Instead of the AOE limit, why not add a sort of enrage mechanics to the mobs ?

[Kaver]

But why though? Pulling 5 mobs is already more challenging since there are more mobs to interrupt with potentially deadly abilities and more mobs that can damage you. Why is making them enrage necessary?

Because then skilled players would still be able to pull more than 5 mobs and do damage to them all.

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Nah, Cap is fine. It stops certain classes being too dominant in AoE situations.

Would you also be okay if they introduced a cap that would stop Warlocks from being dominant in raiding?

[Super Kami Dende]

Would you also be okay if they introduced a cap that would stop Warlocks from being dominant in raiding?

yes I would.

[Gorsameth]

The best solution would be Static Damage to the hard cap Say 100 dmg to 4 targets so 400 total any targets beyond that split the damage. So for 8 targets it hits them for 50 instead of 100....and so on and so on.

FF14 version of 100% to the first 75% to the second 50% to the third and 30% to all other targets would work too.

once upon a time WoW worked like that in the past.

[Raisei]

It was added because of what people did in MDI, that it the reason.

Blizzard thinks balancing AoE around what the top 1% do during a mythic+ tournament is the right way to go about things, because a tiny amount of groups are able to pull 15 mobs + a boss and destroy everything (because of DKs), Blizzard invented M+, they created the win conditions so what the hell are competitive groups going to do? pull tons of mobs because you need to kill a certain amount then they are going to take those tons of mobs and pull a boss with them because this entire thing is timed as well.

They do this all while loading dungeons and raids with so much trash and are supersized when again the top 1% find ways to clear it as fast as possible.


Pointless change.

You are right that the root of the problem are these insane pulls in the MDI. But this is not why the change was implemented.

People are stupid. They see something on the screen and think "I can do that too!", so they carry what they saw into their own runs and they start to expect that the Tanks pull insane numbers no matter what the affixes are and then they blame the Tanks for dying or loosing aggro in that 20 mob pull with 10 different mechanics happening at once. But of course they also blame the Tank if he doesn't pull 4 groups at once.

Tanks aren't made to handle 20 mobs at once, healers aren't made to heal them to full every 4 seconds. Just because DPS are able to damage 20 mobs at once does not mean they get to demand that as a pace for the dungeon and make the life of other roles miserable.

Which is why this change was done and it is perfectly reasonable.

[n0n3]

Enrage mechanics won't help, top groups will still pull big as they will figure out ways to deal with it.
I am fine with cap since I play a warlock, it takes me about 11 seconds to setup my dots and start spamming malefic rapture. Most melees can just go between the 5 mobs, press 1-2 buttons and start AoEing.
If they would remove the 5 cap on AoE, affliction warlocks would be replaced by other melee dpsers in m+ comps.

[valky94]

or lowering damage up 70, 50, 30, 10 while above x target.

aoe caps are not a good balancing act. Blizzard with target caps... Like they nerfed themself.

any soluution is a better one

except blizzard is not hard capped, its dmg is soft capped at 20 targets, it will still hit all targets in the radius, except it will do less damage if there are more than 20 enemies

[cparle87]

The AOE capping is a typical example of 'Nerfing Fun'
Pulling a big amount of mobs (15+) and destorying them with your CC and damage cooldowns feels good! You will do everything you can to try to kill them ASAP, while still worrying that those mobs could kill the tank and than the whole group. It is fun, and it fseel great. It even makes adrenaline soaring, this is we want to experience in a game.
In 9.0, we will fight 4/5 mobs in a row, yeah, very RPG in 2020!
But the tension and excitement is gone.

Does that whole "in X year" argument have any value to it, or is it just an empty euphamism to try to assign a negative connotation to something one dislikes?

[exochaft]

once upon a time WoW worked like that in the past.

It still does in many cases, as I feel a lot of people in this thread have niche examples of hard caps w/o going into all the AoE caps that exist in WoW in Shadowlands... and many of which existed in BfA or prior expansions, they just didn't get much attention.

