So, lemme preface this by saying: this isn’t meant to be a groaning “ugh, why” sort of question or a bait post, it’s a genuine curiosity of mine due to missing the period of the game when these were introduced.
Why do some AoE spells have hard target caps (e.g.: “maximum 5 targets”), others have soft caps (e.g.: “deals reduced damage on more than 5 targets”), and some precious few have no cap at all?
Would appreciate any insight on this, especially as to why the disparity between hard, soft, and no cap exists.
Some spells are designed to do damage to literally everything around you.
In theory, this is a balancing reason. It allows different spells/specs/classes to excel at different things. ( ST, AE, Cleave, Etc) In practice, it doesn’t typically work out as well as we’d like.
Because they need to pad out the time a dungeon takes for their mythic dungeon invitational e-sport.
So they ruin the game for the rest of us to achieve it.
It sounds reasonable enough. Though now a follow-up question: why not just implement soft-caps across the board with much smaller incremental gains after hitting a certain number of targets? (and, of course, diminishing returns on resource gains, or even just hard cap that, i.e.: only up to X targets trigger Blizzard’s CDR)
I dunno, I guess multi-target spells being limited never really made perfect sense to me. Limiting something to just cleaving two targets at a time
Though I’m the kind of person that would love to have Splitting Ice say “Ice Lance now creates secondary lances that strike all enemies nearby your target, each dealing 80% of normal damage. Damage of Ice Lance is reduced when hitting more than 2 targets” (with only, like, a 2% actual damage gain per target past it and tremendous falloff on Glacial Augments effectiveness) and wants Chimera Shot to be Trick Shot compatible just so I can see like 20+ bouncy arrows.
Swear on my honor that that’s a coincidence. I don’t know who Faxmonkey is; Mage has just been my main since Legion. I was a Shadow Priest main before that xpac.
Okay, so, in keys you generally want to push as much as you can handle then blow it up with aoe. This is often the most efficient thing. The devs didn’t like that, so they added a bunch of aoe caps, nerfed aoe, etc.
Which…was bad. And unfun. For everybody.
Big, scary pulls (provided you stop enough mechanics) should be fine, but in their philosophy they decided that they wanted people doing stuff slower or something.
Faxmonkey was a mage in vanilla. He was the first to popularize taking advantage of the no target cap AOE to farm large quantities of mobs. In vanilla, gold was very hard to come by. Outside of one time quests, you have to farm mobs and vender things. Essentially all gold in the economy came from one time quests and mass farming of mobs.
Faxmonkey made a video demonstrating how to lock down and AOE farm sections of zones at a time and broke the economy.
Because casters were being left behind by dhs and other melees spamming AOEs like no tomorrow and doing crazy damage, while casters had channeling time for every AOE spell weakening them in AOE damage. So we melees got nerfed with caps.
In general I believe abilities or specs that are aoe capped are badly designed and should be scrapped and re designed. Outlaw, Fury and Marksman feel awful in dungeons where you pull big.
And recently in classic wow they added nerfs to stop this method altogether by making mobs immune to CC after a while too. That means mages go poof into the shadowlands as soon as the slow has no effect.
Have specs that aren’t as good on HUGE packs, but are good or great on small or medium packs.
It’s kind of a matter of design philosophy. Every spec cranking out unreal aoe damage isn’t really ideal, and it was meant to be a bit of a choice, kind of like having more single-target, more crowd control, more defensives, whatever.
How it was implemented? Maybe also not that great.
A lot of AoE abilities are actually strong not because of the damage they do, but because they put a dot on the targets they hit, or generate resources or whatever.
An example I can think of off the top of my head.
Heart Strike (Blood DK) hits up to 5 targets in death and decay. They also get extra RP for each target they hit (with a talent that increases it). If they could cleave infinitely, Blood DK’s would be able to instantly spread the Kyrian ability to infinite mobs, and RP cap off a single heart strike.
This is basically why the old Fire and Brimstone (RIP in Peace ) got axed. You can tune damage easily, but resource gain or procs is a much thornier proposition.
) got axed. You can tune damage easily, but resource gain or procs is a much thornier proposition.