Intensive solo game season 28 - 4.000 paragon = group game 8.000-12.000 paragon. Do something about balance. Solo play is much slower
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Each Season someone complains about experience gain gap between group and solo play. However, one thing they skip is, bringing friends require organization due different time lines and communication, thus rewarded as such. Group play takes planning to organize, and communication to execute.
While Seasons can and will make solo experience gain closer to 2-player setups, it will never meant to catch up 4-player groups where players communicate to work in tandem for clearing content. One person going through the process alone, is not same as 4-players working together to pull aggro, keeping buffs and crowd control in slow burn by communicating.
If you wanted just a “small buff”, they already gave you that at the S28 Altar. This Season brought permanent Reflection Pools at the Altar for example and this is as far as it went in Seasonal play for experience boosts. Yet sure that can be stretched further for rewarding players down the line, but I don’t think they have any plans of making 4-players with solo on par at terms of rewards.
At the end of the day, you don’t need 12k paragon in Seasons to clear GR150.
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Your request is due to broken mechanics in the game done by Blizzard in the last couple of years:
- crazy buffs with 10.000% damage
- too many bots (crazy 10.000+ Paragon people)
- broken balancing in-game, maniacs and botters took advance of this by doing 10.000 paragons in Seasons.
- too many drops
- too many versions of items
- too many versions of crafting in Cube, including horrible Primal crafting recepty
I achieved 7000 paragons in 7 years and I simply stopped playing this game…it had no sense at all to compete with people with 10.000+ paragons or play with them.
This GREAT Game is totally broken in every part and only Remastered D3 will bring everything to normal.
Group play by itself is a buff compared to solo, the XP bonuses on top is really quite overkill. Will it change, no, but it was always an idiotic concept.
And the moment someone grabs Area Damage or tag too many targets wtih DoT, it ruins the client-server communication for everyone. There’s always a backdraw, it’s not a straight benefit but still a benefit regardless because in the end it required you to organize it.
Can agree that.
Group play doesn’t require effort even remotely on the scale of the rewards.
Solo play needs significant buffs (or group play nerfs) to achieve balance
Paragon levels don’t land on your lap just because you play with a group. To reiterate; finding friends and convincing them to play with you, is some part of the process. You have to play it and be efficient because everyone have limited time and real life chores. You can sit down and play 10 hours per day, alone; yet not everyone have the same comfort, patience or time while playing with you.
Secondly, playing at push level for gem ranks, require communication, which isn’t as easy as you implied. The moment someone over extends as buff duration fades, apply crowd control abit too much, misses a crucial cycle to burst or a pull, whole progress can spiral down real fast in 4-player and you fail it.
If you go seek communities for groups, group play either require you to be at a high paragon level for starting your journey; or you have to organize a few friends who have time, equal footing (not too wide paragon gap) and planning for this. So, yes, playing in groups really require some effort.
And again, you don’t need 12k paragon level to clear GR150 solo.
It has significant buffs and it can happen down the line again. Solo play always get close to two player efficiency but never surpasses it; neither it should.
I don’t think it will happen.
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Actually in group play the paragons do just land in your lap.
Being in a group alone gives an xp buff.
Even if everyone just plays their regular build without coordination and real teamplay by just joining a public session they already significantly outpace solo farming.
If then an actual group optimizes for group play the difference gets ridiculous.
Solo play should be as fast as group play.
Playing in a group, for the sake of playing with friends should be motivator enough.
The more you know… You still have to finish a Greater Rift after finding similar paragon level players, also you will need communication while clearing high content.
You won’t be hooked in a GR150 with only 1200-1300 plvl in a team of four. Neither a random player with high plvl would hook you up in high GRs even if you asked them nicely. Hell, we even have a meta specific for 2 supports, 1 trasher and 1 rgk or another trasher. You need to communicate with other players to set a proper team; it won’t land on your lap just because you cobbled random people together.
Luckily you won’t need 10-12k plvl while clearing GR150 solo; skill play is also part of this game. You can observe that top clears may even lower than the rest of the leaderboard if you were to check it.
As I have said it won’t happen, but there’s a neat trick where you can compare. Solo play builds can easily stack Area Damage% while group play builds can not due connection issues, and more players mean more monster health. It’s only expected that higher monster health will grant you higher experience, so group players have to play with buff-debuff cycles which require team work.
You can clear as fast as a group in solo, deal mad amount of damage to 1-player health monsters; you just have to have a better optimization on your pathing. You won’t gain the same amount of experience but that’s expected. Because how health scaling works on additonal players yet how group and solo builds differ, it only seems fair.
