Guild Wars 2

AoE making you a sad panda?

Then may I direct your attention, stage right, to the dodge key ===>

If players mindlessly stand inside a red ring of death or – in the case of AoE skills that do not have a red ring to telegraph their presence – an obvious chokepoint, then please explain why those players should be saved from defeat through the contrivance of the AoE cap.

After being wiped a few times, perhaps they’ll reconsider their approach. Then maybe we’ll see WvWvW realize its potential as a deep and complex strategic and tactical game rather than mindless circle zerging.

I never knew there was a limit thats dumb. If I fire up a barrage of a billion arrows into 20 or 30 people it would be ridiculous if only 5 of them got hit.

AoE limit promotes the current poor zerg gameplay. Anyone who wants to argue about single target characters should check their figures. A thief can hit once for 16k or burst for 13k. A warrior can do similar. How many targets do you think a Necromancer has to hit to inflict this much damage in one hit? Im yet to see damage come close to this, even before the AoE limit.

Minion of Vey.4398:

I’m an ele but I think the 5 target max is appropriate.

Not really interested in tactics where a small group of people can outright reject any amount of people from crossing through an area.

Why not? That’s the way warfare works. The English used longbow AOE spam in a constrained area during the battle of Agincourt.

Kaleban.9834:

Ghanto.9784:

Well, I’ll just point out the obvious, lol: there will still be zergs and if there’s a lot more people in those zergs able to aoe an unlimited number of people then they’re just going to mow you down even quicker. So I’m not sure how you think this would give a much smaller group any real advantage.

Not really obvious at all, nor is it correct. The point of the zerg is the same as a school of fish, survival by numbers.

Right now, if a small group of Eles all simultaneously meteor storm a huge zerg, very little damage is done, the zerg swarms over the Eles and they’re dead. The zerg stays together and continues on, much like a plague of locusts.

Now if there were a removal of the AoE cap, that same small group of Eles could use the same tactic to smash apart the zerg, scattering them because grouping together inside the red circles is no longer a means to spread out the damage. Leaving several smaller groups that can then be engaged by ally groups. Which means tactics, planning and positioning come into play, instead of just the herd mentality.

Again, ask yourselves, in what rational, logical way does the act of congregating inside AoE skills make any kind of sense? Even from just a gameplay perspective, in both PvE and sPvP, players try to avoid red circles because they know it means death. So why in WvWvW should it mean anything different? The hard cap on AoE is very counter-intuitive, and a stupid mechanic that equates to training wheels for adults.

To all those whining about their poor melee classes, remember that every single class has access to AoE, some are just better (i.e. Ele, Necro) at it than others. I didn’t choose to main an Ele because I wanted to slay people in melee combat, I did so because I naturally assumed that I would be more of an artillery piece, softening up many targets for my sturdier comrades to melee and finish off. Problem is, the AoE cap completely pulls the claws and fangs from any sort of long range support, and encourages the zerg mentality over actual tactics and strategy. Its a shame really.

Well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree, because you haven’t changed my mind on the matter. If your small group of ele’s is outnumbered three to one by the number of ele’s in any given zerg, or more – plus all the other classes with aoe – I still don’t think you’d have a much better chance. If you’d be getting a boost by the increased aoe, all those people in the zerg with aoe would be getting the same boost. You seem to be counting on any given zerg having less ele’s than in your small group, but I wouldn’t bank on it. And even if it did prove true that a small group of ele’s with unlimited aoe targets could demolish a whole zerg, how loing do you think it would be till they were nerfed in some other way?

LOL @ AoE cap to save bandwidth.

Because of this the focus is having zerg vs. zerg fights.

Oh wait, won’t that chug more bandwidth than the AoE cap?

Seriously…

/FF

I agree with the TS. There’s a reason for AoE to be called Area of Effect. It should affect the whole Area not 5 random targets even if the spells is visually affecting the entire area. If there are 10 brainless nuts willingly stand in the AoE then let them die from it, why? bcoz they are standing in the AoE. No point limiting it to a number within an area. Meteor storm hits at random spots within the AoE, if a meteor lands on 8 players stacking then they should pay the price for stacking under the meteor.

cant believe some people came with ‘’save bandwitdth’’…

I’d really like to see Arena Net’s comment on this issue and to get it resolved. Right now WvWvW is a zerg vs zerg chug fest that’s getting old fast.

If an AoE cap could be removed for WvWvW (not for PvE…because I can understand it being there to prevent massive mob farming and gold farming/exploiting, that’s a given), the game would be much better off. Defenses at keeps and sieges would be more traditional, same with attacks. As it is right now, as long as the attackers have 1 more guy than the defenders, they’ll get through seeing as how the “cap” will prevent that 1 guy from getting hit as the AoE’s hit all his allies and he gets untouched. Sure players use siege to defend some of the time, but they actually still want to be useful against the enemy besides trying to reload a “slow” arrowcart or ballista.

….because all it seems to have is “glass pistols” that aren’t even 6-shooters (they’re 5 max!).

What am I talking about?

Why, I’m talking about none other than the cap for AoE which is restricting creative gameplay in PvP -WvW in particular- and making the game a Zerg vs. Zerg affair.

AoE (Area of Effect):
- A spell or ability that effects certain people within the specific area. This is dependent on whether or not the spell or ability is a beneficial effect for allies or attack against enemies.

Yet, it seems that the AoE effects in Guild Wars 2 are not of normal RPG definition. They only hit a maximum of 5 allies or 5 enemies within the area. By that, they shouldn’t be called AoE at all. Instead, they should be called “Effects Up To 5 Within Area Abilities” [EUTFWAA] Guild Wars 2 may very well be the only game that has these kind of EUTFWAA’s for players to use. Maybe this is their “innovation” that they advertised?

Well, innovative or not I would like to see them removed the EUTFWAA for the traditional AoE of old. Because frankly this is the only game where an AoE would actually fit much better than other games. Why?

DODGE!!!!!!

That’s right, this game gives the players the ability to dodge roll out of things such as AoE, direct attacks, an Ogre’s mallet swing, and other such harsh things. So, if someone cast a raining hell of fiery meteor showers on a single area where your group of 10 where standing, you can roll out of the way to mitigate most of the damage. Those that don’t roll out? This is what Darwinism is all about.

So, ……again, we need Glass Cannons, because this game lacks them. No more “Glass Pistols”, they’re not fun and they break like a cheap hour glass that’s run out of the 5 grains of sand that was in it….

I believe the reason for the cap is because of how large the battles are. Might have been too performance costly to calculate your AoE attack hitting 200 people at the same time . Not only that, but calculating everyone else doing the same thing as well. Im no Anet employee but there’s a lot that goes into something like this.

