The changes won't arrive in season 4, but they're in the works.
The most powerful items in Diablo 4 drop off of its endgame bosses. But ever since those bosses were introduced in season 2, solo players have had to put in way more effort than those playing in a group to access them. That's going to change soon, associate game director Joe Piepiora told PC Gamer in an interview last week.
Right now, only one player in a four-person group has to spend their materials to summon one of Diablo 4's endgame bosses. When they're defeated, however, everyone in the group can loot the boss and has the same chance to get the ultra-rare Uber Unique items—which is mostly why people farm them in the first place. This is why players connect on Discord and Reddit to form groups where players take turns summoning the bosses so everyone gets four opportunities for the price of one.
Solo players lose out on that efficiency and have to spend their materials every single time they want to summon a boss, making it necessary to seek out groups if they want to maximize their farming efficiency.
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Although group play has always had its advantages in Diablo games—it makes leveling and dungeon clearing much faster—the gap between a solo player and a co-op player when it comes to farming for the most powerful items is so huge it feels unfair to those who can't or don't want to join others.
"This is stuff that we're talking about internally, that we have some thoughts on," Joe Piepiora said when I asked him if there are plans to change this. "I don't know that we're making any big changes for season 4 … But there are some changes that we do want to make to it in the future to basically reward the player who is spending more of the summoning materials and give some value to players who are helping that first player, but not as much."
He brought up how the majority of the crafting material rewards in The Pit, a new 200-tier set of challenging dungeons coming with season 4, go to the player who activated it with the rest being split between everyone else. Piepiora didn't specifically say this is how it would work, but it seems like Blizzard is toying with ways to balance group play versus solo play going forward.
I've joined plenty of groups to farm bosses and, while they've always gone fine, it would be nice to know I'm not throwing materials in a dumpster for simply wanting to do it alone. Season 4 will alleviate this a little by having more things to do once you're at max level, but you're still going to see people spamming "LFM Duriel rota[tion]" in chat until Blizzard decides how and when it wants to change it.
Diablo 4 season 4—along with its massive loot rework—are launching on May 14.
