group play could be more encouraged in poe?

group play already has a monster hp buff AND item quantity buff.

Performance problems related to too many calcs/screen clutter does a lot more to pee in coop play's cheerios than monster HP.

One way some games reward cooperation is by auto-allocating a guaranteed boss or quality item to each party member. This accommodates a wide range of playstyles (support, dps, ancillary) without cluttering the screen. A green quest item is only 1 icon but can be collected by everyone in the instance.

Another way to reduce clutter and foster cooperation is reward chests that are not instance-locked. Anyone may open the chest to pull out items instead of having them spill out all over the ground. Each person sees their own subset of items and this is exclusively theirs, so there's no duping or itemloss bugginess as seen with other shared depots e.g. guild stash.

Shared objectives: by having atlas completion, conqueror progress, and maven tallies tracked somewhere else besides the map device, or have them 100% shared, makes sense. There's no reason not to unless the goal is to act as gatekeeper and individualize grinding for redundant content.

Alternatively, if the goal is to prevent freeloaders from getting a9 atlas completion by riding a better player's coattails, then limit shared objectives to folks who were present in the final arena during the fight and survived it. They can be afk and still share in the objective as long as they bothered to come in the room and survive. This means a rework of the current carry practice, where the carrier asks the carryee to leave the map and only reenter when the boss is within culling range. The carryee will now need to have some clue about the fight mechanics/boss cheats to manually evade shit and the carrier will have to have enough DPS to deal with hp scaling.

IIRC the latter change has already been implemented for most Maven fights and for atlas repopulation. You simply can't stand out in the lobby while the fight's going on and expect to get any peanuts.

The next step obv is getting rid of the clunky allocation system. Somebody might be doing all the dps, sure, but they are being carried and launched into low orbit by an aurabot, or a cursebot, or someone proccing EE for them, some kid with trash gear from the town vendor that got lucky and found a vaal haste gem which he's dutifully mashing as often as he can, turning your Zambonis into the Polar Express with chainsaws strapped to the front.

edit: the big elephant of skill mtx and clutter is camping the room as always. We have little hope of asking for a "ally/enemy radar" mod to simplify all the Gfx and rendering for party members. Rendering fewer allied proj and splash auras as a token flat circular template or something, while keeping enemy skills identifiable, would go a long way towards decluttering and empowering groups. So would having the option to turn off mtx and fog effects and recolour ally/enemy sfx in brighter colours but I gather these are all part of the proxy endpoints for player skill.

8 player teams.

My experience with group play in PoE: One guy is one-shotting everything, all the others are just looting.

For hard boss fights it might be good, but most part of the game is just not really balanced for group play. Too much power, too less HP on monsters even with buffs.

The group play mechanics of D3 are way better here, even though its a much more simple game. But group play is really fun with some friends actually. It was actually always a good group play mechanic in all Diablo games. I played Diablo almost never alone.

How to bring it back? Mhh, better balancing less power creep. Packs that actually have so much health that you're fighting for more than 2 milliseconds with them.

4 people with 60M dps on a boss fight in a map....where is the boss? :)

Miss the days of endless ledge runs...

That train has already gone. In fact I think there never wer any trains.

If you want a good MP experience, play another game.

Anyway, I will list some problems.

1) Over the top effects, even solo.

2) FPS drops

3) Stupid loot system (WHy can't PoE has personal loot like every other games out there)

4) Level design, especially the cell-type just choke points, & did I mention the small S doors. One players standing at door & no one can get out/in
Also most levels do not have a linear/set path so group can stay together

5) Limited portals. I personally think linking how many times you can reentered an area by portals is bad design, even worst for MP. If people want to return to twon every 10 sec, let thme do it. Set a limit how many time a person can died before locked out if thats the reason for it.

6) Map mods. Many peoplelooved this, but I hatred this. A, it is time wasted that you could be killing stuff, but mandatory or you be wasting your maps.
Importantly for MP, that means you have to make sure the mods you roll will not impact all the players, or some players will be just predestains or sitting duck. Especially mods like reflect. or not leech/regen

7) Most contents are not challenging to need to group up. End up one/2 players rush through, the rest picking up the left overs like janitors.

8) Atlas linked to individual, & group affect Atlas. I guess less so these days without the silly Elder/shaper influences a while ago

These are some of the thing that comes to my mind.

It's not really that hard to bring back group play in my opinion. The best group play this game had to offer was always the public games within the acts. Rotations and other things feel forced and relatively unnatural to form. Public games were pretty simple to join and leave and there was no real harm if you messed up somehow.

A few examples include Dried Lake runs when Act 4 was the pinnacle and ledge runs earlier than that. The only equivalent is Blood Aqueduct runs early in the league now.

I think if they just added the ability to scale the level of act areas up to 67 with a slider, they would gain some roots again.

But they want end game in maps, so I don't see that happening.

A possible Solution could be, "stacking" big monster-cluster into a group of 4-5 really strong monsters which award the corresponding EXP.

Like fuse all possible mobs on one Screen Into one pack of mighty mobs, somewhat like metamorph.

group play already raises difficulty

if you find content to be too easy and want a reason to group start doing fully juiced out 100% delirious T19 Maps