8 Person Parties are they to big?

To me that's not enough. I'm used to 9-man parties. Otherwise, everything that Mag said applies.

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Most games are designed on the basis that you are not supposed to have all the buffs, and need to make an actual choice for any given piece of content. Circumventing this is a valid choice which comes with a different tradeoff.

If there are no limitations there are no choices, and if there is no choice, there is no agency.

Intrepid has often stated the goal that a party should contain exactly one of each archetype.

The first citation on the wiki under "Party" references the blog post Group Dynamics in Ashes of Creation , which may be relevant here. Specifically, "The idea behind an 8-person group is to allow us to really amplify party roles, and to create a need for each of the archetypes in every party." .

I would expect that since their explicit goal is to require parties to have one of each archetype, they will test with parties of that composition and not repeat L2's bad design choices simply as a result of testing their content with such a composition. This is one of the harder mistakes to miss (if not make), if you start from that position in your testing.