Because it’s a rehashed concept, and totally off the point of the original OP and my original post. Everything since has been affirmation of Godwin’s law.
Thanks for reminding on the FAQ.
I took a look and noticed they say they intend to include player housing. I don’t recall seeing this before and it feel contradictory to the devs responses on this qn early on.
EDIT: I went to review some of the discord comments that were shared on player housing. I recall now Mike agree they dont want to allow player housing to become a barrier to players socialising. But thought that housing can still be a cool idea to show off personal custom space to others. I suppose I will reserve comments on this until we see a more concrete concept for how EHG intends to implement housing.
1 Like
In my opinion, scaling monsters attributes per player on party is a pretty good shot. This allows you to share a good multiplayer experience with your friends and doesn’t break the game. I don’t think they need to worry about balacing multiplayer, unless we find a broken interaction.
My concerns is about game optimizations. The game isn’t light to play (constantly above 60fps) and we can’t tweak things like game physics, monsters disappearing after death to clean the environment, disable shadows and if I turn off antialiasing the game shows a lot of particles.
This is a really interesting discussion, thanks everyone!
So presuming there is no additional “MP only” or MP-focused content, I suppose the question is more about the philosophical design of balancing (or not) for group play. While I’m definitely a group-oriented player in general (I almost always play a support class in an MMORPG), I also really enjoy playing a crazy solo build in an ARPG. Balancing (or nerfing) specific skills to limit “OP” solo builds seems like a pretty controversial solution and seems like it would ruin a lot of fun for primarily solo players. I guess I’m just wondering if a “/players X” kind of solution (where you just boost the HP and damage of mobs X-fold or more) would work well for this game.
In an ideal situation, I’d love to see single player be more or less unchanged, but somehow when you had a group the content was tough enough that having players work together everyone could feel the benefits. And not just for boss fighting, but also for regular play.
Kind of a side note, but one thing I wonder is how many of the top builds (that might be considered “OP”) rely on Autocast. The Autobomber I believe wouldn’t work well without it. I wonder if removing Autocast capability would help the balancing in a way that would make MP more playable. And if that was the case, would players be OK with that?
There was a thread a while back on “Ideal Group Composition” or something to that effect. When I think about it, there really isn’t one. For a few reasons.
- If you need a healer, you’re going to die before the healer can react.
- Unlike MMORPG “raids”, you’ll need everyone to really contribute to DPS or Monos will go slow (and perhaps Dungeons when they become more of a “thing.”)
So, those two things sort of remove the MMORPG role concepts of healer, tank, dps.
Once you eliminate roles, you’re just left with 4 solo characters teaming up. And at that point, to be honest, ramping up the monsters and bosses sort of becomes just an exercise in math.
I feel that EHG’s goal for MultiPlayer isn’t to provide interesting reasons to group. I think its more to simply allow it (maybe the word “tolerate” is a bit harsh).
For me (and likely others like me), I will never group in Last Epoch. Unless… my real-life friends buy the game (I’m trying to get them to) and we have like a “game night” (say, Tuesdays at 9pm) where we all log on and play together (and chat in Discord) with certain characters we make just for group play (so they all stay the same level as each other). And the rest of the time, I’d be playing solo.
1 Like
On the most recent dev stream this was discussed in more general/high level concepts in that the intention is not to have a party have a strict hierarchy/role gameplay aspect it like you would encounter more traditional MMOs. It seems more along the lines of, if you do decide to play a build that focuses on say, buffing a teammate’s build so that their aspect is stronger, then those choices you make contribute to the success of the group as well instead of everybody focusing solely on DPS.
Largely, it seems like overall they do not want a traditional “healer, tank, and dps” party dynamic and in lieu of more of a choice of contributing to the teams success in ways outside of straight damage. Whether that be in buffing/debuffing/healing/taunts, it’s up to you. But I do not think there will be a large content design emphasis around such roles as in MMOs, just other different ways to play the game and play it well.
For instance, in those genres, I love to tank and heal, so do I have a couple of builds theorycrafted around those concepts where I sacrifice (some) personal DPS to achieve that? Absolutely.
I’m more interested in how the team will approach those builds that Llama pointed out, such as running max party flurry BD that are very much in the upper tier of damage, and one member can even sacrifice say smokescreen for decoy and still be very effective.
Yep, there is still lots of interesting ways you can build parties. For example summon spriggan is really valuable on druid right now, imagine if it eased the gearing of everyone in the party.
