Guild Wars 2

Can the community explain why my AoE skills as a necromancer are limited to 5 people. So if 10 people are in my AoE, why only 5 get hit? Isn’t that really too much of a limiter? I don’t agree that people can bunch up and only 5 get hit. If they are in my area of effect, why are only 5 people getting hit?

With all the dodge abilities and blocks people have, why are you allowed to limit the number to 5 people? It is most noticeable in WvW, and in my opinion drastically impacting AoE class play.

Well some people say: its to limit some class (with huge damage/spike) to wipe entire army. (looks good right ? Yep if it is for AoE without warning (big red circle), but no if it is for AoE with warning).

I totally get why they are doing it. Basically they are trying to prevent situations where AE rules everything. I am just not entirely sure that 5 is the right number given that siege hits everything. For example, one player in a bunker build can out AE someone geared and traited for AE as long as he/she/it is on an arrow cart… and sacrifice nothing open field.

Necromancer marks and wells are so visible it’s ridiculous (which makes them easily avoidable). That said, if 20 people can port in off a portal, then I should be able to hit 20 people with my Aoe mark/well.

Ok, perhaps not everyone, but it is so easy to avoid damage, than limited to a person who dodges my abilities, then severely limits my utility as a player.

Gryph.8237:

Necromancer marks and wells are so visible it’s ridiculous (which makes them easily avoidable). That said, if 20 people can port in off a portal, then I should be able to hit 20 people with my Aoe mark/well.

I agree with you there. While there are some clever uses for portals, I do think it should have it’s limits.

Meh, I feel they should up the limit from 5 to 8. This would be able to counter parties that rely on necro minions and ranger pets to specifically counter AoE damage when they stack up, while still not allowing 5-mans to destroy a zerg with an AoE spike(But do 60% more AoE damage thanks to the 3 extra targets).

8 is used because spvp uses 8v8s in non-tournament games. A good example of why 8 isn’t arbitrary and would be useful.

If they didn’t WvWvW would look like this :

Glue shot + Meteor shower —-→ everyone dead

5 targets are not enough but not sure what the right number is maybe 10?

I actually feel this is the worst thing they have introduced since the game launched. It is the worst thing they have done, or could do. It particualrly is deadly in all forms of combat…and is just plain evil.
In wvw zergs are common place. AOE is how you deal with large groups. Zergs are like sheep, if they are getting hit they scatter. Scattering helps alleivate pain on the defenders. This helps make the battle more even. A zerg of 50 now is unstoppable. 10 people simply can’t lay out enough AOE to do anything to them.
kittenrther more along in WVW. This cap severly limits our abbility to discourage zergs, and zergs won’t scatter if they know that 10 of them in that AOE makes them invicble. They are invincible becuase the damage from the AOE will only strike five targets, so the 10 in the circle are easily perfectly safe. SO no…This encourages players to exploit the system and just stand in damage becuaes they have no fear of the red ring.

That is bad. For everyone!

In PVP its based on an 8V8 model..which ive fought soooo many kittenll scale battles in PVP…all 8v8. It’s really important to instil fear and get opponents to move “AROUND” the aoe….again its like herding ship. Which is a very important tactic. Becuase if you can’t get players to move without direct force, they are going to trench in. Makeing it impossible to get them out of the circle.

Then we come to PVE which ive often been in massive battles against 10+ little spiders and etc. These little buggers hurt…and it’s very hard to KILL THEM ALL WHEN ITS CAPPED AT 5!

*Not to attack you Mumu…But Really that’s not even a good combo.

As an Ele, Meteor Shower only strikes at random locations inside of the AOE. Meaning if your imobalized there is no garuntee the meteor will hit you. You could just stand in the aoe the entire time and there is still a chance that you will never be hit by a single meteor. Even if an Ele uses lava font, or eruption…The aoes are incredibly tiny…So it’s not going to hit all 50 of the zerg…unless they all bunched up into one single little tiny circle.

Also all classes have condition removal. it’s not impossible to get out of Immobalize. which only lasts one second. The cripple only lasts 6 seconds max. The Ranger longbow has volley…Which AOE cripples, damages…So again…It’s not a true tactic. Singe the Ranger can do that all on his own….

