Okay, so there are a lot of things going on in this thread, some of which are just misinformation, and some of which are things that we will be changing in the future.
First off, this is the first I’ve heard about the Venom Spider dropping Epic drops. That obviously wasn’t intended, the only thing that should be dropping Epic drops are the Aberrations the come in the groups. And obviously you can’t solo those. The drop rate is tuned assuming a Level 20 Elite is going to be killed by a group (because it’s supposed to be an Aberration, not a regular Elite), so yes if you can solo it they will be dropping much faster than intended.
Quite frankly, it would have been nice if someone would have mentioned this sooner, but I guess that’s how it goes. At the end of the day it’s our fault for not catching that, and we’ll be patching it out this morning.
I’ve already stated previously the loot in the new end-game dungeons will be better than the current loot available on the Aberrations and World Bosses. Obviously if you’re coming into the end-game dungeon with a set of Epics you’re going to have an easier time doing it than if you come in with just a set of Rare items. But if you want the best gear in the game you’re going to have to do the end-game dungeons.
Everyone’s roll chance is individual, so in theory if you all got super lucky you could all get a drop at the same time. However, the chance for you to get something is reduced based on a formula that does go down the more people are in your party. To some degree this logically makes sense. Consider if there is a group of 10 Deer, and there is a 10% chance by default to get a Deer Horn. That means that on average that group should have 1 horn among them. If we don’t reduce the drop chance and you have a group of 5 people who kill those 10 deer, it wouldn’t make sense for 5 horns to drop, right? It should still be 1 horn.
At the same time, if you are in a group of 5 people killing a group of 10 deer, and the 10 deer are normally solo-able, then you should be able to blow through those 10 deer and kill more like 40 or 50 deer in the same amount of time. I would also say, if you’re in a group you are much less danger when doing that fight. A group of 5 people is not really at any risk whatsoever of dying to those deer.
So I’m not sure it makes sense to say that the drop rate should be the same or only 5% less when you’re in that situation. Yes you have to kill way more monsters to get the same loot, but at the same time, you are in less danger overall.
Now, if we consider a dungeon boss or an Aberration group, that is going to be challenging for a group. Which is why bosses and elites have a much higher base chance of drop built in, because it’s intended that you are farming those in a group and as such we boost the base drop rate so that after it’s divided up among the group members it’s still pretty high.
Of course, if you have something like the Elite Venom Spider which was unintentionally solo-able then you can see how that is going to throw everything off because now you’ve got something with a boosted drop rate you can solo or group, which isn’t normally a choice you’re supposed to be able to make in that situation.
So I guess that’s the explanation of how it works and the logic behind it, but I’m also just pointing out that your perception may be flawed because of that enemy being unbalanced. Which is really more the problem than anything else.
This is just RNG being RNG, there is nothing about loot chance that changes based on the level of the player relative to the mob.
This is one are we are making some changes ahead of the end game dungeons coming out. I will have more details to share on that later this week.
