New patch notes!

[Ruvanal]

QUOTE
With raid groups, Van Cleef is no longer difficult. Grab 10-20 level 18's and go whomp on him.


Yeah, but who would want to share all the experience points and loot drops with 10-20 people, when you can do the instance with five good lvl 18-20's people?  Again, we'll have to experience how raid groups actually work before we can figure out their ramifications.

This note should have some bearing n the matter.

Raid groups of six players or more will not receive a group experience bonus.

I do not think that most players had noted that when in a group that the mobs were giving more exerience to players than the 1/n amount that would have been given for soloing that particular mob. I had taken note a few times that the experience that I recieved when partied with 1 other player was greater than 1/2 of what I would have recieved if I had taken out that mob just by myself. This was with both myself and the other player being the same level, so there should not have been issues of one of us getting a larger slice of the experience total or of one of us having some sort of detrimental effect on the experience earned due to a clvl-mlvl difference. The effect also seemed to in place for larger groups, but was more difficult to look at due to rarely having the larger party being of equal levels and having enough information on the base experience that some of the mobs would yield to a single player.

While I never bother to try and work out what types of modifiers were being applied to boost the earned experience in group, it was none the less there. Taking that factor out of raid groups could allow the easy job of finishing a quest like Van Cleef, it may end making the whole run a much lower experience earning event than it would be if the group hold its number to only a 5 max. This is probably why this note was also listed in the patch docs.

Experience gain from instance dungeons has been increased.

This would probably help some when the raid groups are in the range of 6 to 8 players so that experience is not totally cut to nea nothing while still allowing some groups to not have to artifically hold their group size to 5 for doing some the things that they would like to participate in. Consider the time that there were 7 or 8 of the guild that had been wanting to the Van Cleef quest and efforts were having to be made to determine just who could be group for certain encounters to get the quests completed.