There are hard cap AoE's, where's a cutoff at X number of mobs. However, the damage tends to scale based upon the number of targets. An ability that lets you cleave onto 2 targets usually will hit harder than an ability that will hit 5 targets, making the 2-target cleave class do very well in two target scenarios. In this same case, the 5-target cleave class will likely catch up and exceed the aforementioned 2-target cleave class once you approach 5 targets. Now there's obviously exceptions, and classes can have multiple types of caps available to them, but in general this is how Blizz tries to balance cleave classes.

There's also soft cap AoE, as well. For example, the talent Fury of Elune has sqrt(X) scaling, where the ability will do full damage to the primary target and reduced damage to each mob based upon square root scaling of the number of mobs. Basically, the more mobs there are, the more damage the ability does but the damage to all non-primary targets decreases the more targets there are. There's also the 20/6 rules, where some AoE abilities cap out on damage at 20 targets (6 for healing). So when you AoE 21 targets and beyond, the spell will still do the same damage overall as it did at 20 targets, it'll just be split across all the target. While these may seem superior on paper to low target cleave abilities, they are generally balanced around achieving similar damage profiles when closer to their respective max targets... again, exceptions exist, but they are outliers and not necessarily the rule.

One should keep in mind that most of this target capping won't affect the vast majority of players and their experience, and it will likely only hit the upper echelon a bit. Why? A lot of abilities already had hard caps prior to Shadowlands, and almost all 'uncapped' AoE abilities already fell under the soft-cap rules prior to Shadowlands... most people just didn't notice. The problematic abilities were the ones that likely got hit the most, and what should be noted is that their ability in the ST scenarios were likely held back exactly because of these issues. Blizz is trying to go for classes/specs being good at specific scenarios while usable in all of them, potentially allowing a broader 'meta' comp to exist in the player's minds.

[Aflakk47]

-snip-

Can't wait to see the 3x balance druid clears with their still uncapped AoE and 1 button-sunfire on every mob. Glad they hit every class the same

[Kumorii]

Not sure if I posted already but eh, fuck it.

Enrage mehcanics actively punishes and makes enemies exponentially grow in power if overpulled. While AoE caps simply puts a max on your dmg output. One is easier to adjust and account for due to it being static while the former fluctuates. It's also easier to balance a cap rather than the buff enemies should get because that depends on what kind of mobs and composition of the enemy groups.

[TheRevenantHero]

AoE cap was introduced because every single M+ was the same classes because people would gather shit up then aoe it down rather than using tactics. Now they'll have to learn group management because they can't just spam AoE to win anymore.

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Not sure if I posted already but eh, fuck it.

Enrage mehcanics actively punishes and makes enemies exponentially grow in power if overpulled. While AoE caps simply puts a max on your dmg output. One is easier to adjust and account for due to it being static while the former fluctuates. It's also easier to balance a cap rather than the buff enemies should get because that depends on what kind of mobs and composition of the enemy groups.

Not to mention there are trolls who would purposely pull more to add to the enrage then use something to drop combat or just drop from group, leaving people to be annihilated.

[Amariw]

The AoE cap had too worthwhile goals.

Give casters a more generically useful niche, esp in m+ where interrupts and instant make melee so dominant in bfa. This was a good goal, overall, and i think the AoE cap was a succesful tool to achieve it.

The other goal, stated by blizz, was to make bigger pulls matter. As in, make you think that adding mobs to a single pull is more of a threat than just on bolstering weeks, and possibly for solo play. While a worthy goal as well in my eyes, the cap isn't a good tool for it, not least of which because casters are unaffected. Its probably a decent change, but for the above reason, not this one.

A better solution for this specific issue would be to make aoe rotations less "efficent". What i mean by that is that in wod-wotlk era, you changed to full aoe at around 5 targets, using multi dot or specific cds at 2-4. But today the aoe rotation is so powerful you can sometime use it with no loss even at 2 targets.