Well it’s either that or nerf AoE damage a lot, since it can already down a lot of people (whirlwind for Warrior). Sure you can dodge, but ikittenerg you can barely see what’s going on & since WvW mostly consists of glass cannon builds 10 people could get down by 2 guardians using their #5→#2 greatsword skills.

I’m sick of these posts now, common sense says that if they remove the 5 target limit they either nerf AOE into oblivion after 5 targets or have to buff single target damage to be worth it which would mean one hit kill single target damage.

Remove the cap in wvw and you could get instantly killed by a group of elementalists who use firestorm at the same time, dodging wont save you and you will die over and over.

Come on man, think about this before posting this kind of thread, if they buff something they have to buff everything else to match.
If i can use a spell that does 500 damage on 30 players at the same time I need to be able to do 15,000 damage to a single target per attack to balance it out for single target to be the same DPS.

From a recent WvW fight where the whole way inside a tower was littered with AoE circles 100% of the time, not to mention the lines of warding and other movement denial AoEs, I must say, no.

Without the AoE cap, it wouldn’t take a lot of players to permanently deny a chokepoint with nothing you could do to prevent it.

If you want to go the “precast towards chokepoint all day” boring gameplay, just build enough siege weapons which have a much higher AoE limit than player skills and fire them continuously.

they should either remove the aoe limit, or make is same for everybody (hello Ele!)

stof.9341:

From a recent WvW fight where the whole way inside a tower was littered with AoE circles 100% of the time, not to mention the lines of warding and other movement denial AoEs, I must say, no.

Without the AoE cap, it wouldn’t take a lot of players to permanently deny a chokepoint with nothing you could do to prevent it.

your right, we should only just have zerg fests in wvwvw where the best way to win is to just outplay and use the aoe limit to your advantage, this way you just put more numbers on a gate to attack it and only a few of you will take damage while the rest just sit there with no reason to dodge, let alone retaliate

we’re fine with zergs just running around capping, and immediately leaving to the next point rather than defending what they got

i mean face it, aoes are just so kitten hard to avoid, those big red circles are no indication of whether or not damage will be dealt if you stand inside them. And jesus, did you see the size of them, its like they are a mile across, COMPLETELY impossible to avoid, this is why we need those player limits, because omg, can you imagine what would happen if there wasnt? zergs would actually be broken up and people would actually split up more often, or actually focus their efforts on specific targets objectives and players.

Forts and keeps might actually take some skill to take if we did this

Cant have that can we?

Keep in mind, im talking about damage dealing aoe, not healing or buffs. though i wouldnt mind seeing thiefs getting some use in groups being able to stealth a whole platoon, stealth zerg vs mesmer tele zerg?

I would support a compromise. Up the limit to 10 and see how it goes first.

DeadlySynz.3471:

Great pic Chronometria.. perfectly illustrates why there should be no AoE limit.

Actually it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything at all except show a picture of the ele standing in front of a huge zerg.

The AoE limit now is fine.

You people talking about removing the AoE limit are focusing on an individual basis.

Somewhere there was a mention of a 50 man zerg. Well, if you have 10 ele’s, then you get the AoE you’re looking for. 1 person with AoE can affect 5 people, that’s awesome.

There’s a bad illustration of AoE in zerg v zerg in this thread too.

If there is a 25 v 25, and group A has 5 ele’s, then you’ve got AoE for the entire group B.

Group A’s 5 ele’s could put up 5 static stun fields, and then boom, you’ve stunned the entire enemy zerg.

I see this happen all the time in WvW, especially on choke points. Just the other day a group of us around that 25 man size tried to approach an enemy group around the same size that was on our outer walls. We all had to go up some stairs to get to them. Ele’s placed static fields on the stairs and then our zerg wiped from AoE’s. We even tried a second time with stability and even though we got farther along we still wiped from AoE.

In that scenario we couldn’t attack and avoid the AoE at the same time. AoE is perfectly fine, in the open field people walk around AoE but when used in proper choke points it only takes a few ele’s to destroy or deny a small zerg.

But against a super zerg, you can’t ask for too much. If it’s 5 ele’s against 60 people, you should lose. I don’t care how skilled you are, there is a point where numbers have to have some measure of importance.

McDili.1549:

DeadlySynz.3471:

Great pic Chronometria.. perfectly illustrates why there should be no AoE limit.

Actually it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything at all except show a picture of the ele standing in front of a huge zerg.

The AoE limit now is fine.

You people talking about removing the AoE limit are focusing on an individual basis.

Somewhere there was a mention of a 50 man zerg. Well, if you have 10 ele’s, then you get the AoE you’re looking for. 1 person with AoE can affect 5 people, that’s awesome.

There’s a bad illustration of AoE in zerg v zerg in this thread too.

If there is a 25 v 25, and group A has 5 ele’s, then you’ve got AoE for the entire group B.

Group A’s 5 ele’s could put up 5 static stun fields, and then boom, you’ve stunned the entire enemy zerg.

I see this happen all the time in WvW, especially on choke points. Just the other day a group of us around that 25 man size tried to approach an enemy group around the same size that was on our outer walls. We all had to go up some stairs to get to them. Ele’s placed static fields on the stairs and then our zerg wiped from AoE’s. We even tried a second time with stability and even though we got farther along we still wiped from AoE.

In that scenario we couldn’t attack and avoid the AoE at the same time. AoE is perfectly fine, in the open field people walk around AoE but when used in proper choke points it only takes a few ele’s to destroy or deny a small zerg.

But against a super zerg, you can’t ask for too much. If it’s 5 ele’s against 60 people, you should lose. I don’t care how skilled you are, there is a point where numbers have to have some measure of importance.

I agree with your statement. The limit is fine. If an ele was allowed to use a static field or a slow on an entire zerg through a choke point of if 5 eles just stood at a choke point casting 5 meteor showers and stun them that would reduce numbers to nothing.

Plus your forgetting 1 other important thing. If given unlimited the larger zerg would always win cause they would have a huge amount more AOE that would instantly wipe any smaller group. At this current moment the smaller group could escape with only losing about 5 but if 1 ele could place it just right he could deny them all and poof they are all dead.

McDili.1549:

If there is a 25 v 25, and group A has 5 ele’s, then you’ve got AoE for the entire group B.

Group A’s 5 ele’s could put up 5 static stun fields, and then boom, you’ve stunned the entire enemy zerg.

There is a problem with that calculation, You are assuming that targets chosen by the AOEs don’t overlap. Since we are on that subject, how does the system decide which 5 in the AOE are chosen?

