The issue on this argument lays on season theme and RNG. I agree that skilled players can do okay at certain thresholds, but are really few of them and limited, every tier above the build cap, makes less important the skill. Don’t get me wrong, skills plays a nice factor until certain range, after that gons and RNG will decide more often than not.
One player can have a godly rng while the other can have a garbage RNG. One can get like 5 minutes while the other get like 10 minutes. Doesn’t mean that who did at 5minutes it’s the best or worst.
The current season can narrow down, more RNG and skill than the previous ones, but in the end will be about RNG. Because will compare same sets, no futher seasonal themes and will have only 5 variables(paragon, augment, gear rolls, skill and rng). Either way there is too much factors to consider. The last season I ran frenzy and done really well, my gons was like 100-500 above the wastes variants at the same leaderboards(didn’t had the new system), doesn’t mean the folks who did the same gr as me was worst or better than me.
I done gr 129 with 14:33:869 and failed one gr 130 with 15:16:342 because I died on the last hit on rg(with 30 sec penalty). Doesn’t mean I’m better or worst comparated to anybody who done gr 129 (I had 2300 gons and ran frenzy, most of the folks done with 100-500 gons more or less than me as wastes).
In the real scenario I wouldn’t achieve the gr 130 if I didn’t got a nice rng in there. So sometimes it’s about who fish more, not about skill.
I get that folks with more skills has more odds than the ones that don’t have. Because godly rng can help you a lot, but if you don’t know how to deal with it, sometimes you will lose the chance. But having the skills and having a garbage rng it’s less impactful than having godly rng and not being that good. If the skill was more important than rng, folks wouldn’t fish. So in the end compairson are like “ego flatterer” than a real measurement. That’s why I support leaderboards by set, because they are a good indictive of overall performance of the sets and will show what overperform and what underperforms(In a pool of 1000 players each). That will help to tweak sets to achieve the thresholds that devs want.
About the topic, about group xp and solo. Just increase the damage and/or hp from monsters per new player and that will make multiplayer more challenging(in the past mobs had their damage increased). Don’t need to mess with xp or gems, just make it harder in a challenging ways(increase the damage per number of players will impact and more tankier builds to do pushs, increasing their hp will mean more damage to reach certain gr goals, reducing the speed gr level on runs. Those 2 could reduce the overall level runs by 3-10 helping the leveling process to become more “close” to solo runs. The impact will be more severe on hardcore, but on softcore could solve all the “complaints” about it.
Because when you see a season when a group with 1300gr done 150 with 3z and one bsnecro you see that things got too easy. So increase the mob hp and damage could solve or just stop messing with those astronomical numbers and tweak them like was done on WoW to address the situation in a proper way.
