I like the change. Puts less pressure on players to over perform in content.
Downside is moggers and the like have to spend an extra 2 minutes in an old raid or dungeon.
Just another point along the mud-wimping highway to hell that Actiblizz is roaring down.
The hard 5-target cap just feels bad and none of the āitās better for the gameā arguments are going to change my mind in light of the fact they had the soft target cap as an option.
Little-known fact: The soft AoE cap (where AoEs do full damage up to a max number of targets and then begin splitting it evenly between all targets after passing that number) originally began at 10 targets. For whatever reason it was raised to 20 targets in either WoD or Legion. It was still 20 targets in BFA.
They could have simply lowered the soft-cap to 5 targets. It reduces the total potential output of AoE which thereby would increase the risk groups would take pulling bigger (which seems to be one of the key reasons people are citing in this thread) while not making the playerās experience feel awkward and clunky.
Instead, they chose a sledgehammer change.
edit: And thereās a point to be made about damage-dealing debuffs that can be applied by AoE. In response to this, Iāll refer you to the design of the old Fire & Brimstone talent for Destruction warlocks in MoP which automatically reduced the damage of Immolate debuffs applied to affected targets that were not the primary target. They have the capability to make a much smaller soft cap work and have chosen a poorer and sometimes immersion-breaking experience in its place.
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I guess the real question at that point becomesā¦ like what? What else should we focus on in a M+ scenario? The whole point of the dungeon is to go as fast as we possibly can. What else are we supposed to focus on other than killing mobs as quickly as possible, determining which route is most optimal, and using our abilities to move as quickly as possible?
And I reiterate what I said aboveā¦ So long as the āmassive AoE pullsā come with additional risk, thereās no reason to not have it be a thing. If there was no additional risk with pulling more, then youād be completely correct. But there isā¦ With some of the pulls thereās huge risk involved which can easily cascade out of control leading to an instant wipe.
So many people seem to think that massive aoe pulls are just mindlessly hitting your aoe abilities and thatās it. Go pull all 4 packs before the first boss of KR on a +20 and mindlessly aoe. Enjoy your dirt nap while youāre at it.
All this did was lower the skill ceiling, while doing nothing to increase the skill floor.
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Theyāve said that, even with this change, large pulls will still likely be a viable strategy in a lot of situations, so they probably thought that the soft cap would not be enough.
Itās largely mythic+ that they are thinking about, I would imagine. Basically they would probably like most pulls to be done individually, but the way the percent and the timer work, there is a huge incentive to pull big.
I agree that a hard cap feels awkward (the 6th enemy is in the aoe, why wouldnāt it take damage?), but I guess they probably feel it is needed, at least for now. This type of thing gets tweaked over time and has been tweaked before, so it probably will be again.
What competitive players are doing is not the only concern here, I think, pretty clearly. They know that those players will probably pull big to some extent anyway, and that itās hard to do that at high levels.
But mythic+ is very popular at a lot of skill levels, and they probably donāt like the dynamic of giant pulls for the majority of players who are not doing it in the tactical way you are describing, or not most of the time.
And thatās rather sad. Feels a lot likeā¦ āyou think you want this, but you donātā or āthis is how youāre supposed to enjoy the game.ā
You could achieve the same end result by simply making those deadly mechanicsā¦ deadly regardless of key levelā¦ As an example, the spiders from that wrath dungeon did % based damageā¦ didnāt matter if you were in heroic ICC 25 gear or a brand new tankā¦ if you didnāt interrupt themā¦ you were taking 90% of your health in damage and were likely going to die.
As opposed to current day M+ā¦ where you can easily heal through 15+ stacks of the council fight in shrine in a +2ā¦ but reach 5-6+ stacks in a +15 and your healers going to shout at youā¦
You couldnāt even understand the argument to begin with. What do you want to argue? 
Go back to school and learn some reading and comprehension. Then, maybe, we can argue the optic again 
the absolute irony in this statement is hilarious. I think I pulled something from laughing so hard.
The same basic concern has existed before, when competitive dungeons werenāt even a thing. Wrath heroics were an awful mess by the end of that expansion, and then the early Cataclysm dungeons came across as over-tuned to a lot of players.
Itās more what they want the typical experience to be like. The way the dungeons are structured and paced. That means encouraging or de-emphasizing certain things.
They probably donāt like too many death skips being used either. Not because they think players should never do that, but they donāt want the typical experience to involve everyone running over into a corner to die.
So we got obelisks, and I would be a little surprised if they donāt try to do similar things in BfA. Since players want to move around the dungeon in a non-linear way, better to have a way of doing it that doesnāt rely heavily on awkward death skips.
Of course competitive players will probably still do some skips, which they donāt care about, itās the frequency of it.
I still donāt see that as a good reason to cap aoe at all. If someone wants to play like that let emā play. And like you said just set it for mythic+.
So they made islands so that you can pull the entire island because of no leashing. Then complained people are AOEing down too much stuff. Even when they themselves added ridiculous things like corruptions that could one shot people in arenas. They didnāt even bother adding mechanics to Mythics to make mass pulling extraordinarily dangerous
They have their head so far up their own butts they blame players for their own mistakes now.
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and last time they made mechanics that actually required any thought to them, the forums exploded in whining about how hard the game was. Iāll take this over mindless AOE anyday.
and besides, OPs point is āitās anti-funā, as if mindless AOE spam is somehow fun.
Nothing more fun to me than making a Junkwatt depot group, going there and pulling giant groups of robots to tank while the team aoes them down and we have a giant pileof sparkly corpses at the end, with the twinkly promises of what loot they have.
Itās like Blizzard doesnāt understand the psychology of their own game.
Youāre a sad, strange little manā¦
How sweet! If only you could understand the ironical topic sentence, though.
If you think mindlessly killing 1 mob at a time provides any sense of threat or engagement vs being aware of what 10 mobs are casting and playing around thatā¦ idk what to say to you
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trying so hard to sound smart.
Not everyone is desperate to prove their skill in an MMO. (In which case you should be playing CS:GO probably) They just want a powerful character they put time into hitting mobs in the face, seeing a big number. Many people just like grinding mobs and seeing the sparklies.
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Hello kitty island adventure would be a good place to start.
Complaining you donāt get easy, mindless satisfaction is exactly whatās wrong with WoWās modern game design.
Honestly Iād just ignore him. Heās done nothing but be inflammatory throughout this thread. Heās clearly trying to bait you into getting angry.
Take solace in the fact that if by some miracle heās being genuineā¦ he thinks fighting one mob at a time is more engaging then having to handle 10 mobs with separate team wiping mechanics. Hard to take someone that out of touch seriously.
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