P.S: Nvm, from the wiki:
“Only the 5 closest enemies to the centerpoint of the area of effect will be affected. Similiarly, when affecting allies, closest party members are affected first, followed by closest non-party member allies.”

Only thing is that it doesnt say how precise is the calculation and how are equidistant recipients calculated.

Static Field is a spell that stuns people that cross it. As such, it is very efficient on the way it’ll stun the whole zer since a stuned player cannot cross another static field and use it’s charges.

ele are not even an issue….mesmer/necro fields/marks on the other way…
Look what happens in www, look what happens in vids.

Its qute unfair to have some sort of cap workaround for 2 classes and not for any other.

Suddenflame.2601:

McDili.1549:

DeadlySynz.3471:

Great pic Chronometria.. perfectly illustrates why there should be no AoE limit.

Actually it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything at all except show a picture of the ele standing in front of a huge zerg.

The AoE limit now is fine.

You people talking about removing the AoE limit are focusing on an individual basis.

Somewhere there was a mention of a 50 man zerg. Well, if you have 10 ele’s, then you get the AoE you’re looking for. 1 person with AoE can affect 5 people, that’s awesome.

There’s a bad illustration of AoE in zerg v zerg in this thread too.

If there is a 25 v 25, and group A has 5 ele’s, then you’ve got AoE for the entire group B.

Group A’s 5 ele’s could put up 5 static stun fields, and then boom, you’ve stunned the entire enemy zerg.

I see this happen all the time in WvW, especially on choke points. Just the other day a group of us around that 25 man size tried to approach an enemy group around the same size that was on our outer walls. We all had to go up some stairs to get to them. Ele’s placed static fields on the stairs and then our zerg wiped from AoE’s. We even tried a second time with stability and even though we got farther along we still wiped from AoE.

In that scenario we couldn’t attack and avoid the AoE at the same time. AoE is perfectly fine, in the open field people walk around AoE but when used in proper choke points it only takes a few ele’s to destroy or deny a small zerg.

But against a super zerg, you can’t ask for too much. If it’s 5 ele’s against 60 people, you should lose. I don’t care how skilled you are, there is a point where numbers have to have some measure of importance.

I agree with your statement. The limit is fine. If an ele was allowed to use a static field or a slow on an entire zerg through a choke point of if 5 eles just stood at a choke point casting 5 meteor showers and stun them that would reduce numbers to nothing.

Plus your forgetting 1 other important thing. If given unlimited the larger zerg would always win cause they would have a huge amount more AOE that would instantly wipe any smaller group. At this current moment the smaller group could escape with only losing about 5 but if 1 ele could place it just right he could deny them all and poof they are all dead.

Well that already happens, the larger zerg normally would have more ele’s than a smaller one. If a zerg of 60 guys had 10 ele’s then they have enough AoE to engulf a 50 man zerg in the ele’s alone. But that’s not realistic, zergs aren’t just made up of a frontline, people sit in the back where the ele’s can’t reach without endangering themselves.

Khal Drogo.9631:

McDili.1549:

If there is a 25 v 25, and group A has 5 ele’s, then you’ve got AoE for the entire group B.

Group A’s 5 ele’s could put up 5 static stun fields, and then boom, you’ve stunned the entire enemy zerg.

There is a problem with that calculation, You are assuming that targets chosen by the AOEs don’t overlap. Since we are on that subject, how does the system decide which 5 in the AOE are chosen?

P.S: Nvm, from the wiki:
“Only the 5 closest enemies to the centerpoint of the area of effect will be affected. Similiarly, when affecting allies, closest party members are affected first, followed by closest non-party member allies.”

Only thing is that it doesnt say how precise is the calculation and how are equidistant recipients calculated.

I suppose the equidistant calculation is an issue but it’s also unrealistic. That probably doesn’t happen very often. However, I am interested in how that’s calculation nonetheless.

There is one good reason for why they should remove the aoe limit. It will give players in wvw incentive to split up. Then they can no longer blob up like zombies and always win as long as they have more players. The speed you res someone from dead and the aoe limit is not really balanced. Even if you defend a keep and throw down all you’re aoe and luckily kill 1 they will res him up in 10 seconds.

without aoe-limit it would be bright wizard all over again

But a single tick of meteor shower can tick for upwards of 5k. That means a single wave from just 5 eles could kill everything except Warriors and Necros before you factor in toughness. Toughness would only make it so you would add Rangers and Mesmers to the list. The rest of the classes would be killed in a a second. This isn’t even considering the second tick of the spell. And that’s just your basic GTAOE. What about fire grab that hits for 10k? the game would quickly turn from zerg on zerg to suicidal ele bombs. This isn’t what this game needs.

You know what games with less strict AE caps offer that this game doesn’t? Real resist. If players could put on resist gear to reduce Fire damage by 75% like some other PvP centric MMO’s have offered it wouldn’t be a big deal. But then once you introduce resists, you need to introduce elemental vulnerability to offset it. Then you need to introduce a much more realistic cleansing system. And what would a more robust cleansing system need? Well a more robust purging system.

Perhaps this bane hate mechanic will turn things around. Imagine a Warrior whirwinding into a zerg with banehate on dealing 10% more damage per boon * 25 stacks of might giving +250% more damage or some such nonsense. Or zergs making better use of Necros to strip boons.

You’re never going to fix the zerg mentality. The only thing you can do is design the environment to not reinforce it. But so long as WvW in this game amounts to nothing but running in circles until 2 zergs catch up to one another, it will never change.

Notice that the ones who oppose this idea are all about Zerg?

FateZero.8536:

Notice that the ones who oppose this idea are all about Zerg?

Actually it seems those who oppose it are the ones with experience playing other MMO’s that didn’t have AE caps and know what can go wrong if it’s not done right.

Map design has a very large impact on zerg play. Did DAoC have zergs? Absolutely. Was it only zergs? No. It’s because the WvW map wasn’t a giant circle devoid of any choke points and keeps weren’t just empty square boxes with a king inside.

kitteno.5698:

without aoe-limit it would be bright wizard all over again

Not even. The problem with Warhammer Online was the design of their “keeps”, which were small narrow buildings with usually only a single door. Walls were a no-go point, as they weren’t destructible. The only way to reach the Lords within a keep was to go up a narrow platform path in a small trap-door style area.

Bright Wizards were not the problem, concept design of the game’s sieges, keeps, and overall maps were at fault. Even siege equipment could only be set in static locations where it became very easily campy and could deny enemy access to these siege spots (unlike this game where siege can be set almost anywhere…and I do mean anywhere).

With an AOE cap: Group of 40 rushes narrow door they just broke, and over runs 25 defenders acting like they weren’t there.

