[Monolith] Playing in party with friend feels punishing

Hello there!

Are there any plans of improving Monolith experience in the future?

Now doing Monolith in party feels punishing, cause only one player in party is getting progress, i play with my friend, we started new Monolith at the same time, he gets progress / Gaze of Orybos / Corruption, we have done 70+ echoes, he has over 200 corruption, but when i play solo im at 100 corruption, 0 Gaze of Orybos, etc.

I understand there must be some “leeching” / power leveling / progress unlocking drawback, but there should be Gaze of Orybos reward for everyone in the party if they have enough stability for doing boss, there should be also corruption reward for all players in the party - calculated from their base corruption, so player with 100 corruption cant get for example 200 bonus corruption if he joined party with someone who has 300+ corruption.

Maybe adding 3rd and 4th button (normal party mono, emp. party mono) for Monolith orb / stone would solve that issue - it will save progression for actual party, player who will join new party will get prompt that he will lose progres from all party, etc etc.

Thanks for reading, stay safe travelers!

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i agree with you, if you want to get corruption level, you are forced to play in single player or hosting every game, leaving others behind. There should be a corruption reward for others in the party when you complete “echo of a world” (with the exception for negative corruption reward maybe)

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I might be crazy, but have you tried swapping party leader role occasionally? If you’re at 100 corruption in empowered still, it sounds like your friend has been host the entire time.

Yes but if you play with three other friends it take you 4x the time to level up corruption than solo

Playing with three friends also gives you four peoples loot instead of one if you share your loot.

I also wish some of the corruption and possibly the Gaze would be shared with the people joining but understand that they might not want to give us the full amount.

I’m sure they will update it in the future. Keep in mind this was originally a single player game and the multiplayer beta only launched about a week ago. They need some time to work out the kinks.

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I’m not sure 4x the time is true.

Monster health isn’t 400% in a party of 4, so while you’re playing with your friends, you clear faster and get access to broader range of items (assuming you share some at times).

From a rewards perspective, when you’re the leader, you only get the specific echo rewards, but as party member you get more flexible reward choices (which are scaled by host corruption and echo distance in the usual way). Both get timeline stability rewards.

I might have misread the initial post a bit. Are you saying that you get don’t get gaze of orobyss as party member? I wonder if thats intentional or a bug.

Id be keen to hear EHG perspective on this…

Hey folks. I asked on the Discord and OP should report this as a bug (i.e. it might not be intended)

gaze of orobyss go only to the host of the boss, even if everyone else have enoughb stability and this is probably a bug. Anyway the post was about not progressing with corruption when playing as nonhost party memeber, and it was just a suggestion for future updates

In fact, both of them might be bugs. OP and friends needs to post a bug report so that the devs have more information and track down the bug to fix it.

I don’t see why you’d need to make a bug report for something that might not be a feature as well. I’m sure EHG is watching feedback from both channels/forums.

My two cents is that, as things stand, Gaze of Orybos stacks and direct corruption gain should be treated as separate (but obviously closely-related) issues because players have control over one but not the other. The lack of Gaze of Orybos stacks for qualifying party members feels like a glaring miss to me, to the point where it understandably feels like a bug, and maybe it is. Reason being imo is there’s no drawback to getting those stacks (at least in non-HC), beyond taking a dive to Shade of Orybos to get rid of the stacks if you don’t want to cash them in. This would be a little clunky ofc, and admittedly HC would need different treatment, but would at least allow party members to manage their GoO stacks in SC.

As I’m writing this, though, it’s occurring to me that a cleaner option might be to add a popup panel for party members to choose whether they want to join the monolith boss fight, along with a little checkbox option that lets them decide whether or not they want to gain the Gaze stack. Idk, just an off-the-cuff thought. Might be too intrusive to add a popup for Mono boss fights, though they would be quite similar to the dungeon boss fight popups, and I think a little warning that you’re going into a boss fight without relying on the party leader to communicate it might not be a bad thing.

The timeline corruption gaining for party members - which I think shouldn’t be conflated with the GoO stacks because a solution (without a popup) would be a little more problematic to implement because you have to think of all the use case scenarios. The problematic scenarios are those where party members might not want that corruption gain. For example, maybe someone is being hard carried by a friend in 500 corruption monoliths but can only handle 100’s when they are alone. Extreme example perhaps but even if the gap was narrower, the issue would remain. You also have to think of the new player experience, and try to make it so they can’t accidentally “brick” their timeline(s) by playing with friends without realizing what they’re doing. Yes, you can dump / walk back your corruption level but that is a time-consuming and potentially frustrating exercise if you cannot manage the echoes solo.

So again I think part of the goal here would need to be to make the corruption gain manageable for all players. Again, the point of control for the player could be a popup before the boss encounter. Could either have a second check box for “corruption gain” separate from the Gaze stacks or, honestly, just combine them both into one checkbox.

There are of course issues with adding a popup box before boss encounters like people forgetting to click it every time if they don’t want the default setting, the impact it would have on the flow of the gameplay loop, and dev time investment. I don’t think any of these issues would be insurmountable though, as there is precedence with the pop-up panels for the “ready check” for boss fights in dungeons, so a) we have the technology! and b) a popup for a monolith boss fight wouldn’t be that jarring and would even add a bit of consistency to the UI/UX across systems.

However, as I write this and the ideas keep churning in my noggin, It’s occurring to me now that perhaps the best place for the checkbox(es) might be in Gameplay Options and you might only need the one checkbox since this solution skirts the problems outlined above. One checkbox labelled something like “Enable Corruption Gains as Guest in Parties” for both the GoO stacks and the direct corruption gain would probably do it, but the could be separated out to two checkboxes if there’s some reason to keep them separate that I’m not thinking of. This would solve the problem of player control over timeline corruption while requiring minimal dev effort; it wouldn’t effect the gameplay loop at all so it’s not at all intrusive; and it could be set to Disabled by default so that new players don’t accidentally bork their timelines. It also has the added benefit of being fire and forget - once you set the gameplay option it’s taken care of and you don’t have to deal with it any more.

Would be great to hear from EHG to find out if one or both of these issues are bugs or working as intended or a work in progress. <3

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Certainly, feedback is separate to bug reports and you can have both at the same time.

Based on Mikes posts from the Discord on a daily basis, EHGs position on this is to raise a bug for anything you think might not be intended.

This gives them the feedback and supplies the data (log files, account name, time of issue) they need to investigate.

My friends and I thought that the monolith party experience was super polished at first: smooth loading screen transition, shared stability progress, real nice stuff. But then we got to our first shade and realized only the host gets +corruption and we’re stunned. It takes a lot of time investment to push corruption up, and it’s very demoralizing right now as we’re realizing we’ll have to triple-push monoliths (or go solo) to get everyone’s corruption up.

I understand that there are undue advantages to consider (re: boosting) but I’m curious if devs have thoughts/manifesto on this topic posted somewhere to learn more about the intended direction here… my feedback is that it currently feels really bad and I’m hopeful that there’s a thoughtful compromise that could make it feel better without letting people abuse the system

Monoliths are end game content and with multiplayer patch we still are forced to play main content alone…
This is poorly resolved.

With my friend we played together story and leveling together up to 60lvl, after we unlocked monoliths and realized that there is no shared progression with nodes or corruption than we stopped playing together and now it looks like offline game like it was before 0.9 patch. Sad

Just waiting 6th June for D4

Someone has news about this? It’s crazy I can farm echoes with friends for stability and then I have to leave the party and beat the boss alone… waiting for a dev answer

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