HEAVEN ON HIGH - LET MATCH PARTIES GO TO THE HIGHER FLOORS

[Rogatum]

If pomanders are required and RNG is not on your side that is going to suck.

[Maero]

If pomanders are required and RNG is not on your side that is going to suck.

No different then all other content.
I am at over 50 runs of Swallows Compass for the damn caster gear and it has not dropped once

[CrystalRainbow]

Maybe wait and see the content before asking for changes.

Most people use this content to level quickly. Nothing else. Other want to get to floor 100 or 200 in case of POTD....

[KisaiTenshi]

If pomanders are required and RNG is not on your side that is going to suck.

I'll say it again. RNG content is not skill, it's luck.

I'm willing to look the other way as long as the RNG is not a hindrance. However PotD does not do that. It's entirely possible to get to floor 50 or 100 without any useful pomanders, and then not win because you're in a party of DPS PUG zergs. Hell, the only time I've even had a fail on either of those floors is when it was an all-DPS party and no transformation pomanders at all.

The correct compromise, should be obvious. Matched party's should set a "bookmark" save at every floor, and every item is "saved" separately. When you start a new match, it only matches you with players who have both met that floor and party configuration (eg DPS/DPS/Tank/Healer.) Then before the "watching cutscene" fence goes down, a "roll for inventory" screen pops up, where it lists the inventory each player had at the end of the last floor, and players can either "greed" their own inventory or "greed" another players inventory and abandon their own. Once everyone hits greed on an inventory, those are the items used for the floor and everything else is thrown away. Players could also just agree to disagree and "pass" on their own inventory, knowing it's bad.

That makes it ever-so-slightly easier for matched parties to continue than fixed ones, (since you have a 25% chance of getting a better inventory, maybe someone spent all their time on the previous floor getting all the chests, while your last party just zerged it and picked up nothing.) It still risks getting matched with three more zerg players.

However this would require a little more engineering and it's probably not engineering worth doing for content that is intentionally designed for micro-raiding.

[alimdia]

I feel like calling it "a little more engineering" is an understatement, that's a whole new system that would have to be developed.

[KisaiTenshi]

I feel like calling it "a little more engineering" is an understatement, that's a whole new system that would have to be developed.

Nah. Not how it currently operates. It's not a fundamental change to "save" the inventory between floors since it does it for pre-made's. They wouldn't need to change anything in how PotD actually operates, spawns, mechanics, etc. It's more QoL than anything.

That said, I don't expect it unless Yoshi-P tries to find a reason to get players to keep playing it.

[Vaer]

When you start a new match, it only matches you with players who have both met that floor and party configuration (eg DPS/DPS/Tank/Healer.)

What's the point of it being flex role (one of it's selling points for auto matching) if you are just going to force 1 1 2 or a certain comp anyways. So what happens if my bookmark has 3 tanks? I gotta sit there and wait for 3 tanks or start a new file? Keep leaving groups at the beginning until I get the party comp I want? What if no one queues as a tank or healer for an hour I'll be stuck in queue unable to get a match if the queue is full of DPS? Potentially it makes a ton of people ineligible to join other open groups.

At that point you might as well just make a premade group in PF before going in.

[KisaiTenshi]

What's the point of it being flex role (one of it's selling points for auto matching) if you are just going to force 1 1 2 or a certain comp anyways. So what happens if my bookmark has 3 tanks? I gotta sit there and wait for 3 tanks or start a new file? Keep leaving groups at the beginning until I get the party comp I want? What if no one queues as a tank or healer for an hour I'll be stuck in queue unable to get a match if the queue is full of DPS? Potentially it makes a ton of people ineligible to join other open groups.

At that point you might as well just make a premade group in PF before going in.

Good luck finding a PF for a 200 floor run of PotD.

I don't think it would be an issue. The point is to prevent changing the configuration per-floor which is what it does now on every 10 floors, except it matches you with just whoever is available regardless if that's how the player got there. Bookmark the inventory per floor, re-match players per floor after 100 instead of every 10. Assuming there is any interest in going beyond 100. Otherwise you're right, pre-made party would be the only way to avoid a potentially endless queue. But you get that endless queue anyways when you try to queue for floor 90 when you don't take the same party from 50 onward, so this is not any different.

The elephant in the room is that it's a 100 floor raid, and PUG raids are a take-what-you-get experience to begin with. My suggestion here is really just to bookmark the inventory per-floor, and lock the party configuration past 100 so that you don't have your party configuration subject to RNG. The only way you don't end up with your previous party is if there is another party in the same configuration, at that floor, at the same time.

[Vaer]

Good luck finding a PF for a 200 floor run of PotD.

I meant you should just start a fixed party at that point from the beginning not that you should try to PF if you are actually on 1[91]. With bookmarking and 7 different sets of hard floors in HoH in addition to punishing mechanics and the 1 life rule, good luck getting a queue that has exactly the comp you want all the way to 100.

One of the main reasons it isn't accessible isn't really the number of floors even though it is part of it. It's because 1 wipe destroys the entire group's progress. Imagine you get to floor 91/100. You finally get a queue. One of the people in your group d/cs, and you completely wipe. Now all 4 players have to go back to 31.

The 1 life rule is incompatible with random matching honestly. Couple this with 1 shot mechanics and you're going to have a bad time if this rule is still in place. I just don't see it working very well with auto matching if they keep that rule in. I'm not a fan of the 1 life rule but it is what it is. There's a reason it doesn't exist on the story floors.

[KisaiTenshi]

I meant you should just start a fixed party at that point from the beginning not that you should try to PF if you are actually on 1[91]. With bookmarking and 7 different sets of hard floors in HoH in addition to punishing mechanics and the 1 life rule, good luck getting a queue that has exactly the comp you want all the way to 100.

One of the main reasons it isn't accessible isn't really the number of floors even though it is part of it. It's because 1 wipe destroys the entire group's progress. Imagine you get to floor 91/100. You finally get a queue. One of the people in your group d/cs, and you completely wipe. Now all 4 players have to go back to 31.

The 1 life rule is incompatible with random matching honestly. Couple this with 1 shot mechanics and you're going to have a bad time if this rule is still in place. I just don't see it working very well with auto matching if they keep that rule in. I'm not a fan of the 1 life rule but it is what it is. There's a reason it doesn't exist on the story floors.

I'm not fond of the 1-life rule either, but I know why it's there (people would just keep throwing themselves at the content until they beat it.) Perhaps taking a page from various "permadeath" mechanics would be more reasonable, where a party wipe forces you to lose a floor of progress or something until you've lost 3 floors from where you last reached, then you're forced to start over.