Not going to try to respond to all of your responses but a lot of your points about Overpower/Tactician related stuff actually being AoE benefits since they affect Dreadnaught are technically true but rely on Dreadnaught having significant enough damage that it’s both worth taking and that the modifiers actually matter. Dreadnaught’s 50% AP value is the same as it is on live where it’s not taken for AoE. There are differences from live that might make it worth taking as things stand (no longer on a choice node, and Sweeping Strikes improvements may increase its value somewhat), but I don’t think that makes it much stronger overall. And things like a 15% increase to a 50% AP scaling ability is 7.5% AP which is really not that much. My main hope is just for Dreadnaught to have a strong enough baseline that those things do feel like they matter.
Several of your other points seem to suggest that the existence of Sweeping Strikes makes single target ability improvements have AoE value, but I don’t think that’s true at all. Sweeping Strikes effectively makes single target abilities “two target abilities” and while that doubles the floor on their damage in AoE situations, it doesn’t scale with the number of targets which tends to be what matters in AoE (see: every complaint about hard target caps ever). Collateral Damage does help SS improve your damage in AoE situations, but not in a way that makes your single target damage modifying talents affect that scaling. To be clear, I think it’s ok for Arms to have a niche where it’s better than other specs at very low target counts, but it also needs the ability to scale its damage with increasing target counts at a reasonable rate. And while it may even have that already, I still believe the split of talents that only improve damage on 1-2 targets vs. AoE talents is quite bad for Arms compared to most other DPS specs. That’s been a valid complaint about the spec tree in both DF and TWW, and the changes so far in Midnight don’t seem to do much if anything to address it.