Story: "The Sacrifice", Party Issue.

Locate and Confront the Enemy Balthazar, when doing this story mission within a party, when the map shifts to the new area, everyone in the party is booted from the instance.

Yes, this is very unfortunately designed.

I did the content with a group of three friends the other evening - all of us attempting to progress the personal story - and the way that the instance limits change without warning is extremely unfriendly. The last two changes in particular are dreadful; it's a big map, and the objectives just before the instance shrinks for the first time are very unfortunate, in context. Let me explain precisely why.

The previous step has the party trying to locate green stars places of interest (("traces")). At the same time, there are multiple achievements and optional things to do: kill three elite patrols quickly; rescue nomads; destroy cannon. When you have a group, all of those positively encourage everyone to spread out and find things. BUT. The final "trace" isn't marked by a green star, like the rest; it's simply a place that the instance owner has to go to, with no warning until they get there. If they do that by accident - about the only way it can happen, unless you've been reading a spoiler - or simply without making sure that the whole party is tightly-gathered together and ready, someone at least is going to get left outside and kicked (this, remember, is when everyone has just been thoroughly encouraged to spread out). Whoever thought that randomly reshaping the instance in that way, after what had just gone before, was a good idea? Perhaps NOT your best day's work, is all that I can say.

Because we were doing it as a group, and wanted to all progress it, my friends and I had to restart no less than three times before we finally got it done. About the only blessing was that we didn't hit the "Do you wish to restart?" bug near the end, and lose someone at that point as well.