Monster Health Scaling in Parties Revisited

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Veta321 wrote:

I skimmed the thread. @Scrotie the major criticism of grouping in POE depends on who you talk to. What you suggested sounds good, I like it, but it fails to address the main grouping concern of a large portion of the community. That concern being the disparity in return on currency invested in mapping. More specifically, the disparity in loot return for currency invested when playing in a 6man map group versus anything else, especially solo.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

• Pressing the button on the Eternal Laboratory device causes all portals to divert to a new instance of the same map.

Either you're confused, or I am.

Hmm no, but I must not have seen the last page of the thread. Thanks, fastest fox.

To that point, how do you deal with irregular numbered parties e.g. 4 man groups, 5 man groups.

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Veta321 wrote:

To that point, how do you deal with irregular numbered parties e.g. 4 man groups, 5 man groups.

Um, I don't know. Perhaps put an Orb of Fusing in the Map Device, press the button, one portal disappears but the remaining portals gain a bonus of some kind?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Veta321 wrote:

To that point, how do you deal with irregular numbered parties e.g. 4 man groups, 5 man groups.

Um, I don't know. Perhaps put an Orb of Fusing in the Map Device, press the button, one portal disappears but the remaining portals gain a bonus of some kind?

This indeed would be a way of resolving inequality. Another even more problematic case would be varying party sizes. For example, parties which start as 3 players, but become 4 players. In the current system that is facilitated far better than any kind of instance or portal division. Further, it is a reality that all instances start as 1 player and increase from there. How would we manage dynamic parties in the regular story mode - is it practical for monsters to suddenly double when someone new enters the instance? What if they leave?

What if you use the Eternal Laboratory in one party and then join another with a different amount of players? What if there's players in your EL instance that aren't also in your party?

All that said, I am very much for equalizing returns and loot pace for solo and groups. One proposition I've heard and liked was allowing players to ctrl+click map portals for up to 6 different instances. In the case of irregular party sizes, a special portal could be used to reopen an instance for other players. To limit any kind of abuse the reagents of this special portal should be cost prohibitive - much as starting your own map is cost prohibitive.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Good point; it's a problem I've previously considered but I'm not quite sure how to solve. Perhaps the last Laboratory instance you enter gets "saved" when you log off?

Oh yea, I guess they could do that. The map device is just like 1 really tiny stash tab, plus an integer to indicate portals, that would work.

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Veta321 wrote:

This indeed would be a way of resolving inequality. Another even more problematic case would be varying party sizes. For example, parties which start as 3 players, but become 4 players.

I don't think that's a problem that needs a mechanical solution. "Hey we're doing a map right now, you can join when we're done" is the social solution.

4 man and 5 man could be issues though. 6 portals per map implies the party size will be a factor. 1, 2, 3, 6 good; 4, 5 bad. I'm not convinced by portal "trading." What if it's better to trade your remaining portals than to run the map again? It undermines the core change that was being proposed. If it's not better, then 4 and 5 man parties are at a disadvantage and the solution was incomplete. It has to be exactly equal. If one could figure that out, then we wouldn't need the whole workaround with repeating maps. Could just implement the "portal trades" directly into the existing system.