Sadly it doesn’t work that way. I mean more players mean more monster health and you can not use Area Damage or stack long lingering DoT. Why would you play with friends? To make it harder on yourself?
Again you only describe the optimized group play.
If you join a public group you won’t farm 150s for xp but something lower. There is 0 effort in just playing with whomever is there and it still outpaces solo play.
You can simply clear higher content in groups since the monster hp scaling isn’t nearly enough to balance it out.
I’m well aware that blizzard doesn’t care for balance here, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be balanced tho.
True, but you still gimp your build and still have to have a teamwork for it. As I have said, organizing this is part of it. Developers simply tell you to gather friends and play with them in the same session. Perhaps for lessening the burden of server because it will handle less hashes for dungeon generation or something. I wouldn’t know for sure, but that’s how it has been.
To say the least, anything that would undermine the efforts of players who once walked on this path is not one of the options. If you go turn one of the design pillars on its head and just to make solo play much easier, that is just ignoring the previous players who went through all of this. And by previous players I mean a potential dedicated playerbase here, not a few casual players.
Random groups still won’t be much more efficient than your solo play.
At least not in a significant way. The time required for clearing a dungeon and how many tiers spread away from your solo record, matter. Because when you play as a group, you would like to go further and beyond of solo record for highest rewards.
You won’t really get this benefit spread evenly in a random group; as someone will have way less experience than playing solo. For example; 90% of the time GR pub players can be seen just join and leave the game constantly. That is due paragon level gaps, roles (sometimes unfitting classes/builds being there) and other things not matching together, so they just leave in the hopes of finding a fitting group. At least, a few years ago, the issue was there and I’m not entirely convinced that it’s not the case anymore either.
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I do get your point that changing it would upset group players like you.
Not changing it is ignoring the solo players which are also dedicated long time players and fans of the game.
Imo having both closer together would benefit the game as a whole.
This doesn’t only affect group play but solo play leaderboards as well.
Someone who farms in groups will have significantly higher paragon in a season than someone who doesn’t, yet both compete in the same solo leaderboards.
Just like you, I don’t think that blizzard will change anything. It’s been like this for a decade now, it probably won’t change for the last season.
There would be a lot of angles that blizzard could use to approach this though.
I feel the need to clarify myself. I’m not a group player, but talking about game’s design as whole. I only played a few instances of group play back in '14 and nothing more. Back then group runs were a chaotic, but now we have meta runs and “efficiency” makes the world of Sanctuary revolve around.
What I’m trying to convey here is just my observations; as I have been playing this game solo mostly, while also watching high clear solo/group videos about it in my free time. So yeah, no need to take me that seriously as I hate leaving a wrong impression. I just like game design, that’s all.
Peer pressuring friends to play with you is what companies betting on usually.
Solo self-found has been requested for years just because of that. While I think it’s not that important, growing voice of community sure tells something else. I mean, even community is not set on an agreement of rules for this challenge; some don’t use cube, some don’t use Kadala. It’s a mess but at least it justified its means to go at the root of this problematic debate.
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From Blizzard Reddit post last 3 years ago:
Reducing group bonuses discourages group play when our goal with the game from the start was always to encourage great, engaging (and yes, rewarding) multiplayer.
If you guys can’t accept that Blizzard favors multiplayer over solo, you guys can always go to play PoE. Unless it was fixed in these few years, PoE is known for favoring solo play and punishing group play. 
I don’t mind at all if groups are more effective than solo. It simply just makes sense that groups can for example do higher GRs than solo.
The problem is effort vs reward imbalance. If group play rewards individuals more for doing less compared to solo play, that’s a massive problem and should be fixed. The relative reward for the same amount of effort should be equal for both group and solo. D3 does not do that at all.
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You can add Diablo Immortal too.
The full party gets extra chests from clearing the dungeon or killing the raid bosses. 
Blizzard isn’t joking when they said they want to make multiplayer rewarding.
No, you can’t. Not unless you as the solo player has vastly superior paragon/skill than the group your comparing with. All things being equal the group wins every time.
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12.000 paragon (group) = 4.000 paragon (solo) * x
x = 30; 50 (not normal)
From what I remember, Diablo 1 didn’t influence experience/levelling together or solo. It was just the difficulty (Normal, Nightmare, Hell).
Diablo 2 was the beginning of experience gain by adding more players.
Diablo 3, and if I’m not mistaken, Diablo Immortal as well, experience gain is better with more players.
I cannot speak for Diablo 4, as I only participated in Server Slam solo.