The five-man limit hurts only the player and helps nothing in my honest heart-felt oppinion. It is the most evil thing in the world and should be burned with fire-fire-fire….It’s not hard to avoid red circles…and No classes AOe is strong enough to destroy 50 people on there own. Even Ele’s are not that strong. It’s truely a terrible mechanic.

You can only hit 5 people, but 50 can hit you at once.

@frostflare
There are some class which strong enough to destroy 50 (or if not destroy, crippled) so hard. In addition, these class long range AoE skills do not have red circle (which is deadly). This type of AoE skills should be limited. But I agree with non AoE cap for all skills which have red circle (as it has a warning for player to move) or low range line skills (except melee attack).

I am sorry, but Anet has totally screwed up siege warefare, and large scale combat due to their limits on player damage via limit to 5 enemies being targeted. So, 10 people behind the wall facing 30, cannot possibly hold because those 10 people are limited in their damage output, and cannot discourage. yet hey, you can portal those 30 in/out and there is no restriction. I don’t get their logic, at all. Oh boo hoo you dont want a player to damage all 30 idiots standing in one huge cirlce? have you seen the current strategies, people just stack on each other so aoe damage only hits 5, and if multiple AOEs hit, it hits 5 diff people, so in reality, its little damage.

Sorry ANET, don’t agree with you on this one at all. YOu have MADE zergs stronger and stronger, and skill is entirely removed. 10 skill players, are limited in damage, while 50 idiots can take anything. The only counter, is to have more players on your side. Skill… not needed, numbers…. needed.

good job

I’ve never witnessed one against 50 and win. Aoe like Meteor shower…Really I think should have the limit impacted only on each Meteor(since it strikes at random locations each..and has no real aim).

The only thing I remeber as being particularly exploitable was rangers and the barage. Which i’ve faced 10 rangers who just set up “zerg” aoe of barrage. Which it’s the damage+cripple that really makes that skill OP. Not how many it targets.

I am least happy with this change becuase it Encourages zergs, and removes one of the few tactics to deal with them in WVW. In wvw…Zergs rule undoubtably. Even in a very deffensive situation…like in the keeps. Without a heavy amount of seige(which has no cap), we can’t deal with zergs. Wvw is unblanaced by nature, but numbers should never be the only factor in determine wins. That is flawed…

Also they could remove the cap in PVE, becuase some big fights are incredibly hard to do with only so little targets.

*I loled out loud at your post covenn…Mainly becuase its the most true statement in gw2 at the moment! Have you ever sat on a wall and been struck by 15 ranger arrows all at once? I have…it is not fun! lol

Gryph.8237:

Can the community explain why my AoE skills as a necromancer are limited to 5 people. So if 10 people are in my AoE, why only 5 get hit? Isn’t that really too much of a limiter? I don’t agree that people can bunch up and only 5 get hit. If they are in my area of effect, why are only 5 people getting hit?

With all the dodge abilities and blocks people have, why are you allowed to limit the number to 5 people? It is most noticeable in WvW, and in my opinion drastically impacting AoE class play.

has no sense at all we know, but the defenders are the ones who ‘’cant get out of the void zone’’ or think an elementalist will be able to wipe 50 people at gates when is defending

kinda funny honestly, but the real reason was because anet saw it as logical a cause of the five party max size, thats kinda funny too

it is poor, flawed logic. Sometimes, I don’t get where they are coming from and they are so bloody biased. The game mechanics, logic employed by devs coupled with the lack of communication, and poor optimization is losing my interest fast. But hey, lets all just play theives, because they are single target masters. In fact, lets make wvw, just like pvp… where you have thieves, mesmers, warriors and guardians only. Guild wars? no. 4 class wars? yes

Gryph.8237:

I am sorry, but Anet has totally screwed up siege warefare, and large scale combat due to their limits on player damage via limit to 5 enemies being targeted. So, 10 people behind the wall facing 30, cannot possibly hold because those 10 people are limited in their damage output, and cannot discourage. yet hey, you can portal those 30 in/out and there is no restriction. I don’t get their logic, at all. Oh boo hoo you dont want a player to damage all 30 idiots standing in one huge cirlce? have you seen the current strategies, people just stack on each other so aoe damage only hits 5, and if multiple AOEs hit, it hits 5 diff people, so in reality, its little damage.