Without an AOE cap: Group of 40 can either rush the narrow door and risk that the group of 25 has more than a few AoE based classes (Mesmers, Elementalists, Rangers, and Necros), or it can strategically cull the enemy’s numbers using their own AOE, siege equipment, and direct spell attacks. They even have a Plan B option of busting open a wall section so as to make the enemy spread their defenses thinner across multiple entry points.

To the issue with Stactic Field, there really isn’t one. You’re complaining about one ability like it’s the end-all. In this game there’s Fears, Knockbacks, and other stuns. But, every class has at the very least 1-3 breakout abilities that can get them out of a Crowd Control and be able to actively move around the battlefield once more. You can even dodge-roll through to Evade (so long as you don’t end up in the other section of the same red-ring when you’re done).

I’m trying to see a logical argument against the AoE cap removal, but all I’m seeing is single-pathing minded concepts where everyone thinks that players will brainlessly go into narrow areas of death. That’s what we have now already in the game in the zerg vs zerg that currently exits. And the problem with what we have now is that people do this willingly because they KNOW that only 5 people are hit by a single AOE; being a group of 20, you’re chances of getting hit is 1 in 4, a significantly easier thing to risk if walking into that AoE was a 1 in 1 hit chance without a cap.

Siphaed.9235:

I’m trying to see a logical argument against the AoE cap removal, but all I’m seeing is single-pathing minded concepts where everyone thinks that players will brainlessly go into narrow areas of death. That’s what we have now already in the game in the zerg vs zerg that currently exits. And the problem with what we have now is that people do this willingly because they KNOW that only 5 people are hit by a single AOE; being a group of 20, you’re chances of getting hit is 1 in 4, a significantly easier thing to risk if walking into that AoE was a 1 in 1 hit chance without a cap.

This. Most of these arguments seem to be based on the fact that AOE would be OP against the zerg without a cap. Well, you’re right. But that’s kind of the point. AOE should be devastating if you take 40 people and stand in the middle of it. The balance to AOE is not to stand in the middle of it. What a lot of people seem to be missing is that if you remove the AOE cap, the game will change. People will stop zerging up so as to avoid getting wiped by AOE. They will be forced to spread out, run in smaller groups, take multiple objectives and generally think more overall.

Yes, AOE would be OP against the zerg without a cap. That’s the idea. To get people to stop running in mindless zergs. At least bump it up to 10 and see if that promotes some more interesting gameplay.

McDili.1549:

DeadlySynz.3471:

Great pic Chronometria.. perfectly illustrates why there should be no AoE limit.

Actually it doesn’t. It doesn’t do anything at all except show a picture of the ele standing in front of a huge zerg.

The AoE limit now is fine.

You people talking about removing the AoE limit are focusing on an individual basis.

Somewhere there was a mention of a 50 man zerg. Well, if you have 10 ele’s, then you get the AoE you’re looking for. 1 person with AoE can affect 5 people, that’s awesome.

There’s a bad illustration of AoE in zerg v zerg in this thread too.

If there is a 25 v 25, and group A has 5 ele’s, then you’ve got AoE for the entire group B.

Group A’s 5 ele’s could put up 5 static stun fields, and then boom, you’ve stunned the entire enemy zerg.

I see this happen all the time in WvW, especially on choke points. Just the other day a group of us around that 25 man size tried to approach an enemy group around the same size that was on our outer walls. We all had to go up some stairs to get to them. Ele’s placed static fields on the stairs and then our zerg wiped from AoE’s. We even tried a second time with stability and even though we got farther along we still wiped from AoE.

In that scenario we couldn’t attack and avoid the AoE at the same time. AoE is perfectly fine, in the open field people walk around AoE but when used in proper choke points it only takes a few ele’s to destroy or deny a small zerg.

But against a super zerg, you can’t ask for too much. If it’s 5 ele’s against 60 people, you should lose. I don’t care how skilled you are, there is a point where numbers have to have some measure of importance.

Note how the reason in every case as to why you believe removal of an AoE cap is a bad thing is due to the potential for one or a few players to smash and destroy an entire zerg?

How is that a bad thing? This isn’t about unfairness or class balance, it won’t make solo target melee attacks obsolete, etc. What its about is tactics. If a zerg can be busted up by a couple of players (here, “busted up” means scattering the zerg) then that means the propensity for players to form zergs in the first place becomes a bad idea.

With an AoE cap, the logical reaction is to charge around en masse. Without an AoE cap, the logical course is to fight in the smallest possible groups while still remaining viable to accomplish the objective. Which means that in the long run, players would be spread out all over the map in small strike groups and small defense units, taking or defending various objectives, and using positioning, tactics and strategy to mitigate damage, especially via AoE.

I really don’t understand the objections, unless the only basis for such is because people are lazy and would rather rely on a flawed game mechanic to save them instead of having to stroll out of a red circle. The idea that the meta will then be dominated by Eles for AoE is flawed too, because that assumes that players will actively refuse to switch tactics away from the zerg mentality. If players refuse to dodge out of a red circle, then why should they be given a free pass?

The other issue too, especially for AoE heavy classes (Necro, Ele, etc.) is that as it stands now in WvWvW, AoE is falsely advertised. The ground target indicator might show that 15 or 20 players will be hit by an AoE, but only five are. Its deceiving to the players, on both sides, and constitutes a poor crutch for design.

Phoenix.3416:

I’m sick of these posts now, common sense says that if they remove the 5 target limit they either nerf AOE into oblivion after 5 targets or have to buff single target damage to be worth it which would mean one hit kill single target damage.

Remove the cap in wvw and you could get instantly killed by a group of elementalists who use firestorm at the same time, dodging wont save you and you will die over and over.

Come on man, think about this before posting this kind of thread, if they buff something they have to buff everything else to match.
If i can use a spell that does 500 damage on 30 players at the same time I need to be able to do 15,000 damage to a single target per attack to balance it out for single target to be the same DPS.

No, common sense does not say this at all. AoEs are long cooldown skills, usually with long cast times, as well. Single target skills are short cooldown skills, usually with shorter cast/activation times. If any adjustment had to to be made to single target skills as some form of compensation, it would be a very small amount; they would not become one hit kills. Your comparison of the DPS of an AoE versus the DPS of a single target skill only works if both skills have the same recharge and activation times; which they do not.

To illustrate:

1) Elementalist casts Firestorm on a Warrior. Firestorm is now on a 15 second cooldown.

2) Warrior dodges once to evade and takes no damage, but isn’t fully out of the AoE ring of the spell.

