True, but the damage was increased to compensate. Pre-9.0 the ability dealt 30% of your attacks as damage to all targets. Now there’s a hard cap of 5 targets, but the damage is 60%
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Everything was capped pre-Legion to some degree. It wasn’t something that was noticed because we didn’t know life in any other way.
Even in Legion the change wasn’t noticed too much, and certainly M+ was a large part of it, but dominant classes like Affliction that got their AoE from unique sources probably obscured that.
It was more BfA when melee became extremely dominant due to uncapped burst AoE in M+ that exposed the issues with uncapped AoE.
Thanks for the links.
If they do truly have traditional soft caps then perhaps the abilities that are outliers (especially the burst AoE of Survival) simply need to be balanced to a different target point, maybe 15 targets.
That being said the new AoE formula being expressed in the 9.1.5 changes once again supported exponentially scaling AoE, which I believe are known as square root caps.
I’m pretty sure that patch which you linked only mentions the change from hard capped abilities to square root capped (reduced damage above X targets).
It doesn’t seem to mention any changes to abilities that were currently soft-capped at 20 targets.
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Blame M+ players specifically the MDI ones
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Yeah naturally it has diminishing returns to the point where it’s no longer worth pulling more.
But just pointing it since mechanically it is different to the standard meteor style of soft-caps.
Even if numerically the raw damage is the same, you still miss out on a lot of advantages that a soft-cap provides like increased procs or resource generation.
Soft-caps are just better design-wise IMO.
I think they should stop balancing with the goal of making certain specs worse than others against X amount of targets. Always assume M+ is 10+ targets unless you make the dungeons extremely boring and restrictive. Balance everyone for 10+ evenly.
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I agree, but I’ll also take double the damage and a target cap honestly.
i hit everything no matter how big the tank pulls cluster aoes for life 
And much easier to balance.
Better balance points and increased interactions is always a win.
In a perfect world, yes. But that brings on the situation of BfA.
When all things are consistent how damage is dealt, ie the damage profile, then becomes the determining factor.
That’s why melee was so oppressive in BfA, being able to deal all your AoE in a short burst is a much better damage profile than doing the damage over a longer period of time, even if it’s more consistent.
That’s why historically (until Legion and the great uncapping) melee abilities had harsher target restrictions than delayed AoE like abilities such as Blizzard.
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Closest 5 take full damage.
They fixed that like 2 patches ago
Can we un-square root eyebeam while we’re at it? It used to be a good aoe button, now you need a legendary for that to be true.
Removing the AOE cap will fundamentally change the way M+ is done. Doing this means that tanks don’t really tank anymore and healers don’t really heal. You go back to a Kiting meta where your tank is just running around back and forth through ground effects. Your healer is also just doing damage, because the tank is either successfully kiting -or- instantly dead. So the healer is only there for magic dispels and bosses.
It’s not really a fun way to play the game. Also many of the AOE rotations are extremely boring. Usually 1 button + a maybe a couple buff cds.
So who would be having fun? It might be cool for like a couple dungeons, but it’s going to get super boring very very fast.
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Like I can understand their intentions behind it but for the specs they wanted to help they just made those worse, while not hampering the offenders. Also there was no reason why the aoe cap had to function within legacy or against mobs of 10 levels or more. I did 1 island pre-9.1.5 and jfc it was horrible. Took like 2-3 times longer than back in bfa just cause that one change.
This is a fantasy game…
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It’s ironic saying this because the game always had various forms of aoe cap until Legion.
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AoE caps should be removed and dps should be balanced around both single target and infinite target aoe. With tweaks and balancing done weekly.
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I’m all for diminishing returns but lets not limit how many targets get hit
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Yes, lets clear dungeons one mob at a time. Now just let us have them line up one by one and we do it in a few days instead of an hour or whatever. 
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i agree, nerf melee aoe
I always read posts like this like a small child asking why we can’t stop for McDonalds at 15:00.
You’re not considering the implications of uncapping every AoE move. It serves a purpose. The diminishing returns caps are probably the best overall compromise.
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