[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

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Currently, party play is objectively far easier than solo play. Even for groups without top-tier characters, the monster die far too quickly and struggle to do damage to multiple players at once. While we cannot increase damage for party play (this fails due to our Armour system)

You got too many defensive mobs that do no damage get stunned etc.
Imo those mobs should still die faster but they should get special abilities like ManaBurn/ Blood Magic Curse(Use mana as BM character) and pose more of a threat than being a Pinata.
Forcing players to stop attacks or run away is something thats far better than create high HP mobs(I call them MMO mobs) that take forever to kill.

One reason I liked the 1 week Turbo Race was simply because while mobs were easy to kill they still could overpower you by packsizes or speed.

Players use chain against packs of mobs why don't get ranged mobs get chain agains packs of players?
So once an arrow hits it looks chains till 5 times or other archers get 1 forking projectile for each player.
Melee mobs get multistrike and a flicker strike without damage followed by a normal attack, so other players get hit.

Or mobs that direct some of their received damage to another player(also offers another PK opportunity).

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monsters that are magic (60% per player rather than 50%), rare (80%) and unique (100%).

Wasn't it 50 magic 100 rare 200 unique in CB while Base life was lower?

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As a long-term change, we will be making sure that many monsters have the ability to deal area of effect damage so that they're more challenging to parties and summoners.

It doesn't have to be AoE. It has to be a special ability. For example some caster character casts a warpfield to protect himself and scatters all party players into different areas so those players must fight a pack with 3,5 times their base HP.
PnP games have some spells which can easily make it to an ARPG games.

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With more difficulty should come more rewards. While we want to keep the rewards for solo play competitive, it is difficult to deal with strangers or to arrange and keep the commitments required to play with a consistent group. If we make party play more challenging, we'll probably also incentivise it slightly more also. Solo players are already at a big advantage from an item drop point of view (they get more items per player and have no loot tension), so small increases to the party rewards are not deemed to be unfair.

Then why I don't play high level content? Because the solo player loot is not enough!
I am sick of killing 400 mobs each map that yield 60-80 items and 4-10 of them are rare, while with 6 players you get a screen of 60-80 items already.
3-4 players drops for solo play and a bit more for bigger parties would be fine.

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While we're very pleased with the pacing of item drops in the early game, once you're playing in parties with lots of Increased Quality mods (or Map content with large item bonuses), way too many white items litter the ground. This is bad for many reasons - readability, item dilution, performance, control, etc. A big part of this is that there's a big bonus to item quantity when you're in a party. We are currently experimenting with turning some of this bonus into Item Rarity, so that the same number of Magic, Rare and Unique items are the same, but with less white items.

If you do so increase the basedrop rate for solo players. Nothing will be worse than an even more punishing solo play. 1 Player = 4 rares 6 players = 18 rares now and 26+ after Rarity change.
A better change would be to increase the chance of arealevel items.
So instead of the base -10 level drops a full player party has only -5 level drops as common drops.
The prior post would make it more D2esque. In D2 you barely feel a difference between 1 and 8 players.

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We are likely to make it easier to acquire the lowest levels of maps. After a lot of thinking and simulations, we are now pretty comfortable that the economic (and gameplay) damage of easier access to the first maps is low enough that we should make them more accessible to more players.

You do realize because of that Grindfest you lost many players? I posted that the mapdroprates in merciless are far too low 5 days after OB release! It should have stayed the same way as in CB.

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We want to use this change as a reason for players to play in more of Merciless Act Three.

Players are sick of Catacombs, Docks and Lunaris already. They are playing too much of act3.
There has to be A3X content at the same level of lower maps with random mobs.

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We're discussing specific chests that drop only maps, and a system where Merciless Piety has an extra drop slot that has a reasonable chance of dropping a map.

Or you could create a meta endgame at tower of god which sends you into areas level 60-66 with high drop chances for maps.
Imo Piety is far easier than Vaal.

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We are considering some potential solutions (experience equation changes, ways to access maps for experience gain rather than items, etc).

Or you could add an experience modifier tied to the map difficulty and all high maps got hard bosses blocking 50% of the remaining map.

And by hard I don't mean General Gravicius in Shipyard. Something like the Pre 9.12 reflect as Auras and other mechanics that summon weaker mobs and heavy hits so a combinations of both is deadly.

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We also feel that the item quantity rates on maps are potentially a little too high and affect the problem described previously where too many white items drop

I prefer solo play and I disagree.
Quantity for each player scales in a really unfair way.