Sorry ANET, don’t agree with you on this one at all. YOu have MADE zergs stronger and stronger, and skill is entirely removed. 10 skill players, are limited in damage, while 50 idiots can take anything. The only counter, is to have more players on your side. Skill… not needed, numbers…. needed.

good job

You cant kill 30 people with 10? Ive done it with 6…

Also not all AoE damage is limited, and not all skills are limited in the number of enemies they can affect.
For example, siege is pretty much unlimited. Reflect skills will block any number of projectiles, and warding will prevent ANY number of enemies from crossing.

Unlimited AOE damage would be a perfect counter to those stacking a zerg for an impending portal bomb.

Gryph.8237:

it is poor, flawed logic. Sometimes, I don’t get where they are coming from and they are so bloody biased. The game mechanics, logic employed by devs coupled with the lack of communication, and poor optimization is losing my interest fast. But hey, lets all just play theives, because they are single target masters. In fact, lets make wvw, just like pvp… where you have thieves, mesmers, warriors and guardians only. Guild wars? no. 4 class wars? yes

The only games that allowed unlimited AoE targetting would end up grinding to a complete stop when a huge force started getting AE’d in a chokepoint. The sheer amount of calculation and bandwidth requirement pretty much murdered servers in past MMOs.

For example if AOE was unlimited: You cast an aoe spell that hits 60 people. the server has to calculate in each tick the total damage to apply to each person, send that information to the person recieving the damage and the person sending it, plus combo information to anyone interacting with the combination field. The damage is based off armor value of the person and the attack level of the person, plus a few random proc rolls that its got to do for each damage tick. So if AOE was unlimited that one spell per tick has a huge amount of calculation to do, and bandwidth to consume. Now imagine a 60 on 60 fight where one force of 60 is concentrated for a second getting hit by all 60 enemies aoe’s. Sure they are going down fast, but during that second its going to lag out completely as the servers CPU will start stressing under that immediate load. It might take the server 10 seconds to do all the calculations it needs to do for 1 second of player activity.

Thus an AoE cap.

Siege is exempt for a couple reasons, 1, its limited in its placement, 2 there is much less calculation to do, as its only based on the opponents armor, there are no proc effects to consider. But even with this we still get lagstorms in sieges where all 3 servers are fighting over the center of stonemist.

The AoE cap has to exist or Anet will have to implement its own form of Time Dilation.

If you want to get an idea what this lag would be like, if you were there in Warhammer when there were lots of people attacking keep or citadel and a bunch of wizards would drop huge aoe’s into the zerg coming up the ramp… LAG… LAG… LAG… everyone dead.

I wonder if it’d be hard for ANet to disable the limit on AoE damage/heal/buff targets for a week …

If they can tryout culling, why not this :P

After giving it a try, people who currently speculate about how much better it would
make the game would finally have a reference to see how it actually worked out.

Anyways, as it is now … i think we should stop calling the Abilities AoE’s since they
do not affect everyone in that area of effect ….

Let’s call them random 5 abilities.. that goes for the healing, boon application. Oh and random 5 includes pets, and dorkus necro minions

YES, this is so good. Necro has some serious random 5 abilities, that make “one of the lowest played classes” even less played, because the necro depends on AoE, and is probably the most impacted by the AoE/Random 5 limitation.

If there was no limit every class would have only one or at most 2 builds that r worth anything. Rams would become almost useless as would arrow carts. A well timed aplace hammer daze and with meteor shower and barrage could wipe 20 people. How would it be fair for 3 people to wipe 20 in 3 secs with no siege

Terribad Idea.
The skill in WvW is in organised warfare. If you want your individual skills as a class acknowledged, go play spvp. Sorry to disappoint here, but in real warfare your ‘rambo’ character doesn’t exist.