3) The Warrior now takes a hit from Firestorm. The base damage is 211, but obviously will be greater than this due to the Elementalist’s attack stat, boons, nourishment and consumable buffs, and if they’ve traited to increase their fire damage. Regardless, that one strike of Firestorm isn’t going to kill a Warrior at full health.

4) The Warrior is now able to move out of the AoE ring of Firestorm. Let’s assume 3 seconds have elapsed since the Elementalist first cast it; it still has another 12 seconds left on cooldown.

5) Let’s assume the Warrior is an axe wielder. He closes the distance to the Elementalist using Eviscerate. Let’s also assume he only had level 1 in adrenaline at the time of the leap. At base level, he’ll deal 487 points of damage to the Elementalist. We’ll assume 4 seconds have now elapsed and Firestorm is still has 11 seconds left on cooldown.

6) The Warrior now starts to auto-attack the Elementalist using Chop – Double Chop – Triple Chop. The whole sequence takes 3.6 seconds to execute for 1648 base damage.

7) By the time the Elementalist’s Firestorm is off of cooldown and ready to be cast again, the Warrior will have had an opportunity to land 3+ sequences of Chop – Double Chop – Triple Chop. Using just his gap-closer Eviscerate and the axe auto-attack, the Warrior will have potentially dealt 5,431 points of damage versus the Elementalist’s 211. This is a 1:25+ ratio of damage in favor of the Warrior.

Of course, this all contrived since the Elementalist isn’t just going to stand there nor use any other skills. Likewise, the Warrior will do more than just auto-attack. However, since you wanted to use a contrived scenario in describing Elementalists using a single skill – Firestorm – to instantly kill a player, it’s only fitting I counter it to demonstrate how it wouldn’t work in practice; even with multiple Elementalists stacking their Firestorms together.

The point being that the removal of the AoE cap does not mean single target skills must be increased in damage to compensate.

The more important point is that AoEs are not guaranteed insta-kills; even with the caps removed. The simplest counter to the argument against removing the AoE cap is two words:

Arrow Carts.

They have an AoE cap of 50; effectively no cap when compared to the size of most zergs. Furthermore, unlike player AoE skills with long cooldown times, Arrow Cart skill recharge times are so short that – in conjunction with the duration of their AoE – they can maintain continuous suppression fire. They create permanent AoE with a cap of 50 players and dealing 600+ damage per hit. They are – in effect – the epitome of AoE without a cap.

Do Arrow Carts make WvWvW unplayable? No.

Is Arrow Cart fire un-dodgeable? No.

Are Arrow Carts so OP that there’s no way to counter them? No.

Likewise, removing the cap from player AoE skills – especially in light of their longer recharge times – will not lead to instantly killing whole zergs unless the players in that zerg are braindead. In which case, they should be wiped by the AoE.

Now to the most important point of all. Learn to dodge. Learn to juke. Learn to bait an enemy into wasting a long recharge AoE so you can then charge through while its on cooldown. In short, learn to think when you play instead of being a mindless zombie following the herd.

Might as well start now because WvWvW is going to evolve into a thinking person’s game anyway. The current circle zerging fad will only last so long. It may be fun in the short-term but gets boring and repetitive over the long-term. Players then abandon that aspect of the game. For ArenaNet to keep WvWvW alive, they will eventually have to introduce mechanics to break up zergs or – at the very least – offer alternatives that are equally viable and equally rewarding. That may or may not mean raising the AoE cap.

Regardless of whether that specific change is implemented, there will be changes whose goal will be to foster deeper strategic and tactical play rather than mindless zerging. If all you care about is blobbing up and running in circles, then smile, be happy, and enjoy it while it lasts. If, instead, you plan on playing WvWvW for a long time to come, you might consider upping your game. A good place to start would be with the dodge key.

So while you may be sick of posts in favor of removing AoE caps, I’m sick of players who don’t know how to dodge or believe they should be allowed to stand in the middle of AoE and avoid all the damage without consequence due to the crutch of AoE caps.

Good job taking probably the strongest autoattack chain in the game to illustrate your point. Btw, Chop/Double Chop/Triple Chop is an AoE skill too. It’d have to be uncapped in targets then?

Every single “remove AoE cap” poster seem to put his arguments as if a single elementalist was pitched against zergy hordes of melee players. Oh no, my AoEs have long CD! That won’t be OP at all. Except that when you get 10 elementalists, they can cycle their huge repertoire of AoEs and between all of them together, there won’t be a single square foot of land to stand on safe in the whole area otuside a tower gate and be in range to hit it.

Removing the cap BUFFS zergs more than anything. the zerg stacks, throws down a shadows refuge, everyone uses aoe buff spells and they scatter to attack the small force.

can you imagine 50 players using might, aegis, ret, fury etc on each other at the same time? not to mention if those players have AOE healing the entire zerg could heal itself up. Healing would need to be drastically weaker than damage to stop the zerg stacking and healing nonstop.

Why use shadow refuge? You could permastealth a whole zerg with just a few thieves throwing up Smoke Bomb on cooldown.

stof.9341:

Why use shadow refuge? You could permastealth a whole zerg with just a few thieves throwing up Smoke Bomb on cooldown.

Thats what I was thinking too.

Shadow Refuge makes for a GREAT distraction though. Nothing like a big house floating in the air to draw attention.

stof.9341:

Good job taking probably the strongest autoattack chain in the game to illustrate your point. Btw, Chop/Double Chop/Triple Chop is an AoE skill too. It’d have to be uncapped in targets then?

Every single “remove AoE cap” poster seem to put his arguments as if a single elementalist was pitched against zergy hordes of melee players. Oh no, my AoEs have long CD! That won’t be OP at all. Except that when you get 10 elementalists, they can cycle their huge repertoire of AoEs and between all of them together, there won’t be a single square foot of land to stand on safe in the whole area otuside a tower gate and be in range to hit it.

No problem. Substitute any single target, non-AoE, auto-attack you wish and it will still do more damage than any AoE in actual practice when taking the AoE’s cooldown into consideration. I was illustrating how the poster to whom I was responding is in error in trying to paint AoEs as insta-kills. Arguing that uncapped AoE would be OP on the basis of no caps and damage alone is disingenuous. There’s range, duration, activation time, recharge time, positioning, counters, dodges, buffs, boons, and traits.

As to 10 elementalists cycling their huge repertoire of AoEs, that’s no different than firing 10 arrow carts. Actually, I take that back; it is different. It’s different because arrow carts can be placed in locations that are difficult or even impossible to target using player skills. Furthermore, arrow carts can be fired continuously such that the damage of all ten can be brought to bear simultaneously. Elementalists cycling their AoEs means players charging through them are only going to encounter a subset rather than all ten at once. Take dodging into account and they’ll only be hit by one or maybe two AoEs at most; easily survivable.

