Guild Wars 2

Alilinke.7690:

Vissarion.6509:

Q: Elaborate your plans for changing AoEs

• If your skil does 10 damage to a single target, if you have another skill that have the same opportunity cost but deals 8 damage to 5 targets, the AoE skill is better – we don’t want you to use AoE skills on single target mobs.

Too bad I, as a staff ele can’t switch to single target.

This is what I don’t get. Do they not recognize how they designed their classes and weapons sets?

Exarthious.5792:

There is no reason any AoE ability should do more to a single target, than a single target ability. You shouldn’t even argue that, ever.

What you should be trying to get them to do, is make it so that our AEs hit MORE targets, say 15, instead of 5.

But like all MMOs, the majority who play the classes who’re getting changed will fight tooth, and nail against the change, without offering up better alternatives, that are more reasonable.

Many classes have only a handful of single target skills. This isn’t WoW where you pick and choose based on the target or situation. You use the handful of skills you have as they come off cooldown and that’s it.

For instance, and elementalist doesn’t use an AoE skill against a single target because it does good damage (in fact most of their AoE skills do mediocre single target damage), they use an AoE because that’s is literally what 90% of their arsenal consists of.

dreztina.4820:

If anet handles this poorly, which is fairly likely, this change could very well be the end of competitive play in wvw. All hail the zerg.

This is my estimation as well. The idea is completely counter to what makes WvW enjoyable. If smaller well coordinated groups can no longer use terrain and choke points to utilize AoE and outplay larger groups, it will just be a god awful zerg trainfest.

CETheLucid.3964:

I can only hope that this nerf in damage for PvP’s sake is compensated by tweaks in PvE.

This, and that the viability of AoE is left intact in general. Yes, It does need a nerf. The video demonstrates that irrefutably.

Though I hope staff and AoE will remain viable in WvW and PvP. That’s all I can ask as an elementalist that does a little bit of everything (PvE, WvW, little PvP now and then).

I don’t agree at all. That video is a testament to why it should remain the same. I absolutely love that 4 well played and clever players can take on that many bad players and come out ahead. That’s a fantastic thing. The larger Zerg always winning is god awful boring.

Zantetsuken.9051:

This isn’t really relevant. If you increased the 4 to 30 so it was even numbers, and then looked at the AoE damage, that is where the problem lies. Guilds are using culling and AoE damage to wipe out large groups in seconds before they even know what hit them.

Like it or not, that causes players to quit, because that kind of combat isn’t fun. There is no fighting involved, just AoE spam followed by a long run back from the Waypoint.

This change, if it goes far enough, will make combat more involved and enjoyable.

The thing that’s likely to cause people to quit is sweeping nerfs to their classes when 80+% of their damage is AoE based. Nobody complains about AoE, they complain about getting mutilated by a thief in the span of 2 seconds.

Too many classes are AoE heavy with very weak single target options. You can’t just nerf AoE on a broad scale and expect good things to come from it. If the goal is to enrage a massive portion of your player base, that’s a good way to do it… especially when most of the community complaints in PvP revolve around things like thief single target burst damage.

It’s not enough problem that they should be focusing on it , they are playing with fire as some of their class designs are almost entirely AoE centric and have really poor single target options; and they are liable to make a lot of folks extremely upset.

I know a more important aspect to much of the community is actually overbearing single target burst damage, (aka thiefs). I don’t quite get how Anet has keyed in on AoE as being a bigger problem when almost nobody actually complains about it.

It just doesn’t seem like a smart change to me. I don’t see very many people coming away from that update without having a really bad taste in their mouth.