Scenario if aoe was not limited: 10, 3 well power necro’s voip up, go around, insta kill everything.
Players take down gate. They either move in 1 by 1 and get picked off, or all charge in and all insta die, in the bottle neck that is the gate. 10 wells, all insta-spawned at the same time, will kill everyone, no matter ‘ohh but its a big red circle’, its a bottle neck, hard to see the ground, and even with lightning reactions, the first tick of each well will hit.

Bad idea is bad. Keep limit at 5.

Also, to the person saying 10 players couldn’t take out 50 players, well duh. its 10 v 50, or a 1 v 5 in spvp terms. even the most skilled pvp’ers cant pull that off against semi smart players.
BUT, that point aside, 10 players, each hitting a 5 different chars = 50 people being hit. obv some would stack, but the more stack the better.

Bad idea is Bad.

The only way this could be reasonable, if the damage output scaled with the number of players hit. for example,
if an aoe hits 5 players, they are each hit for 1000.
if it hits 10 players, they are each hit for 500.

It’s to ensure that the zerg > all.

Limiting AOE’s really just prevents smaller groups from performing at top potential in order to win against a larger force.

AoE should be limitless in regards to the numbers of players it hits if they are in the range of the AoE simple as that.
Why on earth pander to players who CBA to dodge or even evade the ability to be AoE’d, let alone those classes that have damage reflect.
Not only will making AoE’s limitless disperse the almighty zergs but in doing so it might even fix the need for culling and rendering issues as players would be more spread out, which would allow the game engine to work wonders.
I can fully understand the limit of 5 in sPvP but really is there any need for it anywhere else in this game.
Don’t forget that even if defenders can AoE so can Attackers so really in making AoE limitless is not a benefit just for defense but also attack as well

Make skills that block/absorb projectiles absorb aoe projectile types? Strategic skill usage would offset heavy aoe barrages……..

if there was no AOE cap they would have to nerf any AOE damage into the ground or we would all have to reroll AOE classes. Right now Meteorstorm does 2-4k per tick on a Berserker geared Ele that would have to be turned down to 200-400 at the least to account for it beeing able to hit 60 people at the same time not that fun if ure only able to hit 1-3 or in PVE i would think… Games that has AOE without cap dont have AOE doing equal damage to single damage like GW2 have… People who wish to have unlimited target also should think about what have to get nerfed and how they would enjoy that…

So everyone that is complaining about zergs how r u suppose to take anything defended by 10 people? If there were no Aoe cap wvw would be so boring. Everyone would just put like 7-8 else or rangers in every tower and keep and if they were coordinated it wouldn’t matter if u sent 100 people at them they could win and not because of skill but because of the ability to spam Aoe.

Valik Shin.9027:

So everyone that is complaining about zergs how r u suppose to take anything defended by 10 people? If there were no Aoe cap wvw would be so boring. Everyone would just put like 7-8 else or rangers in every tower and keep and if they were coordinated it wouldn’t matter if u sent 100 people at them they could win and not because of skill but because of the ability to spam Aoe.

Winning through zerg forces is far worse and the antithesis of winning through skill. If people were smart then a non-capped aoe mechanic wouldn’t be an issue, but since people don’t like to dodge or use positioning to get out of the obvious red circles….

This is like raids getting constantly dumbed down because people couldn’t be arsed to DON’T STAND IN THE FIRE.

Well, the only good reason to limit AoE damage is the servers capability of handling all the calculations. However, couldn’t we at least double the limit?

These Zergs are getting ridiculous…. instead of spreading out to cover more area and avoid AoE damage, commanders ask people to huddle in one ball, as tiny as possible, to be practically invincible against any AoE skill. The logic… Ugh. Brain, freezes.
As long as opponent doesn’t have siege that is.

Braxxus.2904:

Valik Shin.9027:

So everyone that is complaining about zergs how r u suppose to take anything defended by 10 people? If there were no Aoe cap wvw would be so boring. Everyone would just put like 7-8 else or rangers in every tower and keep and if they were coordinated it wouldn’t matter if u sent 100 people at them they could win and not because of skill but because of the ability to spam Aoe.

