One of the major problems that a lot of people have with the recent patch is how much more difficult many of the elite areas have become. I’m not really sure what the rationale was behind this change, but my assumption is that it was to make this content a bit less trivial for the big zerg groups that often form in elite areas. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of people who like to play solo and those people just got absolutely fucked.
My suggestion would be to spend a bit more time implementing a much better system: difficulty scaling. I’ve seen it in other games and it’s a much better solution to the issue. For each player that engages in combat against a mob, that mob should gain quite a bit of max HP and also a slight increase in damage done.
I’m sure this would be a non-trivial feature to implement, but it would be really good for the game.
I feel the problem is that there’s a ton more fun changes to counter a mass of players than just buffing hp and damage. Spawn timers, aggro switching, number of npcs summoned, Flat out chest removal and limited drop pool, aggro follow range, more ranging npcs, i’m sure there’s more ideas.
New worlds shared drops for the group and chest loot mechanics are extremely pro group.
Runescape for example allows massable bosses and gives out xp to everyone but the drops are limited so if you’re doing it you get killcount and its easy and such but you’re not likely to get much loot.
I agree Elite areas probably shouldn’t be soloable just by hopping on a ledge and waiting for aggro to reset.
This game would be a dream to me if it had a dark souls type of difficulty for a solo player. Make elite areas genuinely difficult, but still do-able for a solo player who plays really well. And then the only way to have that happen without it being absolutely trivial and boring for people who do the area in a group, you’d need some form of scaling.
The simplest solution would be a significant HP increase per player + a smaller damage increase per player (with a hard cap or soft cap from diminishing returns so that the mobs don’t just start one-shotting everyone).
Your ideas are interesting and could be better than simple scaling, but could also be so much worse and much more difficult to implement and implement properly.
I think the biggest problem is many mechanics with wars and terriroty and such need many many players but then PVE wise there’s very limited options for instanced PVE. So the good open world options just get flooded with players.
It’s also just the nature of the loot + watermark system. With no scaling, if your purpose to do an elite area is to loot as much as possible in the shortest time, you will naturally try to get into a zerg with 10+ people.
If I was the one implementing or designing the scaling, here’s what I would try to target:
1 player: Difficult, but do-able if the player plays it well.
5 players: Around 3.5x more HP, around 2x more damage done. So it’s similar to the difficulty of an expedition.
6+ players: As the player count goes over 5, increase HP by about 1x per player (so 6 players would be 4.5x, 7 players would be 5.5x, etc.) But probably don’t increase the damage done anymore.
10+ players: As the player count goes over 10, increase HP by about 1.5x per player.
My rationale here would be that the optimal difficulty is at a 5 man group. But it’s still do-able for a good solo player and won’t take them an insane amount of time. And then as you get into zerg territory, you’re not actually going to be killing the mob much faster than if you just did it in a 5 man.
Nobody would be punished here. Everyone would be able to do the content the way they want to and it would be fairly balanced as far as time required so there wouldn’t be much benefit to going with more than 5 people (but you also wouldn’t be punished for showing up as a group of 5 and there’s already a group of 5 there).