Party play for maps feels bad

We have loved playing in a party in PoE for the last 10 years. It's never been about increasing drops, more about having fun with your friends.

Party play in PoE 2 has a ton of potential, but really feels bad in the endgame due to design decisions.

1. Only the party leader can open maps. This means if my party leader wants to look up a few things I can't just open a map and blast for a bit. No, we don't want to switch party leaders, it feels annoying.

2. You can't open your own maps while being in a party. We'd often just run a larger map together while blasting a few small maps on the side. PoE2 doesn't allow for it and thus feels bad. I don't want to leave and rejoin the party all the time. The introduction of sticky parties (eg when people log off and on again) has been great QoL to keep parties going, we don't want to disband them just for this.

3. Only having one death per map feels bad in a party. If you die early on (because your ranger got hit) your friends will just have to run the map without you while you do something else. That feels bad.

Other than than, we had an amazing time in the campaign, that was really well done! Beating bosses in a party was a lot easier and enjoyable as well

agreed

Yup, really bad for parties in end game

I totally agree, 3 of us play weekly together and once we got to maps the fun went down. If one of us dies the map run is over, we have to wipe it and take the penalty to keep playing together or make somebody wait.

We are hoping for a way to endgame that doesn't hurt group play. Like original post, this isn't about loot.

Completely agree with these points. The worst is number 3. Whoever decided it would be fun to not allow revives so you have to wait for your friend to finish the map so you can keep playing together, should be fired.

Yep. The endgame is not group friendly and that sucks bigtime. I was excited to see the Atlas map and how crazy the depth was only to find just how anti-social the whole experience is. I hope this gets reworked for people that want to play with other people.