This means there is almost no damage loss on the primary target for doing aoe, which causes players to forgo thinking "is a mob here dangerous enough that i should focus it"? If players would need to make a consious choice of whether or not to focus a target, and the choice will make a big difference, they will be more careful about adding dangerous long lived mobs.

But as things stand, even at 2 mobs you can already go ham into aoe rotation, many classes even *gain. More single target dps* this way. For this purpose, the aoe cap isn't enough.

[Zephire]

It'll take same time to get used to. I loved my massive pulls, it forced me as a tank to think about how much I could handle, how much the group could handle and what we were willing to risk. I've not played much yet and pre-patches are always, well, pre-patches, so we'll see how it feels when SL comes but currently it feels kinda boring. This is especially true when you overgear the content. Things still die quicker but I don't get the "we rock, look at how quick that massive pull was destroyed!"-feeling.

We'll see. Still think it should work more like full damage on X mobs, any mobb over that takes reduced damage, split between every other mob over X or just split the damage evenly between everything but that has some other drawbacks, maybe.

[Scrysis]

When you pull more than 5 mobs, they become enraged and the more you pull the more powerful that enrage will be, so :

- current content will stay challenging for those that like mass pulls
- no more awkward to hit 20 mobs but only 5 are injured / killed
- the enrage can be disabled for old content so it won't screw farmers

As a healer. . .


. . . . FUUUUUCCCKKK NO. It's bad enough when dps and tanks stand in shit. And over-pull. Now you're suggesting we add even more healer punishment for when the rest of the group overpulls. No thank you.

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You are right that the root of the problem are these insane pulls in the MDI. But this is not why the change was implemented.

People are stupid. They see something on the screen and think "I can do that too!", so they carry what they saw into their own runs and they start to expect that the Tanks pull insane numbers no matter what the affixes are and then they blame the Tanks for dying or loosing aggro in that 20 mob pull with 10 different mechanics happening at once. But of course they also blame the Tank if he doesn't pull 4 groups at once.

Tanks aren't made to handle 20 mobs at once, healers aren't made to heal them to full every 4 seconds. Just because DPS are able to damage 20 mobs at once does not mean they get to demand that as a pace for the dungeon and make the life of other roles miserable.

Which is why this change was done and it is perfectly reasonable.

Thank you.

[huth]

once upon a time WoW worked like that in the past.

Actually, it still does. That's what's called the "soft cap". Most abilities without a hard cap have it beyond 20 targets, though some, like Meteor, have lower.

[owbu]

Because the design intent of the cap was to let some classes excel at AoE and other classes excel at cleaving and your solution does not do that.

Disableling the limit for low level content is a good idea though.

[Easyclassictopkeklel]

or lowering damage up 70, 50, 30, 10 while above x target.

aoe caps are not a good balancing act. Blizzard with target caps... Like they nerfed themself.

any soluution is a better one

just because you do not see the reasoning behind, doesn't make it the worst decision. Look it up, many people spoke about it and explained it.
AOE cap works, why add overcomplicated systems which scale with mobs etc? That's just more variables and more stuff that can go wrong and needs extra
balancing. And your idea of "lower the dmg" wouldnt work as well...just think about it, it is pretty obvious why it wouldn't.

[loras]

lol... you don't even need interrupts if you dance out of line of sight...

Tell that to the tank.

[Swnem]

I don't think that would stop people from AoE'ing.
The method of damage reduced by X for Y+ targets is cool, but you are ignoring the real benefit of this change, which is the performance and stability gains.

I think overall they make this solution acceptable.

[plz delete account]

That wouldn't solve half the issues Blizzard's implementation does and create new ones. It's not just about limiting the strength of the abilities, it's also to create a differentiation between "cleave" and "true" AoE abilities.

so why are Pestilence and DnD capped then?