Those 10 elementalists, on the other hand, are going to have to jump up on the lip of the battlements to be able to place their AoE targeting reticles on the ground outside the tower or otherwise be able to target an opponent sieging the tower. Doing so then exposes them to enemy AoE or being pulled off the wall.

If you can’t figure out how to counter those 10 elementalists using player skills because “there won’t be a single square foot of land to stand on safe in the whole area otuside a tower gate and be in range to hit it” then maybe it’s time to think of alternatives that do have the range.

Build some trebs and bombard that wall. Knock them back and interrupt them with the treb boulders and poison them and obscure their view with the cow carcasses. Build some arrow carts whose 2,500 range beats the elementalists 1,200 range. Build ballista whose 3,000 range is even better than the arrow carts’. Get some necros in there with Reaper’s Mark to fear them back from the wall’s edge and then follow up with your own elementalists to apply AoE pressure. These are just a few suggestions.

In short, think when playing WvWvW rather than expect the game mechanics to provide training wheels which permit standing in the middle of AoE and taking no damage. The days of human wave tactics as the predominate approach will eventually come to an end in WvWvW. Might as well start learning how to adapt now rather than later.

I think it’s stupid how many people think that AoE would become that much more stronger without a limit. The only circumstance where it will be dealing more damage is when more than 5 people stand inside the AoE radius. As most of these radii aren’t that wide, you’d already have to be fairly stacked up together for this to be relevant. This is the main issue with how AoE works at its present state, where people only know one way of playing in the zerg, and that’s in one big zergball. And if the defenders have enough elementalists and necros to keep spamming AoE at the gate entrance it should be perfectly clear that going with rams is not a viable method of attacking the keep/tower, and you might want to consider alternatives like catapults or trebuchets, or maybe even sneaky tactics where you send a smaller force to ram the ‘back door’ (obiously this only applies to keeps).

The idea of rams providing protection to the person operating it with something like a roof is not bad at all though.

Something I see people posting a lot of is the AOE effects, such as knockback, blinds, and various other conditions which do no damage. These effects could be very overpowered if the aoe limit was removed from them.

An easy solution to this is to have these conditions still have an aoe limit, but to remove the limit on pure damage aoes. Solves the issue with having huge knockbacks to entire groups, and still limits zerg usefulness. The healing limit would also need to be removed, but not the buff limit.

Quite funny to see all the referrals to chokepoints- most are quire easy to get around/through and of course there is that little known and even less used thing called siege weapons which can help clear out chokepoints pretty fast- drop two superior ballys with ranked players firing them and see how long the chokepoint remains a problem.

killcannon.2576:

The healing limit would also need to be removed, but not the buff limit.

The healing and buff limits have the exact same purpose as no limit on AoE-damage would have. Namely, to reduce incentives for people to stand close to each other. So I don’t see any real reason to change the healing limit.

I do wish someone would explain a bit more about the brightwizard from Warhammer.

Anyway, I was always a bit undecided on the issue of AoE limits. I can kind of see their use, but I can also see where they are redundant. If AoEs were too potent for farming enemies in PVE, for example, you would have to blame the designers for making it so easily exploitable. But anyway, there are a couple of things mentioned that I don’t feel are properly covered.

Everyone keeps talking about Elementalists with this discussion. I find there are a few more classes that need special attention, more so than the elementalist:

#1: Necromancer. Wells cannot be “dodged out of” because they are instantaneous and give no warning to their activation. Unless you can spot the activation time, epidemic is also a very nasty AoE that is up every 12 seconds. Wells can be dodged out of without sustaining too much damage, to be fair. LIfe Transfer with infinite targets is also incredibly epic. Scepter/Dagger skills also don’t make circles.

#2: The Thief. If you can get together 5 thieves with Shadow Refuge and its recharge reduction, then a “zerg” of any size can be under permanent stealth, rendering the entire “countering zergs” thing moot. The only counters I can think of are… necromancer wells.

#3: The Guardian. Particularly, ones that spec into shouts. With shout recharges and 30% boon duration along with Vengeful, 4 guardians can easily give a group permanent retaliation with their shouts alone.

I find that these 3 are the real game changers. And sure, other classes get some perks, like staff eles and grenade engineers, and some classes get shafted royally, like warriors, but at the end of the day it is these 3 that make or break how WvW is run in the future, and sadly it is run a lot like how it is run now.

The argument against mindless zergs is only scraping the surface with these changes. What will happen with these changes is one party of the following classes will assemble, and this will be the commanding class. The commanding class will say when it is that everyone needs to huddle in order to get stealth or retaliation, and then the zerg will continue to march forward with nearly the same mindlessness that it did before. To be fair, having a commanding party that orders and mildly organizes the zerg is more thoughtful than the current swarm of locusts tactic that is used, but only just so.

Instead, a new problem emerges: with entire zerg getting boons from everyone else in the zerg, the safety in numbers effect compounds greatly. Any group that does not have substantial numbers will have less boons and less heals and less ways to defend themselves. As much as we’d like to think that a few elementalists can stand utop a hill and use meteor shower to wipe out untold masses, the fact is that it’ll never scratch them.

This problem is magnified by permanent mass stealth. With a squad of 20 people possibly around every corner, the only way to safely travel is with another squad of 20 people. Otherwise, any small group will be insta-gibbed by a larger one that happens to be stealthed. This also makes countering a large zerg impossible because you never know when one is around. The smaller the group, the less protection that retaliation provides, so massive numbers become much safer since the retaliation boon will kill off any would-be attackers.

So mindless zerg would be exchanged for a slightly less mindless zerg, and the outcome of the zerg vs. zerg battle will be determined by who keeps retaliation up better. Would this be a better game than the way it is now? I’m not to sure, really.

I would rather make a case for unlimiting only damage AoEs. Boons allow a mindless group of people to become mindlessly too powerful without a check. My concern with letting damage AoEs run amok is Necromancers, where only a few are needed to unload epidemic onto a target to cause a massive zerg to melt away. Epidemic has a 1200 casting range and a radius of 600 with no red circle and no obvious activation, and since multiple epidemics multiply conditions, a VERY large area will suddenly be poisoned and have 25 bleed stacks, ticking away 3000 damage per second.