For example necro offers interesting potential buffs to a squirrel beast master scaling aspect of the viper effect by offering a poison specialized dreadshade, and running say serpents milk to have their mages poison like crazy to shred.
Or even if we consider less obvious poison combos, we have summon spriggan + howl wolves Beastmaster in a party with other minion builds to spread around buffs that normally are not so impactful when you just have 2-3 minions but being able to buff up 15 necromancer minions make a world of difference.
As a minion player I see tons of combos already that I am really excited to try in multiplayer
While I personally already have planned around some support/buff/debuff type builds, that will support the party.
I also have some highly specialised builds, that excel in one area, but are very lackluster in another area.
For example, I have a build, that is one of my strongest singletarget builds, but it’s cooldown gated and relatively bad for Monolith Echoes.
Right now, I did a few things to counter-act how bad it is for echoes, by using certain idols.
When MP becomes available I would like to play the same build and fully embrace the singletarget aspect and completely ignore AoE clear.
This way, if I play with other people together that are fully focused on AoE, each group member will have specific task.
I really like the idea of this and I have plenty more builds, that are really not viable currently in a solo environment.
1 Like
I still hope there is more to it then adjusting builds with people you play along. Sure it’s fun to have one 0dps taunt machine and 3 nukers to run through content but if the content is “Solo player content who isn’t gating anyone” I see no reson to ever touch coop gameplayif there is no incentive to play it like scaliing and some benefits to make your life harder with friends.
Playing together with people is incentive enough for me already, as long as it’s not significantly worse, for whatever reason than playing solo, I don’t need any specific incentives for playing cooperatively.
And as I mentioned, allowing to play certain kind of builds is also already an incentive for me personally.
3 Likes
The main problem is unorganised play. If I play with people that run everywhere like headless chickens and I need to go half the level into a different zone to pickup a possibly good item I go into nerdrage sooner then later ^^.
I don’t want PoE party magic find crazy but I’ve seen it in Hero Siege for example. As soon as a dev stateted MP don’t have any benefits over single player besides making the game far more and unreasonable harder noone wants to coop anymore ^^.
1 Like
More or Better loot will not really do much, if the experience is really bad anyway.
And depending on how well the devs balance multiplayer in terms of enemy health and how fast you can get through an area with a group there is no reason to give more or better loot.
You can’t buff item acquisition, because unorganized party play has some potentially bad things that could happen.
This will then make organized party play way to beneficial and powerful.
If you speak for yourself that’s fine, but you can’t say because of X nobody will paly it anymore.
I played so many games, that were just fun playing coopertively and I never thought about if this is better or worse now compared to playing solo.
There are so many different player types wanting so many different things from multiplayer.
5 Likes
IMO in caps, If you buff loot in MP, it will just be another vicious cycle of putting together the most efficient farm loot pigeonholed team setup more than > fun aspect of trying different team setup
Haha i dont know why im still talking about MP anymore, i mean whats the the point since its inevitable, the dev probably…already has plans for some form of loot rewards exclusively for MP, disguse as completion bonus of some sort.
EHG clearly has stated multiple time, that there will no rewards or content gated behind MP
im going devils advocate here 
i hope they dont gate rewards, but my heart says there will be some form of that regardless.
Unless they massively increase the tankiness of mobs >4x in 4 player parties) you’ll get more loot per unit time in mp. If it takes X minutes to clear a mono in solo amd the same amount of time in a party of 4, even if you get the same drops solo v partied, you can benefit from the other players drops (if you’re in a coordinated/sharing party). How much would you benefit? No idea…
If that’s the case MP is always fun if there are no differences in any way compared to solo. It’s just hard to have such a group always available ^^.
1 Like
Even if they do it doesnt matter, you will sweep through the mobs as a group like a pack of locusts killing everything, most groups will have 1-2 ranged characters offscreening things and most of the game play will just be spamming movement skills to keep up probably
Even D3 was this way. I and many others could carry a whole team with a decent character in normal rifts
The issue is multiplying monster HP doesnt do much at all when the base life of some monsters are just incredibly low, even at corruption 250+. Maelstrom for example on my Bear druid was doing about 8-12k per tick - if a small mob has 1000 life x 4 will still die in 1 tick to one single Maelstrom from 1 single character
1 Like
I say scale to avg team level.
4 lv 100 players u get all the mobs including trash doing T4 Juria health and damage.
1 Like
Because that worked so well for D3’s original Inferno difficulty.