Guild Wars 2

As I believe I ready on some of the devs answers in the last Q&A. Their concerns were with people using AOE skills because people use them to hit single mobs/players for more damage than some other skills.

Please Read the entire solution as it all ties into one. Thank you.

Well here is my solution:
1- Remove the cap on how many players a single AOE can hit. First of all the reason it is an AOE is to hit as many targets as you can.
2- Reduce the damage it does to a single mob/player
3- Ramp the damage for the amount of mobs/players hit
4- Blast type AOE’s that initiate at a single point and then spreads in all directions can be blocked by a mob/player not damaging others further out from the point of ignition. Sort of like having a light on a table shining in all directions and if you place something in the light to cause a shadow, anything fully in the shadow would not get hit. In game you would probably have to have a smaller inner ring that you would not be able to get a shadow from because one large player/mob could stand at the ignition point and kill the entire AOE.
5- Rain/Falling AOE’s would act like blast AOE’s but instead have the ramp in damage toned down but pulse from the ignition point multiple times. This would make it so that some players can get blocked, but if people just willy nilly run around in the large red circle they may cause more damage to others getting hit. Due to the pulsing calculating the amount of people hit each time.
6- Ring/Wall AOE’s no change needed other than the cap removed

Number 3 is quite abusive. The damage goes up for the amount of players are in the AOE? Most game developers would slap you over the head with a 9-iron if you said that. (Ramping, meaning going up. If you meant going down, you need to say “Scale down the damage based on more enemies.”)

The 5th reason is why there’s a cap. If the game engine has to calculate so many damage calculations (IE animations bouncing off a player to another player, and just simple numbers appearing), it’d lag harder than wv3, it would also lag wv3 more so, causing even the highest CPUs to bugger out, forcing GW2’s dev team to optimize the game.

Actually, if an AOE ability is too powerful its damage should ramp down per additional target hit. For example, if it does 500 damage to one target, it should do 400 damage each to two targets, 300 each to three, etc., and probably have a cap on max number of targets hit (say five).

I did indeed mean ramp the damage as in making it go up. It promotes the AOE user to properly place their AOE’s and not use them on lower number mobs/players. And they don’t have to ramp the damage drastically. Also most of the problems I really see with AOE’s is that there are those people who are blind to/ignore Big red Circles

As for #5 I don’t think it would effect the system as much as you do. Its not like bouncing animations as your example is. Since the server does all the calculations and not your CPU, it would not effect game play from your side. And those calculations are pretty much already done, they would just have to tag damage information sent out with a variable. Use the processing that determines the random 5 people out of the 50 that it hit to send out the tags.

DocHolliday.5921:

Actually, if an AOE ability is too powerful its damage should ramp down per additional target hit. For example, if it does 500 damage to one target, it should do 400 damage each to two targets, 300 each to three, etc., and probably have a cap on max number of targets hit (say five).

You are not adding in that I said bring the damage down for if only a single target is hit. And that players can effectively shadow other players from the damage plays a big factor into this. The point of this idea was also going of why the devs stated they wanted to change AOE’s.

This Idea does 3 things:

1- Takes the use of AOE away from single target high damage output (What the Devs Wanted)
2- Hopefully take W3 out of the ZERG play it is at now and make it more Small groups playing tactically and working together covering larger areas.
3- Take away the use of AOE’s as just another button in the rotation to output damage and make players more prone to use them in more favorable situations.

Please link the Q & A where the devs said they see a problem with AOE abilities doing too much damage to a single target. I’m pretty skeptical about that. Even if they did, your ideas are still bad.

doc, find the most recent televised interview they did, where they talked about this.

The link to the twitch session they did is as follows http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/357921586

They also did a text Q&A which explains it a bit better cannot seem to find the link too it but I believe they speak about it in the video