What's the point of the 4/8 person party buffs?

[Rentahamster]

What are the point of these buffs?

To encourage grouping. At first glance, it seems like more of a band-aid fix than a real solution, but we'll see how it plays out.

What I'm worried about is now the fairly large gap in battle effectiveness of a 7-man party compared to an 8-man party. Play sessions might be stalled or halted due to just one person leaving.

[Zkieve]

It's not in place to encourage grouping.

It's in place to make it harder for groups with <4 members to do content designed for 4-7 people, and to make content designed for 8 people harder to do with <8 people. This way they can design better content for specific group sizes: 1-3, 4-7, 8.

This X100.
Why would people scream thins are easier when they were super easy to begin with .Did some one really thought having anything from the current NMs made you leet ?. orz.

[solracht]

There's an attribute rehaul incoming, there's a battle rehaul incoming, and there's a job system on its way to be implemented. Does it really seem feasible and anything but a waste of time to go back and take care of every Notorious Monster that was added since the game came out, to make sure it feels challenging after every rehaul?

I think we should wait until all of the battle-related adjustments are done, and then start judging the difficulty of content, because that's probably when they'll start caring about making sure it feels "right".

At the very least, judge 3 the high level NMs that were added this patch (it's possible they were designed with the party buffs in mind). Caring about the old ones makes absolutely no sense at this point.

[Poipori]

The thing is, is this really necessary? It looks as though SE is making artificial mechanic to promote group play.

Don't get me wrong, I also think that a game, especially an MMO should encourage group play, but it should be in other form, such as making bosses that are too strong to solo.


Then again, if it is not to encourage grouping, then all the more I think it should not be implemented,

Because what is wrong with letting a group of 3 or 7 people defeat a strong enemy if they are really good?

But with this buff implemented, a strong 3 or 7man group will be jeopardized not because they lack skill, but simply because they did not get that magical number of players in group.

I don't feel the need to impose players in getting a certain number of people just so they can get a special buff.

[Arcell]

Who's to say that group of 7 can't though? We don't know how they've adjusted things yet.

[Poipori]

Who's to say that group of 7 can't though? We don't know how they've adjusted things yet.

I'm not saying they can't, but why is there a need to penalize them for not having a certain magical numbers of people in group.

[Griss]

Remember when they "Adjusted" impish incantation. and it became more deadly when done by the higher ranked imps? yea good times.

the buffs for partying were unexpected. but i aint turning away extra hp/mp and help in the accuracy department.

[Rentahamster]

But with this buff implemented, a strong 3 or 7man group will be jeopardized not because they lack skill, but simply because they did not get that magical number of players in group.

Yeah, this is what worries me, too.

[Kurokikaze]

But with this buff implemented, a strong 3 or 7man group will be jeopardized not because they lack skill, but simply because they did not get that magical number of players in group.

I don't feel the need to impose players in getting a certain number of people just so they can get a special buff.

Either they give that buff to encourage the people to find an extra person or they make that encounter difficult enough that you need that extra person... ITS THE SAME THING.

[solracht]

But with this buff implemented, a strong 3 or 7man group will be jeopardized not because they lack skill, but simply because they did not get that magical number of players in group.

Content in XI hardly felt balanced around a specific number of people: the party limits were way higher than what you actually needed most of the time, and it was up to the group to decide how many people they wanted to take.

That's simply not the direction they seem to be taking in this game, if these buffs are a good indicator. That's all there's to it. They're taking the direction a lot of MMORPGs have taken, rather than what FFXI did.

The buffs are hardly needed to achieve this, however: if content is tightly balanced (see, Warcraft hardmodes) then it's impossible to beat without the required numbers, except under rare levels of skill and gear (not different than beating an 8man NM with 7 people in our current system). Why they chose to add a buff, rather than tightly tuning the encounters? I don't think we'll be able to really know until they tell us how the newer battle-systems are going to work, and until we see the real content.

My guess is doing it this way makes it easier for them to balance the encounters the way they want, but this is complete speculation.


EDIT: Man, Kuro destroyed me. Way to say in one sentence something that took me a wall of text to explain.