But all that said, I am willing to give unlimited AoEs a shot. Just maybe, people aren’t competent enough to get 5 thieves together in a group. Just maybe…

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I would rather make a case for unlimiting only damage AoEs. Boons allow a mindless group of people to become mindlessly too powerful without a check. My concern with letting damage AoEs run amok is Necromancers, where only a few are needed to unload epidemic onto a target to cause a massive zerg to melt away. Epidemic has a 1200 casting range and a radius of 600 with no red circle and no obvious activation, and since multiple epidemics multiply conditions, a VERY large area will suddenly be poisoned and have 25 bleed stacks, ticking away 3000 damage per second.

But all that said, I am willing to give unlimited AoEs a shot. Just maybe, people aren’t competent enough to get 5 thieves together in a group. Just maybe…

Well thought-out analysis and I agree with your conclusion of un-limiting only the direct damage AoEs.

Even before we go that far, though, maybe we need to ask whether zerging is a symptom or a cause. I’d argue it’s a symptom of a larger problem. Namely there is no incentive given to players to do anything other than zerg. It’s currently the most effective method for farming karma, experience, and WXP. Seen in this light, zerging is merely a symptom of an unbalanced and ill-conceived rewards system.

If we could find ways to de-incentivize zerging, then perhaps the problem will self-resolve. One suggestion that has been made is to divide the WXP between all the players involved in tagging an enemy who is defeated. This leads to smaller groups being awarded more WXP for their efforts when compared to the players who are part of a zerg. It doesn’t eliminate zerging because there are other benefits to blobbing up than just the WXP; safety in numbers, for example.

All the same, it might be worth ArenaNet giving some consideration to methods for rewarding players who don’t zerg a greater amount when compared to those who do. Then there wouldn’t be a need to remove the AoE cap.

Phoenix.3416:

I’m sick of these posts now, common sense says that if they remove the 5 target limit they either nerf AOE into oblivion after 5 targets or have to buff single target damage to be worth it which would mean one hit kill single target damage.

Remove the cap in wvw and you could get instantly killed by a group of elementalists who use firestorm at the same time, dodging wont save you and you will die over and over.

Come on man, think about this before posting this kind of thread, if they buff something they have to buff everything else to match.
If i can use a spell that does 500 damage on 30 players at the same time I need to be able to do 15,000 damage to a single target per attack to balance it out for single target to be the same DPS.

But this is just stupid reply, why would you need to buff the single target dmg to match the AOE numbers?
If you do 500 dmg to 30 players you do jack kitten in dmg terms, 500 dmg is a regeneration tick, if you do 15000 dmg to a single target you kill that target.

You cant compare numbers like that, its just stupid, there are no dmg lists wich rewards players for most dished out dmg a certain time.
you get rewarded for killing players.
For AOE to be usefull for anything else then just tagging people for drops they need to remove the cap, not buff the dmg.

again who cares if 1 ellementalist can do 50.000 dmg to 100 players? it dosnt mean anything, he is not gonna kill anything faster then 1 thief targeting 1 player.

Stop throwing AOE dmg numbers VS Single target dmg numbers around like that.

If the AOE cap is removed AOE spells could finaly be used as many wants to use them as, area denial.
Single target specced players will always be more usefull when it comes to killing players.

It seems that many players actually dont mind the AOE cap to be removed just ´cause of dmg AoE skills becoming to powerful, but rather some defensive buff skills, like shadow refuge etc.

Well this is easy to counter, just make thouse skills party buffs.
Shadow refuge, can stealth your party members.
Feed back, can protect your party members etc etc.

If the AOE cap would to be removed it dosnt mean that every skill automatically will be OP, it just means that AOE skills will not be limited to 5 players a time in that area, everything else can be modified by buffing/nerfing individual skills.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I would rather make a case for unlimiting only damage AoEs. Boons allow a mindless group of people to become mindlessly too powerful without a check. My concern with letting damage AoEs run amok is Necromancers, where only a few are needed to unload epidemic onto a target to cause a massive zerg to melt away. Epidemic has a 1200 casting range and a radius of 600 with no red circle and no obvious activation, and since multiple epidemics multiply conditions, a VERY large area will suddenly be poisoned and have 25 bleed stacks, ticking away 3000 damage per second.

But all that said, I am willing to give unlimited AoEs a shot. Just maybe, people aren’t competent enough to get 5 thieves together in a group. Just maybe…

Well thought-out analysis and I agree with your conclusion of un-limiting only the direct damage AoEs.

Even before we go that far, though, maybe we need to ask whether zerging is a symptom or a cause. I’d argue it’s a symptom of a larger problem. Namely there is no incentive given to players to do anything other than zerg. It’s currently the most effective method for farming karma, experience, and WXP. Seen in this light, zerging is merely a symptom of an unbalanced and ill-conceived rewards system.

If we could find ways to de-incentivize zerging, then perhaps the problem will self-resolve. One suggestion that has been made is to divide the WXP between all the players involved in tagging an enemy who is defeated. This leads to smaller groups being awarded more WXP for their efforts when compared to the players who are part of a zerg. It doesn’t eliminate zerging because there are other benefits to blobbing up than just the WXP; safety in numbers, for example.

All the same, it might be worth ArenaNet giving some consideration to methods for rewarding players who don’t zerg a greater amount when compared to those who do. Then there wouldn’t be a need to remove the AoE cap.

This I agree to!
Zerging is the effect of having static objects giving the highest reward.
If you took away static objects point and reward factor, people would not zerg just because of that.
for exampel.
If a keep/tower didnt not reward a victory point tick but instead increased the amount of points a player gets for killing another player I think many many things would change.

you get 1 victory point for your server any time you kill a player, you get 2 victory points every time you kill a player in proximity to your servers owned static object, keep/tower.

This means that yes zerging will still happen, cause you need big numbers to claim static objects, but it would also mean that players will get be rewarded for roaming in smaller grps, covering a larger area killing players.

This also means that attacking a well deffened keep can backfire, ie if you die to much you will acctually help the deffenders side, giving them victory points for your deaths.
And this opens up a whole new area of possible server wide tactis and the use of multi targeted attacks, ie splitt up your forces to attack more towers, cover reinforcment routes etc etc.

This change would change alot in terms of www.

This is a damage cap and it exists for system design reasons.

You set a limit on the amount of damage x number of players can receive in x amount of time and that allows you to balance skills. You know that no matter how high the number of players scale, there will always be a window of time that you can activate a defensive skill and mitigate/avoid incoming damage without your entire team exploding instantly.

In teams that are of a consistent size (i.e. 10 vs 10) then you don’t need a damage cap because there is an effective player cap. But in Guild Wars 2, fighting in WvW can be any sized team against any sized team. Sometimes its ridiculous like 50 players killing 1 dude mining a copper ore node.

