How about we remove it now, it was a nice experiment but yeah it sucks.
21 Likes
No AoE cap is unrealistic. Being able to do identical damage to an infinite amount of targets is fun, but makes little sense. Especially with melee AoE.
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Unrealistic? That’s how the game was before, or the cap was so high you didn’t even notice, so no it’s not unrealistic.
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You think it’s realistic to swing a sword into a crowd and do the same damage to all targets regardless of how many there are? The current model of diminishing returns best reflects what would happen in actual practice.
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I disagree. When I rain down hellfire from the sky it pretty much damages everybody equally.
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I mean this isn’t supposed to be REAL it’s a fantasy RPG, can I hop on a flying horse and cruise through the sky in reality, nope. It’s magic so I’m sure it could do a lot of things.
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9.1.5 called, the AoE caps were removed in that patch.
In MoP there was a soft-AoE cap of 20 targets. Beyond 20 targets you dealt reduced damage.
In Shadowlands they implemented a hard cap for several abilities of 5 targets in the 9.0 patch, with other abilities having a larger cap (caster AoE in particular) and a few staying completely uncapped (like Consecration for Paladins).
In 9.1.5 they removed the hard caps, and changed all abilities previously capped to do reduced damage to targets outside of the existing caps, meaning that your AoE abilities as a Warrior, Rogue or Paladin will deal damage to all targets caught in them, but that number is reduced after the 5th target.
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Still not sure how this works.
How does the game pick which 5 take the full damage?
Say there’s 2 elites and 6 regular mobs in a pile. I have one elite targeted. I use thrash on the pack.
Will my target take the full damage and the game randomly picks 4 others out of that group of 8 to do so as well? Is there any way to ensure that the 2 elites will take the full damage?
Personally I think they just need to go back to reinstating soft caps as well as hard caps, like they had for 13 years before Legion.
Only hard caps doesn’t work, but neither does having no caps as well. Basically at any point where there is the ability to exponentially scale with the number of enemies results in a negative interaction.
2 Likes
Thrash wasn’t changed in 9.0, it still had a soft-cap of 20 targets in 9.0 as it was a threat generation tool. Swipe had a hard cap of 5 targets. I don’t know whether or not it prioritized targets or how that prioritizing, if it was even there, worked.
They already did that in 9.1.5, also AoE caps were added in Shadowlands, not Legion. It was a 9.0 change that was changed two patches later due to feedback and Blizzard’s own numbers.
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I would like trick shots and blade flurry to be uncapped!
Are you sure? I haven’t seen Survival Hunters or Destro Locks being soft capped.
If you have a link to the details though I would appreciate being able to take a look.
Also AoE caps were added in 2004 with Vanilla WoW. I said Legion as this was the first expansion that had AoE caps removed. From Vanilla - WoD AoE all worked off being hard capped or soft capped. Ie capped by number of targets hit, or damage capped by a number of targets hit but then damage spread amongst an infinite number of enemies.
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But then we have a difference in melee and spell capabilities, and different kinds of spells.
Yep, here’s the wowhead article that talked about the 9.0 hard cap changes.
And here’s wowhead news article about the 9.1.5 change.
Than how about they make the AOE cap for all spells instead of letting some classes run wild.
3 warlocks and a druid can do some really big numbers and make content null and void, but yet throw in a paladin, a rogue, a warrior and a mage and all of a sudden you need to be careful how many you pull.
AOE capped for everyone, or AOE capped for no one.
11 Likes
I don’t really think many things were capped to where you’d notice pre Legion, you just noticed more in Legion cause of M+ and the pull as much as we can and go fast lifestyle that came with it.
A hard cap would be okay but I think it would have to be bigger like 20-30, I also think all classes should have the same cap so you don’t end up with some being just worse because they only hit 5 vs 8, etc.
Hard caps are doodoo.
Soft Caps and Square Root Caps are fine as balancing tools.
Some exist, like Blade Flurry.
That’s not how it works. Soft-caps don’t do full damage to X targets and then deal reduced after (despite that’s how the tooltips work).
There’s two methods.
The first is traditional soft-caps which just split damage between hit targets equally past the cap.
Then you’ve got square root caps which decreases the damage when you hit more targets, but at a rate where you’ll still do more DPS the more stuff you hit.
The damage Destro Warlocks do is soft-capped. The resources they generate are not. This leads to exponential DPS gain in bulk aoe since more RoF hits = more embers = more infernals (from set bonus) which = more embers = more RoF.
1 Like
To a point, eventually pulling doesn’t give you any noticeable DPS increase, but still hits the tank for full damage of one extra mob. You have to balance what classes you have with how much the tank can handle.