Co-op Feedback

One is the most efficient number.

I'm not a fan of playing online for a variety of reasons. In fact, even on consoles, whatever, I normally don't play MP at all. I'm just not that type of guy.

I'm a narrative guy. It's my career, it's my passion, and I think that video games have a lot to offer as a medium for storytelling. So I usually play alone. I hated playing co-op in D2, not only due to battle.net issues, but because we were given more reasons to avoid other players than we were to have them in our games.

This changed a lot with D3. I know there's still grumbling about four player only, but man it can get pretty nuts.
There's good and bad with co-op. I will start with the good.

I hate act 4. I'm just going to blatantly state it. There's too much bullshit to wade through, particularly the silver spire with the ridiculous spawns of morlu and a mixture of other nut-punching combinations. I really loathe going through them. I try to get items with movement speed and skills with movement speed just so I can skim through it as quickly as possible. Spirit walk was awesome for this.

For the first time today, I played the silver spire levels in MP. I normally play it SP just to breeze through it. Granted, this was on normal, but the sheer chaos of two wizards and two barbs...was very enjoyable. D2 often got chaotic as well, a very busy visual soup, a system-crippling visual soup at that, but some chaos that you can't even follow, hell, I like that now and then. I actually had a really good time. But, again, this was normal mode. Inferno, I can't even get to Act IV yet.

For a while I was a pretty notorious griefer. I am an idea man, and the realm of griefing was not exempt. But I don't really feel the need to in D3, and I won't even go into the complex psychology behind that. It's not that I can't grief, I just don't want to. I find myself, upon entering a game, re-rigging my build to completely maximize party play. I like to buff. I like to know that's my mantra underneath my party's feet. I like saving my leap attack for that health globe on the other side of the screen that nobody else can get to. That feels good to me.

I wish I had more reasons to go into co-op, but like D2, I have too many reasons not to. All of the reasons are different, mind you, but reasons all the same.

I could spend time and wordcount typing up the reasons why I and other players do not want to play co-op. You already know what they are. It's highly inefficient for farming, is the main reason. It's a lot of reasons rolled into one over-arching issue.

So how can you get me into co-op? Man. I'd be bashed for this so hard on the forums.

Less health scaling, outside of bosses. I mean real bosses, not elites. I mean the butcher, maghda, rakanoth. That would be a big thing for players.

Another thing, that I will have gone into in other posts, is co-op only elite modifiers. It's like a reversal of champion modifiers like fire chains. Imagine health linked, but not the elites, the party itself. How awesome would that be? The answer is "very." Or a shadow clone modifier where the elites disappear and shadow clones spawn, like some boss I vaguely recall from WoW. I always loved that fight.

Buffs given to an entire party when all party members are in experience range of each other. I mean range as in yards: if all players in a party are within 40 yards of each other, they gain this small buff. Say, 5% movement speed or something that's not game-changing but also not insignificant to the point where it would be ignored.

Just some thoughts. I can't believe that I finally like a co-op game, but I just wish I had reasons to co-op to begin with.