So, I decided to level with some friends yesterday. I thought there was level scaling in the game, but perhaps it’s only for SC? I suggested to buy the best gear from the vendor they could, and just leave Tristram to test it out, as the level discrepancy was pretty large. It was normal difficulty, but they got one shot.
Later on, they were playing normal difficulty, attempting to run bounties, and having a hard time. They were both the same level here. When one of them left, so that they were playing solo, they stated the enemies came apart like tissue paper.
I also noticed some difficulty earlier running Speed Racer with another player. In previous seasons, I’ve always destroyed the enemies in a shot or two with my gear. But the enemies felt far tougher than normal. I was only doing 10% damage to bosses per hit, despite having 360k dps as well as skill multipliers. I never had this probably before.
When two players of different levels party together, it matters who started the game as the difficulty reflects the level of the party starter.
In other words, if you have a level 10 hero, and a level 20 hero, if the level 10 hero starts the game, all the mobs are set to level 10 difficulty / health. When the level 20 hero joins that game, they can easily kill all the level 10 mobs. However, if the level 20 starts the game, all the mobs are set to level 20 difficulty / health. When the level 10 hero joins that game, they’ll struggle to kill level 20 mobs.
This is why, when one hero power levels another, it’s the existing level 70 that starts a T6 game and invites the level 1 into it, so that the power leveller is killing level 70 T6 mobs (with corresponding XP values per killed mob) rather than killing level 1 T6 mobs.
I can understand why they wouldn’t offer it in HC. The apprentice mode, by it’s description, allows players to level more safely and easily “granting you bonus survivability and damage”. This is kind of against the ethos of HC where you’re playing with no safety net. I guess you can still do 2 player HC with a stronger partner to get a similar speed levelling effect but you’d have to be a lot more careful about staying out of trouble.
yeah it was me with BT, i did a round of bounties so i said come on in my game guys and claim. when they joined I was working on another round of bounties but BOOM I got killed, granted I wasnt very high maybe level 25 or so and i was in an area that shouldnt have killed me but I figured bad luck and im kinda drunk.
So BT asks another one to join his game and she went out of town to kill a mob (on normal) and boom she was insta killed. So she made a game and had her hubby join and same thing.
So I created a game with a new character and boom same thing. the mobs just were crazy harder when others joined.
I can understand if you start a game @ 70, and in HC, the characters don’t scale ala Apprentice Mode. As Quiraing stated, perhaps there was a reason in HC so there was no safety net. But it doesn’t make sense that if you’re hosting @ 1, and someone 4+ levels joins your game, for the game to scale to that level then. Because that could be exploited for griefing players incredibly easily.
But the thing that bugs me is that they had that same problem when both of them were the exact same level. And on normal difficulty.
I thought I had leveled up in HC before and never had this problem.
And the same thing with Speed Racer. I was doing 10% damage every hit. I just went through and replayed the Spider Queen 5x, and every time, each single hit did 90% or more damage. This is the exact same build, same stats, etc.