Problem:
Eldritch influence added a huge amount of extra monsters to maps. This is one of the main factors that makes it harder for players to justify doing Maven-witnessed maps or non-map content, as their rewards struggle to compete.
Solution:
The amount of Influence Packs spawned by Eldritch-Influenced Maps has been reduced by around a third but the chance of Influence Altars spawning has been increased by about half to somewhat offset this. Previously, Eldritch-Influenced Maps would always spawn exactly 60 packs within a map. They will now spawn somewhere between 20 and 60 packs per map. It’s a large enough variance that the difference should be notable. It should also encourage more decision making around Altars. For example, if you intuit that it may be a 20 pack map, you might be more inclined to pick more Map Boss modifiers as there won’t be as many Influence Monsters in the map to get other rewards from.
While we were working on this, we took the opportunity to change the pack spawning behaviour from Influence so that a given area will only have three different types of monster packs. Previously, there were eight pack types that could be spawned per influence type and it randomly chose which pack type to spawn. This is a relatively small change that won’t have a significant effect during gameplay. The goal was simply to give some identity to an area and give you a slightly better idea of what to expect during gameplay.