I don’t get why waste valuable time futzing around on old content when they’re supposed to be feverishly slaving away on the new expansion. Its a waste of resources and time. There’s literally a handful of weeks left before 9.0 pre expansion and everything gets stat squished and the content gets sunset.
The same reason as the GCD change in BfA.
To artificially slow combat in some way, shape, or form instead of fixing the design issues.
In this case, not designing mobs that punish people for just slamming their face as hard as they can upon their AoE buttons in M+.
And it’s funny.
The largest offenders of ungodly pulls are still going to be good at it, just a bit less, meaning classes that can’t abuse stuff like epidemic or this new damnation cleaving from spriests I’m hearing about are going to be taken over others more often just because it’s gonna come out on top.
At least.
That’s my tinfoil hat theory.
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Blizzard put in large packs of mobs that require AoE to mow down in a timely fashion. Blizzard was then shocked, just shocked that players with better AoE abilities were chosen over those without. This is their solution.
It’s not a good solution.
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Yes I’m just saying that the way they’ve done the aoe cap doesn’t make sense. It does literally nothing to remove a meta, it just shifts it and will honestly probably make it tighter
This is not the reason, he’s just trolling.
The M+ round-table folks already speculated on this. Blizzard is likely trying to make “specialist” DPS. This class is good for 1-2 target, this class is good for 4-5 cleave, this class is good for uncapped AE.
People are saying this changes nothing but that’s not true at all.
If class X is best at cleave, he’ll be really good in bolstering weeks, whereas class Y that has uncapped AE will be good in weeks where you can do big nut pulls.
I remenber Ion saying in one interview that AOE caps would help with balancing classes…
Don’t quote me on that. I do not agree with it either and I’m not sure how capping some classes and leaving others without it can somehow help but shrug Blizzard is famous for thinking something is a problem and then fixing said problem even when it really wasn’t an issue. (Example: GCD)
Unholy + the gcd change + the new aoe cap. This is going to feel aweful. 
I know people who watched the MDI are probably losing their minds over Unholy AOE and wanted that brought down but man does that take a very skilled and coordinated tank to pull off, you won’t be seeing that in pug M+s ever.
I’m curious how they’re gonna balance/fix wound popping now, because if you’re spreading them out in a group and SS in D&D and it doesn’t hit the mobs with wounds that’s going to feel like absolute crap.
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Don’t worry. people in the MDI will soon be whining about Affliction uncapped AOE instead.
then after they get capped they will whine about Balance, then about the next…
soon everyone will be capped like Unholy and we will be all miserable together.
like family <3
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Exactly this. I mean, are they going to do anything about our single target? Unholy is good for one thing and thats getting neutered. Dnd not hitting all targets is real bad. On top of that we have a good 15 seconds before we even really get to dps.
If they’re going to keep adding stuff like this then some specs need to be reworked.
Seems simple enough to me.
I can see your reasoning. I do not agree hard capping AOE is the correct way to make that.
I also have to admit I do not trust Blizz balance team enough for it to work.
But I still thank you for helping me understand what could be the potential benefit of it.
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I agree with you here. I also agree that having no AE at all leaves major gaps in the kit for people who want to farm old content. Having some kind of “really bad but technically exists” AE option for certain classes can help. Magma Totem on Shaman was this for a while - it’s really bad, but at least it technically existed so that Shaman could kill tons of mobs at the same time for older/casual content.
I’m not going to hold my breath that they’ll fix any of that, it’s been like … 2 months since we’ve seen any DK changes for Shadowlands? Either they’re doing a massive rework and haven’t gotten it to a point to release for feedback or they think it’s fine and we’ll have another expansion of pointing out GCD bloat and dead DK talent problems.
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that was intended with beguiling, specifically the mobs you had to STDPS down paired with the bosses was supposed to be enough to bring more ST oriented classes.
that didn’t happen. people will always take the most AoE specs and make them work in other niches. that’s just how M+ goes
for raiding, on the other hand, I can see it work
i do really believe this is more about the game engine though. i think everything else is lip service.
The difference is that you didn’t have AE caps at that point. All DPS classes were largely in the same pot with slight differences, and some were just better than others.
Blizzard has more levers and knobs to tune by creating this segmentation.
Its not. MDI and m+ are the reason i bet.
These people don’t know what they’re talking about so take it from me
Basically we’ve had a huge inflation of AoE skills so it’s become harder to balance because standard practice is to pull hella stuff and nuke it all at once
If your class doesn’t have insane spammable AoE options they fall behind
So the choice they had to make was nerf AoE or buff the other classes AoE which would result in every class dishing out insane AoE damage to compete
They went with the option to limit it mainly with spammable AoE attacks
Some monk decided to make a hyperbolic video to highlight the issue of farming old world content and turned people who don’t exactly know how the system works now into a tail spin
I posted this in a thread yesterday, but pretty informative google doc here
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MtoLVx_dxKPf4Wjn1S6aQX7_dvc3errKZnX-HZxj2Qg/edit#gid=0