I'm fine with high-end DG's being practically unsoloable. Just put a lot more Delquad and Hive bosses in DF 400+ and (most importantly) improve their drops. Their loot has to be at N times better than the loot you can get doing solo dg's, if you expect N players to squad up and do them. New unsoloable AI are always welcome as well!

/signed

Is it possible for a DG to cater to both the solo people and also to groups?

IE: If a guy goes in solo, he gets 10 AI from level 1 - Boss.

Then, a group of 4 go in. Instead of having 10 of the AI in all the levels, there would be 10 * Sqrt[N} (Rounded up/down), where N is the number of people in a group. So they get 20 AI in levels 1 - Boss, and 2-3 bosses at the end.

That or increase the drop percent for each new person in a group.

One of the best games I saw do this was Borderlands. The more people there were, the more baddies, and thus, the better the loot.

As it is, it just isnt economically worthwhile to DG in groups as more often than not DG loot is garbage.

Also, if you increased the number of drops/numbers of bosses for groups, you could add an auto-kick out to each DG as camping would be a serious issue in that case. But, you wouldnt need to camp if each time you went through a DG, you got something semi-worthwhile.

~BD

I also really like the Borderlands system. That was a great Co-op game where it was more worthwhile playing together then alone.

Sounds absolutely amazing, as a system. I really love it.
But, would it be possible to do Shm/Zerk+MC'd Alts?

While I agree group gameplay is generally better than solo, that doesn't mean you should be FORCED to play in groups to do anything meaningful past level 1k. It should be possible to solo level at an acceptable rate (i.e. not epic, 5-minute fights for each AI, where you get pwnt by another 3 before the end of the first minute), and even get some decent loot solo, from DGs. Hell, the last big solo-oriented content was Enigmatic Sector, several years ago, and that's aimed at level 400-500. We need more stuff made to be soloed at endgame, but that can't be exploited with multiple people. Maybe a few special DGs, instanced so only 1 person can enter, with a lockout?

But thats what Im suggesting.

If you want to solo, it will be just as worthwhile (maybe more so, for you personally, if you MC) than if you go with a group.

Again, referring back to Borderlands because they did this wonderfully. If I was going around solo, it would be just as difficult as going in a group, because the amount of AI/their strength would scale with the number of people in the group.

So, if I teamed up with 3 others, the AI would be pretty damn close to 4x as hard, but instead of going solo I was with others killing stuff. The loot that dropped was 4x times better as well, so really it was just a matter of preference, which is how I feel SS should be.

Forcing people into groups (excluding ubers) or solo should not be done, but rather, allow people to do it however they please.

Again, Im not sure how viable this is in the game, but I think with some creative thinking here or there, it could be done.

~BD

Just throwing this example out...
AI being 3x as hard, for a group of Engi Dread/Shm Rhino w/o slaves/Zerk.
The Zerk has to output roughly 3x the DPS to cover the chars keeping it alive etc?

The idea of more people = more lewt sounds good to me

Kanga

See, thats why I threw in the Sqrt[N] thing. For 3 you would have 1-2x the difficulty.

But also, from your same point, if you have just a zerker, in a DG and he can only last 3 minutes in the first level. Then you throw in a ShM + Engi with the zerker, don't you think he will last roughly 2-3 times as long? So if the AI are 2-3x as difficult, he will end up still only lasting about 3 minutes, same as if he did solo.

Now granted, it wouldnt be a linear difficulty increase, because if something was so difficult that no one could do it, adding more people wouldn't necessarily help. But if it does so in a Square root type way, once you add in, say 4 people, its only 2x as difficult as it was.

~BD

Well firstly my Zerk is bank, so yeah....

But overall signed, on the Sqrt. concept, non-linear, for the love of god.