Monster Health Scaling in Parties Revisited

The key metric is loot per unit time, symbolized by the expression below. For our purposes, L is loot per unit time, and the loot itself is one (it doesn't need a variable).

L = 1 / t

Time is used two ways: moving around, and standing around DPSing things. We'll call these movetime and killtime.

L = 1 / (m + k)

For solo play, that's enough. However, for party play, we need to factor in group IIQ bonus and group monster health bonus. We'll signify those with i and h respectively, along with p for the number of players. (It's *p at the end because the loot is split p ways.)

L = i / [(m + k*h/p)*p]
L = i / (m*p + k*h)

So the question is, does partying up currently increase your loot per unit time, or decrease it? The answer to that question depends on how much time you spend DPSing, relative to how much time you spend moving.

Let's imagine for a second that you always spent one unit of time playing. The precise unit is irrelevant; one second, one hour, or your own unit of time which is equal to 5 hours, 37 minutes and 12 seconds... doesn't matter. In any case...

m + k = 1

This means your solo efficiency is equal to one...

L = 1 / (m + k)
L = 1 / 1

You're thinking about joining a six-man party. This means:

L = 3.5 / (6*m + 4*k)

Let's say you move 50% of the time and kill 50% of the time. You'll get...

L = 3.5 / (3 + 2)
L = 3.5 / 5
L = 0.7

So you'd be making 30% less loot partying.

If you add in the m+k=1 equation and solve for m and k, you'll find there are no solutions of positive numbers for both m and k. This means no one is breaking even; everyone is losing. In truth, everyone makes more loot per unit time solo, unless you're leeching off someone better than you.

In contrast, let's look at the old bonus of 25% health per player.
L = 3.5 / (6*m + 2.25*k)
This one has a break-even point at m=1/3, k=2/3 (link). This meant that if you spent more than 1/3 of your time moving around, partying didn't benefit you, but if you spent more than 2/3 of your time DPSing, you'd benefit from partying. If you spent 75% of your time DPSing, you'd get 9.8% more loot.

Granted, none of this takes into account things like party synergy (I'm essentially assuming robots here), but having no break-even point for uncoordinated parties means players are not really incentivized to even try. How are you supposed to synergize if you can't even meet new players by joining pubs, because no one is willing to even attempt pubs anymore? At least the old system encouraged players to group when going against content with a high DPS-to-move ratio (meaning: things which didn't die easily in the first place).

Well, I guess there still is the practice of leeching off players who are better than you. That probably still works, when you can find a sucker.

Bottom line: The monster health bonus per player should never be greater than the group IIQ bonus per player.

I feel like its mostly map bosses that are the worst in 6 man partys, it definitely feels like it takes longer to kill in a group versus solo for me a lot of times.

I've never actually timed it so I could just be perceiving it wrong.

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Verminoth wrote:

That's exactly my point linkstatic. The damage output requirements on each individual party member have increased to a point of not allowing people to choose sub-optimal damage output builds.

I think the game should be balanced around people having "okay" gear for the level that they are at, with average passive trees.

The way things are right now, my groups feel like they need to go damage or else get left behind because they are slowing the group down.

No man, you're not getting it, he's saying you aren't allowed to use something besides spectral throw. The problem here isn't game balance, it's "you didn't use spectral throw". Not cookie cutter enough = you need to cut more cookies to play POE. Get back to cutting those cookies.

At no point during this game's lifetime will balancing the game appropriately become the solution.

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Mr_Mustasch wrote:

eed to play with a good MF player/culler.

EXP gain is better in group play

No it isn't. EXP gain in parties have changed considerably since release. All party members get the same EXP as solo, and only nearby members get EXP.

EXP isn't evenly distributed anymore. A mob that gives 1000 EXP solo gives 1000 EXP in a 6 man party to every one. If 2 are far away when that mob is killed, the 4 that killed it still get 1000 EXP each, NOT 6000 EXP divided by the 4.

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linkstatic wrote:

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Mr_Mustasch wrote:

EXP gain is better in group play

No it isn't. EXP gain in parties have changed considerably since release. All party members get the same EXP as solo, and only nearby members get EXP.

EXP isn't evenly distributed anymore. A mob that gives 1000 EXP solo gives 1000 EXP in a 6 man party to every one. If 2 are far away when that mob is killed, the 4 that killed it still get 1000 EXP each, NOT 6000 EXP divided by the 4.

While the loot distribution is less-than-solo (as I demonstrated in an earlier post), XP gain for group play is almost always better than solo.

X = 1 / (m + 4*k/6) ... because 4x monster health and 6 players
X = 1 / (m + 2/3*k)

That's always better than normal of 1/(m+k). The sole assumption is that the party can move together competently as a group.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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linkstatic wrote:

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Mr_Mustasch wrote:

EXP gain is better in group play

No it isn't. EXP gain in parties have changed considerably since release. All party members get the same EXP as solo, and only nearby members get EXP.