Winning through zerg forces is far worse and the antithesis of winning through skill. If people were smart then a non-capped aoe mechanic wouldn’t be an issue, but since people don’t like to dodge or use positioning to get out of the obvious red circles….

This is like raids getting constantly dumbed down because people couldn’t be arsed to DON’T STAND IN THE FIRE.

It’s called choke points. I doesn’t matter how skilled u r if u can’t make it though a point u have to pass though u can’t cap the tower. Even if use blocks to get though it u still need to sit in the lords room and kill them as they cast more Aoe in an area that u have to stay in to cap the tower which can only b countered by mass Aoe on ur part. If u don’t believe me try to cap the bay when there r 12 arrow carts in the lords room.

Draygo.9473:

Gryph.8237:

it is poor, flawed logic. Sometimes, I don’t get where they are coming from and they are so bloody biased. The game mechanics, logic employed by devs coupled with the lack of communication, and poor optimization is losing my interest fast. But hey, lets all just play theives, because they are single target masters. In fact, lets make wvw, just like pvp… where you have thieves, mesmers, warriors and guardians only. Guild wars? no. 4 class wars? yes

The only games that allowed unlimited AoE targetting would end up grinding to a complete stop when a huge force started getting AE’d in a chokepoint. The sheer amount of calculation and bandwidth requirement pretty much murdered servers in past MMOs.

For example if AOE was unlimited: You cast an aoe spell that hits 60 people. the server has to calculate in each tick the total damage to apply to each person, send that information to the person recieving the damage and the person sending it, plus combo information to anyone interacting with the combination field. The damage is based off armor value of the person and the attack level of the person, plus a few random proc rolls that its got to do for each damage tick. So if AOE was unlimited that one spell per tick has a huge amount of calculation to do, and bandwidth to consume. Now imagine a 60 on 60 fight where one force of 60 is concentrated for a second getting hit by all 60 enemies aoe’s. Sure they are going down fast, but during that second its going to lag out completely as the servers CPU will start stressing under that immediate load. It might take the server 10 seconds to do all the calculations it needs to do for 1 second of player activity.

Thus an AoE cap.

Siege is exempt for a couple reasons, 1, its limited in its placement, 2 there is much less calculation to do, as its only based on the opponents armor, there are no proc effects to consider. But even with this we still get lagstorms in sieges where all 3 servers are fighting over the center of stonemist.

The AoE cap has to exist or Anet will have to implement its own form of Time Dilation.

If you want to get an idea what this lag would be like, if you were there in Warhammer when there were lots of people attacking keep or citadel and a bunch of wizards would drop huge aoe’s into the zerg coming up the ramp… LAG… LAG… LAG… everyone dead.

I agree, too many people miss this. GW2 is already a very gfx and cpu intensive game, with unlimited AOE w3 would just not work. IT woulds turn into a 3 min slide show at best with more then 20v20 as things try and calculate and catch up .

I also agree that it is one of the stupidest things as regards to tactics though, that the counter to aoe is to stack. That is like saying the counter to burst is to blow a skill that make you take x amount of more damage.

Draygo.9473:

The only games that allowed unlimited AoE targetting would end up grinding to a complete stop when a huge force started getting AE’d in a chokepoint. The sheer amount of calculation and bandwidth requirement pretty much murdered servers in past MMOs.

Soooo why did I never have issues with it in those MMOs?

Braxxus.2904:

It’s to ensure that the zerg > all.

Limiting AOE’s really just prevents smaller groups from performing at top potential in order to win against a larger force.

Which is at the heart of this whole debate.

Personally, I believe the status quo, that numbers matter more than skill in WvV is far better than the alternative, which would be WvW combat that is utterly beholden to smaller “skilled” groups that are able to coordinate much better than a slapped-together army.

I’m all in favor of some sort of guild v. guild arena for more high-skill battles in the 15-30 player range, but I don’t think most of the people asking for small groups to be able to dominate large groups understand what they’re asking for, or how utterly it’d destroy WvW for the majority of the population.

I can see it now, all the threads about “portals ruining the game” are gonna be " portals need to be buffed somehow"