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I mean IDK about others but to me feels like the game is just too much AoE-centric right now
Recently just before S2 started I remember a patch note saying “Frozen Orb damage increased” by was it 25 or 30% don’t quite remember but regardless - “Frozen Orb should feel more on par with other Core skills for the Sorceress now”
Got me thinking that AoE has perhaps taken over too much ?, here’s my personal experience/example
I’m running a walking-arsenal Barb (DeathBlow Barb more specifically) and trying to put as much eggs in the DeathBlow basket as I can but Upheaval does not only more clear but does even more damage per target (which is something I really highly doubt should happen, especially if Upheaval is like lvl8 and DB is at lvl11)
There are also a couple of ways I think Generators could get improved to gain a bit of “endgame” power but let’s keep the discussion for “Does D4 have too much AoE” now ?, cause tbh I think it does, would probably just buff SingleTarget/low-AoE stuff by 25-30% and would nerf the AoE by about same amount
Regardless, what’s your opinion on this one ? 
No please no, no, nooooo lol
AoE will always reign supreme in ARPGs. The genre is about killing packs of monsters to get loot.
3 Likes
Unless your guy fawlkes and miss with frozen orb.
Faw kes.
RIP
AoE is fine where it’s at. Nothing wrong with a game that promotes killing millions of demons to have an efficient method to do so. Now bosses are a different story, but how do we get to said bosses? By killing everything and anything in our path. What’s the best method to do this? AoE.
If anything we need AoE on top of AoE on top of AoE. Bring back the Vanilla D2 Corpse Explosion! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, when you upgraded CE it expanded the radius, to the point you could literally kill everything on the screen plus a screen away. It was hilarious and amazing, hilazing if you will. Bring this back!
1 Like
And/or solo bosses too, which was a good reason to have a mix of higher dps single target skills and aoe skills.
This aint no MMO where we have to avoid breaking dazes yet. The issue is when this game makes single target DPS a meta for tier climbing
I’m not sure when it happened exactly but game has been made a lot easier - far too easy imo - everything just instantly blows up around you now aoe or not.
2 Likes
Thats the D3 creep
20 chars
We all get this but does not mean should be over-emphasized
A skill that is designed to EXECUTE (albeit self-refreshing on hit) should do more damage than an AoE skill that’s designed to be more spammable in general
Like - there are layers (or at least should be) even to this tbh
A big problem from the beginning has been burst AOE. I don’t know how this became popular, but it used to be that AOE came at the cost of single target damage. It was a tool for crowds of weaker enemies, or sometimes had a snare/cc component that would help with somewhat stronger enemies. For high single target damage you needed to use a single target or otherwise more narrow scope skill. Abilities that take up 1/4 to the entire playable area shouldn’t chunking you for half your health unless you weren’t wearing any gear. Even then, dots and AOEs shouldn’t be essentially or literally one-shotting you outside of very rare circumstance. You should die from a bulk of damage from multiple sources.
Back in the first Diablo one acid dog wasn’t a big deal. Five weren’t a big deal. 40 could be a nightmare if you weren’t ready. Succubi weren’t a big deal a couple at a time, but when there were 20 of them and some melee dudes crowding you it was a potential recipe for a bad time. Unless you were batting way out of your league, nothing one-shot you in the original Diablo. There are obviously a ton of improvements to the original formula, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things to be gleaned from the original game.
They tried low density less AOE content and nobody liked the walking simulator that it turned out to be.
AOE is fine, density is king, mowing down hordes and hordes of demons is the game here.
AoE supremacy will always happen when enemy density and layering are not in check. It’s also not just an ARPG thing. It’s any game. Warframe has the same problem.
Path of Exile and Warframe made the same mistakes in that regard but if you look at early D2 pre-synergy patch with weapon swapping and the use of multiple main skills this had not yet become a cemented concept in the eyes of ARPG players.
In fact the two strongest classes in Diablo 1 are Warrior / Rogue. Both single target.
are you new to arpgs? It’s all about aoe in all of them.