Partying



Parties allow up to six people to play together. Players can create or join public parties by clicking on the Notice Board in town, or by pressing S to open the Social window. Players can also invite someone to a party by selecting a player's name in chat, clicking on them in town, or typing /invite playername in the chat console.

Effect on monsters


Monsters gain extra life for each additional party member after the first: The original life amount is used for the purposes of determining the length of stuns and status ailments – this means monsters will not be harder to stun/freeze/etc when fighting in a party.

It is believed that monster's extra life gain is only affecting nearby ones, therefore players leaving map before new monsters are encountered have no effect on their life.

Effect on loot
Each player after the first adds the following bonus: Bonuses to item rarity or quantity from modifiers on player gear are only counted from the player who lands the killing blow. This bonus is multiplicative with any player bonuses to rarity/quantity. Any quantity bonus from a map is multiplicative with all other modifiers.

Item drops from monsters are calculated based on the number of players nearby (13 metres - around six tiles, which is approximately a screen) rather than the number in the instance. The quantity of drops is based on the minimum of the number of players who were around at the start and end of the fight. This means that if you spawn a boss alone before bringing in friends to help (or if the friends leave during the fight) then it will only drop enough items for one person.

Maps
The chance of a non-unique Map dropping is not affected by party size. They are affected by the quantity and rarity bonuses provided by the Map they are dropped inside of.

Unique maps are dropped as part of the normal Item drop system and not governed by the same rules as other non-unique maps so they do get the party bonus.

Effect on experience
See experience in party for more information.

Effect on flasks
Party members of a character landing the killing blow on an enemy will gain flask charges if they are nearby. This is not true for all +life and +mana gained "when you deal a killing blow" modifiers; only a character actually landing a killing blow will trigger those effects.

Benefits of partying
Parties allow players to share all benefits of buffs that apply to allies and all debuffs to monsters. Some examples include:
 * auras
 * curses
 * ally specific bonuses from items, gems, etc.

Downsides of partying
When partying with characters, downsides can happen that a solo player would not have to encounter. These examples will focus on problems that may occur with a random stranger entering your party:
 * Curses - Curses can over-ride each other based on the curse priority rules. This can be fixed by having everyone in the party agree to only let 1 player apply all of their curses and nobody else is allowed to curse.
 * Pace - The speed at which different individuals prefer to kill or move can vary based on the individual. The variance in the speed of different characters is high enough that it may take some time to find players who enjoy your pace to party with.
 * Lag - Lag is a colloquial term for anything that slows down things in the game like big drops in Frames per second or temporary screen freezes. It is not necessarily referring to internet speed, though that can be a source of lag. What does or does not cause lag can sometimes be relative to the speed of the individual computer, but the resources used can be expected more accurately. Things which use up much more resources from GPU and CPU are more likely to lag the party in general. Therefore this list will show some of the most resource intensive builds that are known for causing more lag than average builds.
 * Minions - Minions can lag more than the average build even with small numbers. The resources used are much higher if the player is using a large army.
 * very Fast Attack or cast speed - The speed at which you use skills affects resources used.
 * Note - More resources being used may not always be the source of the lag.

Version history

 * Fixed a bug where looting an item while in a party with loot allocation set required an extra click if the allocation changed while the cursor was held over the item.
 * Fixed a bug where, very rarely, party members would create a new instance of your hideout when using the Visit Hideout button, and would thus close any open map portals in the existing hideout instance.


 * The party user interface now shows what area your party members are in if they're not in the current area. Players who have recently disconnected are shown greyed out for a few seconds so that you can see that it occurred.
 * Fixed a case where players with slow load times could fail Zana's limited portals mission during the load screen while in a party.


 * The party life bonus for monsters in higher difficulties has been reduced from 25% to 20% per player per difficulty


 * 40% of the item quantity bonus for additional party members is now shifted towards item rarity. Gems and currency items still receive the old item quantity bonus.


 * Players now receive the same amount of experience from nearby monster kills regardless of how many members are in their party. Because experience is awarded to nearby party members equally and is not divided up between them any more, monsters are no longer scaled up in experience if you're playing in a party.
 * This means that larger parties who stick together will get slightly more experience than before, and that idling characters elsewhere in the level no longer increases your experience gains. Solo players receive exactly the same experience that they did previously.
 * Experience is still scaled down if the player is too high or too low level, or if there's a much higher level party member nearby. These equations have not changed.
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