Are there any benefits to playing in a party?

GGG disincentivizes group play with the penalties they have in place for group play.

Positive:
- Playing with friends
- That's it

Negatives:
- Less overall loot
- Less flask charge % at 75%
- Only the one getting the KB gets the flask charge
- Less XP per monster
- More monster health with less reward (more monster health is a must but you should get rewarded for it, not penalized by getting less of everything overall)

With this system in place their actions show they don't want you to play in a group with anyone. This is exactly why, after over 15k hours of playing combined between myself and my 2 friends, we stopped playing. Got sick of always wanting to group together but never doing it because we'd be wasting our time compared to if we just did it solo and traded with each other.

Less overall loot PER MOB
Less XP PER MOB

You should be able to kill many more mobs in a given amount of time with a party, so, you have to look at loot/hour and XP/hour, or else you're getting the wrong idea about what the results are.

Also, you can fight higher level monsters, or monsters you couldn't kill yourself, so the loot and XP you are getting PER MOB is a bigger hit than the ones you'd get by yourself.

The flask thing? You're misquoting that. It's a +75% BONUS per party member to the recharge rate. So, you're getting a bigger recharge amount per hit, not a penalty. True, only the KB player gets the recharge, but if you need charges, just talk to each other, and work it out so you all get turns at killing blows.

This was necro'd from 2012 for anyone confused.