Craywulf, on 18 January 2013 - 05:30 PM, said:
I went back and read the reddit thread about AoE. Seems to me the major concern is the overuse of AoE spells, as one developer implied...
So it looks like they are looking at it as cost per damage kinda thing. Perhaps reducing amount of damage per target in AoE will balance the cost/damage ratio. For example if single target damage does 100 points for a cooldown of 3 seconds, then the AoE spell should be 50 points of damage per 5 targets for a cooldown of 3 seconds. This gives the player more thought in which skill they want to use for a specific situation.
That is looking at it from a strictly damage focused point of view. Why do that when there are so many other factors? Such as channel time, cool down time and the ability to easily dodge around half of the larger AOE abilities.
Honestly this game doesnt really have that many attacks to choose from. For sake of argument, lets look at Elementalist since they will be the ones most affected by this.
Staff skills dont really allow themselves to have some attacks used on single target and some for multiple.
Regardless of element attunement staff breaks down to
#1 Single target with some AOE (Fire having a small blast radius, and Air jumping to multiple targets)
#2 Three out of Four are ground target AOE
#3 Generally a utility (AOE heal, a push, a shield and an AOE burn)
#4 Generally a utility (AOE speed boost, an evade, a chill and a cripple)
#5 A long cool down AOE
So, when using the staff you DO use AOE for single target because....thats all you have, and it isnt like you can switch weapons.
If these changes go through, your telling me a staff Elementalist will just auto attack for any fight with 2 or fewer enemies? And with larger battles the enemies will just move out of our AOEs?
This doesnt seem fun at all.... Guess ill just run around D/D all the time because thats a better single target choice....right? Lets see...
D/D
#1 auto attacks all hit multiple targets with the exception of earth attunement
#2 is a cone AOE or PBAOE
#3 Fire and Water are AOE, Earth is a utility gap closer and Air is a utility stun aura
#4 All AOE with the exception of Water shield.
#5 All AOE
Im not going to bother with scepter/focus, because they arent too good in a WvW or general situation; however they are also more AOE focused.
So, does this mean that an Elementalist is just screwed in 1v1 fights after this patch? Where is the single target damage to make AOE nerfes acceptable?
Guess Elementalist just roll with the zerg now......
I am glad to hear one of Anets objective is to break that up with these changes btw....
EDIT: i am going to clarify that i will consider anything that hits 2 or more people to be an area of effect. Not just because that...is kinda the definition, but also because one of the examples ANet gave is that people use AOE when a player is reviving someone else. So, this clearly indicates that to them anything that hits 2 or more people is AOE.
2nd EDIT: It could be interesting to have AOE damge be a base factor and have it spread out across the targets in the AOE.
So, for example, Firegrab could do 700 dmg if it hits 1 target, 500 dmg if it hits 2 targets, 300 dmg if 3 etc.
However, this also encourages zerg mentality because now you will want as many people around you as possible to mitigate damage. IMO all AOE Nerfs pretty much do that anyway though.................
Edited by Voradors, 18 January 2013 - 06:34 PM.
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