Then there is balancing single target damage against area of effect damage. In WvW the number of players scales far beyond what the party wide call target can support. It is therefore not realistic to call a single target damage “spike” using 5 players in 5 different parties. Spiking is pretty clumsy in this game but if they ever improve the functionality of commander squads (so they have all of the functionality of a party) then a damage cap on aoe is one of the things that will keep single target damage viable over aoe in game modes like WvW. In WvW right now, single target burst is not very effective in large scale battles. To spec for single target damage you really need to be carrying alot of team synergy/control otherwise your team is not being as effective as it could be.

Its not as simple as saying: “remove the damage cap”. You can point to games that do not have an aoe damage cap but the reality is that its a different game with a different system.

If you change something fundamental in a system, it can have far reaching consequences that are difficult to predict. Right now, there are a number of incentives to balling up lots of players, so you can’t point to DAOC or whatever. You have to look at the system in GW2.

Shout range is 600 units so this is roughly the radius in which you can share boons, venoms, cleanse conditions, auras etc.

Good positioning necessitates that you fight within a certain radius of your support players so you can receive these benefits and extend beyond that range only when you have an evade (or some other invulnerability) or some other means of reflecting/redirecting incoming damage or neutralizing your opponent’s ability to deal damage to your team (i.e. an aoe blind). That in turn is preferable to burning a heal skill when it is not necessary.

Disorganized teams in WvW can collapse precipitously because of bad positioning and poor situational awareness. For instance, a Geyser is a pretty nice heal and if blasted gives area healing but it only lasts 2 seconds. This means that if you want your team mates to benefit from a Geyser you need to tell them where you are putting it (i.e. on commander icon) and players need to be within 2 seconds run to gain any benefit from it at all.

So buff range is also tied into skill duration. You can think of distance and time as being interchangeable in many ways. If you are so far away that you cannot get to a Geyser in 2 seconds, you are strictly speaking, out of position.

The amount that a Geyser can or should heal is predicated on the amount of damage players can receive over the same time interval.

Geysers and Meteor Showers are static ground effects. You put them on the ground and they stay there for x amount of time, affecting x number of players in range. The best way to avoid taking damage from a Meteor Shower is to not stand in it over its full duration.

What about AoE damage you can use on the move like arcing melee attacks or cone attacks like Wave of Wrath?

WvW when organized is fundamentally a game of positioning and zoning. Its easier to coordinate a large number of players moving as one entity on the fly than it is to control many individual players or small teams of players that need to accomplish different goals.

You attempt to keep enemies at range where they can do no damage to you. When you go into damage range, do you so using windows of opportunity your team creates for itself. You attempt to bait out very damaging skills, forcing your opponents to waste skills that can hurt you. You create windows of invulnerability or near invulnerability where you go in with alot of boon support, stability, aegis/block chains/evasion and mass control effects to root enemies you need to take down. You create a window where your opponent cannot position themselves correctly because you have covered your weakest flanks with fields of wells, marks, wards and sanctuary bubbles meaning they cannot reach you without cost.

The system is currently designed so you can have this kind of interplay of engaging, disengaging, splitting, reforming, engaging etc. The only issue I have is that stability ignores all hard CCs and has no natural counter because multiple boon rips are limited and do not scale well in massive teams.

There is also not enough targeted boon removal. Players ball up to benefit from a chain of synergistic skill/trait relationships. For instance:

1) players stay in shout range to benefit from group swiftness, so everyone moves at the same speed. When everyone moves at the same speed, they can stay in shout range on the move without separating.

2) If they stay in shout range on the move they can benefit from permanent fury as long as the team runs the correct ratio of aura sharing eles. If you have perma fury, it allows your entire team to wear tankier gear and still maintain high crit.

3) If you can maintain high crit with tanky gear, you benefit more from on crit procs like Empowering Might, which is capped on a 1 second cooldown. Why is it capped? Because its too easy to maintain 16 stacks of might on all party members permanently using a support Guardian and this is with AoE skills like mighty blow capped to 5 players.

So you cant look at the AoE damage cap in isolation. You need to look at the rest of the system and how its connected. Changing one variable alters its relationship with another variable which produces an unintended result.

If anet wants to consider increasingly the AoE damage cap, they also need to look at AoE buff/healing cap too. Also there will have to be some method of anti AoE (in much the same way that Swirling Winds is anti projectile).

Stability I wouldn’t say is OP, its just that there is no natural counter to it until there is a method of removing it when it is covered, and it is almost always covered by boons that are reapplied quickly like Might.

There are many skills in the game that remove a specific condition. Charge! (Warrior warhorn 4) specifically removes cripple, chill and immobilize. There would need to be a method of specifically removing swiftness, fury and stability.

These are things that must be iterated and tested in small increments otherwise the integrity of the system collapses. Blizzard for example are terrible at making these massive buffs/nerfs that completely destroys skill relationships/synergy which completely ruins PvP. You keep making big changes like that and you lose track of the chain of consequences. You no longer understand how one variable affects another which affects another.

Incidentally, this is why you see guilds like Red Guard running many support Guardians and Elementalists with a mandatory minimum amount of cleanse conditions whenever possible since they are predominately responsible for giving their team unconditional freedom of movement. The correct ratio of guardians = high stability uptime = anti hard CC (area stun, knockdown, pull, launch). The correct ratio of Guardians running Pure of Voice + triple shouts supplemented by Warriors with a Warhorn and off hand dagger/staff Necros = anti soft CC (cripple, chill, immobilize). Elementalists and Guardians maintain 100% swiftness uptime. Guardians are predominately responsible for maintaining and reapplying Might which covers Swiftness, Fury and Stability making it hard to remove with single boon stack removal.

This is also the reason why guild groups such as this tend to run on their own and try to shake off pubbies or other guild groups they cannot communicate with effectively because they steal buff slots, preventing their team from having unconditional freedom of movement.

If you have unconditional freedom of movement, you can easily avoid standing in AoE damage so Meteor Shower is not a threat.

Even with a 5 person concurrent target cap on Meteor Shower, a handful of glass staff eles will completely destroy an entire Zerg that is forced to stand in a Meteor Shower for its full duration. You can see this for yourself with the current (bugged?) Leg Specialist Warriors + arrow cart since that is capable of applying more soft CC than can be cleansed over time. However, you are immobile when doing this so you can only do it safely behind a wall.

I think the problem right now is that it is very difficult to restrict absolute freedom of movement of teams that position themselves to be constantly in shout radius and that is partly due to boon removal not scaling very well against very big teams + the total absence of targeted boon removal.

When area hard CCs like static field cannot be instantly countered by 4 guardians hitting Stand Your Ground! then you will see Meteor Shower being much more deadly, without increasing the damage cap.