My friends and I just tried out the new expansion, and while we like all the new twists and perks a new features to the game, especially being able to form a party, we couldn't find anything having to do with how you fight as a party. Do you double the Masters health? Do you add a second monster? We couldn't find any answers in the rule book, and would appreciate some help!

There's a few of the party skills that enhance coop combat. All monsters, but villains, remain unchanged: normal monsters stay the same because most of the times you'll fighting against those alone (otherwise if you go as a party, you won't have much time to gear up properly), villains have been modified (or are simply tougher in the new scenarios) to cover the need for a more coop play (more or less: I'm keeping this short so that it's spoiler free for those who still have to attempt the new adventures)

Thanks for your input, but, that still doesn't answer how you do combat in co-op play! If you are in a party, do you take turns? how do you determine who is fighting in combat?! Just having a couple skill cards doesn't really answer the question, so any advice or answers would be appreciated! If you do do Fight alone, then what is the point of a party?!

Sorry if it wasn't clear. There's no such a thing as "party combat" (as you noticed, there's no such a section in the rules).

In your turn, the active hero engages an enemy in combat. Period. If you have specific party skills allowing other heroes in the party to intervene, then you'll be able to add one of their tokens, or do other stuff, according to the party skill you learned. If you don't have such skills, the other hero in the party is off to catch flowers in a nearby meadow.

Is it lame? Maybe (we've got crappier versions of what means being in a party in other games tho, see WHQ:TAC), but it works from a point of view of the game mechanics. Going in a different direction (boosting the enemy attack, making enemies scale and so on) would have required designing a different game: if enemies were boosted and heroes had the need to fight together to overcome them all the time, it'd have been:

a) non-thematic: if you need 4 heroes to take down an ogre, then you couldn't explain how peasants survive in such a dangerous world
b) timers should have been changed accordingly because if you tag-team all the time against single enemies, then you have a lot time less to have a proper development of each hero in the party (which is rather a necessity when you fight against bigger villains)

Then of course nothing's stopping you to go in another way, i.e. houserule that heroes are allowed to fight together; but then you'll have to houserule the whole reward system triggered by defeating enemies, and find a way to tune all of this to the timer of the game.

I understand this won't make happy a ton of players; but hopefully the expansion comes with other interesting stuff so that everyone's happy at least for some of those

That's one of the biggest disappointment of Unbreakable Bonds...nothing encourage you to group up and do real coop.

The expansion is still nice but it could have been released as a small format like the other expansions because the price tag on it is just too high for what it offers. No new general Adventure Cards was a big let down for me. But the combat boards and tokens for each "monster class", the envelopes and scenarios are all worth it.

It's still a good expansion but the price should not be that high.

I disagree. Co-op combat for this expansion was atrocious. They needed to start over and revamp the expansion and fix the co-op combat, other than providing a few cards to change things. They would have been better off eliminating the co-op feature and added more gear or better ways to get gear early.