Is AoE actually a problem? - Discussion Thread

#1 - Jan. 17, 2013, 6:45 p.m.

ANET devs talked in the chat/stream today (and in the recent past in blog posts) about nerfing Area of Effect abilities, which they see as a problem because there’s not a high enough opportunity cost to bring AoE, and it leads to weird things like players ignoring single target abilities even on single targets, choosing to use heavy AoE instead of stomping players in PvP, etc.

This doesn’t match my experience at all, except possibly in WvW. And I don’t see why any one should be able to safely rez a downed player in the midst of a massive zerg vs zerg, unless they take exceptional measures like popping invincibility and quickness, or having an “insta rez” utility equipped.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t really see this supposed problem at all. I see that the game has an incredibly large number of AoE abilities, and so they are basically unavoidable to use, but I don’t see people deferring on single target damage, because at the end of the day, 1v1 or killing bosses is really important to a lot of players, and even small damage advantages for single target abilities make them very attractive to use.

Am I alone on this? Are other people running into this problem of not feeling that single target abilities are not presenting a reasonable advantage in certain situations, and if so, can you provide some examples?

JonathanSharp

#133 - Jan. 18, 2013, 10:22 a.m.

Just wanted to let you guys know that we’re reading this thread.

Your logic, reasons, anecdotes and ideas are being listened to. Also keep in mind, that as I said yesterday, a skill can be a balance problem in one area of the game, but underpowered in another. That’s the nature of using one set of #‘s to balance across all areas of the game. So we’re keeping that in mind as we look at this. We may need to do different tweaks in different areas of the game.

We’re also not going to make a knee jerk reaction to this. We’re still gathering data, watching player trends, and having meetings on all possible ramifications from possible changes.

JonathanSharp

#154 - Jan. 18, 2013, 10:57 a.m.

Mirta.5029:
JonathanSharp.7094:
Just wanted to let you guys know that we’re reading this thread.

Your logic, reasons, anecdotes and ideas are being listened to. Also keep in mind, that as I said yesterday, a skill can be a balance problem in one area of the game, but underpowered in another. That’s the nature of using one set of #‘s to balance across all areas of the game. So we’re keeping that in mind as we look at this. We may need to do different tweaks in different areas of the game.

We’re also not going to make a knee jerk reaction to this. We’re still gathering data, watching player trends, and having meetings on all possible ramifications from possible changes.

thank you for the answer, it calmed me down. If you think there’s a problem with AoE in WvW, nerf it in WvW, but not PVE, because nerfing AoE in PVE when some classes already have problems would effectively kill off engineers and staff builds of mesmer, elementalist and necromancer.

No prob. Some classes have a ton of AOE, while others don’t have as much. So we’re not just going to do a blanket nerf to all AOE – that’s not fair to all classes. We’ll go on a class by class, weapon by weapon basis.

And as I’ve said, we may need to tone something down in one area of the game, but it may be totally fine in another area.

For some weapon sets, the AOE options may be too strong compared to the single target options, which is what we aim to address.