EXP isn't evenly distributed anymore. A mob that gives 1000 EXP solo gives 1000 EXP in a 6 man party to every one. If 2 are far away when that mob is killed, the 4 that killed it still get 1000 EXP each, NOT 6000 EXP divided by the 4.

While the loot distribution is less-than-solo (as I demonstrated in an earlier post), XP gain for group play is almost always better than solo.

X = 1 / (m + 4*k/6) ... because 4x monster health and 6 players
X = 1 / (m + 2/3*k)

That's always better than normal of 1/(m+k). The sole assumption is that the party can move together competently as a group.

The key metric for most end game players is exp/time and solo will generally be much faster due to the unknown variable of crappy allies with zero dps.

they only group because maps are much harder to maintain solo than in group.

Scroties terrible math equations make the subject much more interesting.

First the exp idea, his equation clearly shows that a group should be gaining xp faster, which supports the race results showing group play to be more efficient (though there are other reasons for group play being this efficient).

But going back to the idea of 'movetime' and 'killtime', we get the interesting question of what introducing one person who does 0 killtime.

So at the moment we have m + k = 1, this is assuming that all the time you spend ingame is moving or killing.

But when we make it a group, we have

sum(m1->m6) + sum(k1->k6) = 6, so essentially for your whole group the 'playtime' still is one unit, but the actual sum of everyones killtime and movetime is not 1 anymore, because you actually have 6 people killing and moving.

Now if we assume mn+kn=1, then we have m1+k1+m2+k2+m3+k3, where each individual part is summed. This means that we have one person with 0, say k6, then their m6 is 1.




Note, I might have started this with good intentions, but I do this in between actual work and the equation has caused me some confusion. Doing mathematics is fine, doing a part of an equation with a 20 minute break between each causes me to lose my train of thought slightly and often get a bit contradictory.
What i was wanting to do was investigate the effect on Loot/Time when you have a full party but one person not actually contributing to the killing at all. But it started getting complex and I got derailed

Lightning edit not so lightning; reposting whole thing as new post below.

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Real_Wolf wrote:

Scroties terrible math equations make the subject much more interesting.

First the exp idea, his equation clearly shows that a group should be gaining xp faster, which supports the race results showing group play to be more efficient (though there are other reasons for group play being this efficient).

But going back to the idea of 'movetime' and 'killtime', we get the interesting question of what introducing one person who does 0 killtime.

So at the moment we have m + k = 1, this is assuming that all the time you spend ingame is moving or killing.

But when we make it a group, we have

sum(m1->m6) + sum(k1->k6) = 6, so essentially for your whole group the 'playtime' still is one unit, but the actual sum of everyones killtime and movetime is not 1 anymore, because you actually have 6 people killing and moving.

Now if we assume mn+kn=1, then we have m1+k1+m2+k2+m3+k3, where each individual part is summed. This means that we have one person with 0, say k6, then their m6 is 1.




Note, I might have started this with good intentions, but I do this in between actual work and the equation has caused me some confusion. Doing mathematics is fine, doing a part of an equation with a 20 minute break between each causes me to lose my train of thought slightly and often get a bit contradictory.
What i was wanting to do was investigate the effect on Loot/Time when you have a full party but one person not actually contributing to the killing at all. But it started getting complex and I got derailed

Well for one, you're both making the process overly complicated. The only variable that matters is clear time (assuming everybody is safe). Movetime is really just a factor of killtime, which is really just a factor of clear time. IIQ/IIR I won't go into because it's not relevant to the issue.

Just because you have a guy doing 0 "killing" doesn't mean he doesn't improve your clear time either, if for example he has wrath, hatred, anger, and conduit and is spamming charges, it's likely he's doing more for the group than anyone else is when you consider that each aura is multiplied by 6.

What you were trying to do in the math though, is end up with basically sum(m) + sum(k) = 6, but in the case of bad dps players it ends up being 5. Then the hp of the mobs gets multiplied by 1.6 x (5) regardless of his dps, and the clear time goes way down.

Normally I wouldn't bother with pointless stuff like this but I'm a bit bored.

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Nephalim wrote:

The key metric for most end game players is exp/time and solo will generally be much faster due to the unknown variable of crappy allies with zero dps.

This variable can be solved by using known good allies. Just because one can party with players of radically different skill level doesn't mean one should.

Ideally, the system would be balanced for both situations. Having good allies should definitely give better performance than solo, but not to an OP extent. Having shitty allies should definitely give worse performance than solo. Getting random allies should put you in roughly the same ballpark, with at least a decent chance of breaking even.

The current situation is: you're pretty much guaranteed to get more XP per unit time and pretty much guaranteed to get less loot per unit time. There are exceptions, but they require amazingly good groups to get more loot, or amazingly poor groups to get less XP. That sort of binary tradeoff isn't a good situation.