New School AOE vs. Old School AOE

#0 - May 17, 2009, 4:57 p.m.

There have been several topics about this before, but they've all fallen off the screen many /moons ago with the exception of the FOK thread, which seems to be getting a lot of QQ attention. I don't want this to be a QQ thread like many of these turn into--"ZOMG, I can't keep up with [class I don't like]'s AOE! Nerf!" I do, however, not understand what the philosophy from Blizzard is on this.

It used to be that AOE was given exclusively to Warlocks and Mages and required very strong mana support to sustain, and it still does. I completely agree that it was too strong a mechanic for only 2 classes to have (I'm ignoring cleaving melee abilities right now). It required you bring x amount of mages and Warlocks to certain boss fights, or to simply speed up trash pulls. I agree giving AOE to more/all classes in some way or another is a good thing.

What I don't understand is the philosophy behind the new vs old AOE mechanics. Using a fairly gimmicky AOE rotation of Living Bomb, Flamestrike (Rank 9), Flamestrike (Rank 8), Blizzard, repeat, I can say I do very solid AOE damage on any sort of sustained AOE fight. However, it pretty much requires the stars to align. Flamestrike has a horribly small damage radius and often by the time you get the cast off, the Tank has had to move the mobs due to environmental damage or other factors.

The new mechanics such as FOK, Mind Sear, and the DK multi-target disease and other AOE abilities are very friendly to mobile AOE. I feel the numbers, for the most part, in AOE DPS are fair. However, I simply can't keep up in many practical scenarios. Mind Sear particularly bugs me because its mechanic is essentially a mechanic the Mage community has been asking to be implemented on Flamestrike for about 3-4 years.

Mana cost is the other thing that rubs me the wrong way. Once again, in old school philosophy, you were forced to make a decision regarding AOE--was it worth the high mana price? Were there really enough mobs in place to warrant tearing through your mana pool? All of the new AOE mechanics are either very renewable resources or very light on mana per second. Mind Sear is only 216 MPS (mana per second), excluding Shadow mana reduction talents and haste. To contrast that, Blizzard is approximately 302 MPS, Flamestrike is 326 MPS, Rain of Fire is 274 MPS, Seed of Corruption is 655 MPS (ouch), and Hurricane is 283 MPS. Most of the old abilities are about 50% more expensive than their new school counterpart. Of course you can argue that Warlocks don't care due to Life Tap, but that's ultimately more burden on raid healing.

/discuss

EDIT:

Also, threat generation is pretty incredibly high on AOE for pures as compared to Hybrids, but that's more generally speaking. It does, however, greatly hinder practical AOE DPS.

TL;DR: Why do classes who just received their AOE spells in WOTLK have an inherit advantage?

#19 - May 17, 2009, 8:22 p.m.

Our older design was that warlocks and mages were the kinds of AOE. We've backed off that because it's just not a very fun niche. To be "the best" at something implies you're second best at other things. If that is not the case, then mage and warlock are just the best damage classes because they are tied for everything while also being the best at one thing. So then the design needs to become something unsatisfying like mages and locks are the best at AE, but not as good at single-target, or not as good at staying alive, or not as good on long fights. That technically gives everyone a role, but we found it wasn't a fun role for the mages and locks.

Our LK design is that single-target dps matters the most, because that's the most important to players, and things like AE, crowd-control, survivability, etc. are all "good enough" for everyone. There isn't a "best at AE" -- it's just something all classes do. You don't park the rogue when you have a high AE fight and you don't park the mage when you have a high single-target fight. AE matters on almost all of the Ulduar fights to some degree, but single-target dps still probably matters more.