Guild Wars 2

In Guild Wars 2 most melee (auto)attacks do cleave damage, while in Guild Wars 1 the only weapon auto attack with cleave damage was the Scythe.

The problem , I think, with cleave damage is that it does the same or even more damage than single target skills. The fact that all cleave damage does the damage as single target damage promotes staying stacked up in PvE content (apart from world bosses), because the npc’s will move to you anyways and then you can melee them all for the same damage as most single target skills.

In WvW most people are just running with the commander and spamming their AoE-skills (including cleave autoattacks), but what if the AoE damage of melee auto-attacks was nerfed a bit, or even made single target, so that it will be worth it to use single target attacks. The zerg might break and turn zerg vs. zerg into a dynamic fight.
Another thing is that hitting up to 3 foes with a sword, axe or whatever does not really seem realistic, but it is a fantasy game so that’s no problem.

I do not mean to nerf most cleave/AoE skills. (e.g Earthshaker, Clusterbomb, Choas Storm, Meteorshower etc.)

I think it is fine that weapon aas can cleave, but what i would like to see is that the damage down scales depending on the number of opponents. Like with 1 opponent it does 100% damage, with 2 both get 70% damage and so on.

I also don’t have a problem with cleave damage, but I agree it would be nice to see it change based on targets hit. But I’m not sure I like the idea of a flat reduction to all targets based on number of targets hit. Instead, I think it would be interesting (but more challenging to program) to make it so that it strikes targets at staggered intervals, instead of all at the same time, and then have it so that it strikes closest target first, next closest second, and so on, and reduce the damage for each consecutive target. So first target would take full 100%, but second target might take only 66%, and third target only 43.5%, and fourth target 28.75%, etc., with a maximum number of targets hit.