Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos

I like the balancing changes that are to come, and I think the xp curve would balance the endgame content, as just having more hp and more damage would be really helpful overall.

In regards to the new party members not meshing with the team, I don't think it's that big of a deal. In a regular game, there's always forced parties, whether it be by the game design, or by the fact that sometimes there are exactly 4 characters at the lowest level, and I therefore have no choice in who to bring(at least, that's how I play it). Despite this, my parties generally do fine, and I can come up with some strategy to use. I can't foresee any major differences between that and Speed Cave.

In regards to the difficulty of bosses, I think that the 5 bosses should still be randomized, but not objectively buffed. The reason for this is because on the whole, I foresee most of the difficulty being generated from exactly what equipment you find in the cave, and not things like levels or skills(given all of the high power attacks that are normally dealt with by elemental shields). As such, if you have bad equipment, you're basically screwed against the bosses, whereas if the difficulty is lowered, lack of equipment may be made up for with levels or skills. On another note, this also applies to Speed Cave runs that aren't races, because it doesn't matter how thorough I search for stuff, I can't get what hasn't been randomized into the seed. Thus, I can still be screwed if, say, there's no Ice absorbing equipment to deal with Doom.

In regards to the lower starting number of characters, I don't think this is really a bad thing. After all, the characters you do have will be a higher level. Although, this does inherently create a larger gap between the party members you gain and the party members you have in terms of levels. In addition, balancing by party average may be tricky if one party is way ahead of the rest, as the new party members will be dragged down by the other two teams that are behind. This could be offset if they were guaranteed to join +2 or +5 levels above average, I suppose.