Item quality and multiple players?

[MongoJerry]

I've not seen anything official, but I commented last night while playing in a game with Swirly that it looked like there were more snakes in the emperors chamber on the first visit. I chalked it up to having last done it in single player on normal difficulty and us playing in nightmare. But Swirly mentioned that others have noted more mobs and they think it was a stealth change that went hand in hand with removing damage scaling on mobs in multiplayer games. I actually think that would make sense if it were true. The damage reduction was needed but it felt like too much because there are class synergies, even if it is just having fewer mobs for each toon to deal with. Adding some more mobs in with the HP scaling I think would work well to keep multi fun.

It's not the easiest thing to test because there is some randomization to spawns even on the fixed layout maps, but it is something that would make sense, to me at least, as long as it's not a huge increase.

This has always been the case in the game. It's not as obvious in 2-player games, but when you play in 3 or especially 4 player games, the additional mobs are very obvious. I'm not quite certain whether champ packs are affected, but white mob packs definitely are. I say that I'm not quite certain about champion packs, because I used to think they definitely weren't affected but then I saw a minimum 5-pack of champion bug swarms in the sewers in Act 2 in a 3-player game but the group ran before I could verify if it was a single pack or a combination of two packs.