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I've had dps and healers run ahead and pull packs back to me. It's really annoying, but the growing community consensus is that the tank should be getting as many packs as they can.
I think the major problem is that AoE is too good relative to single-target damage. AoE is generally better at 3 or more mobs, and that's the size of an average pack. So simply pulling two packs at a time is a complete win.
AoE also obsoletes tactics like Crowd Control. No point in sheeping something, it's going to get broken in the first few seconds. As well, tank AoE threat has to keep up to match DPS, and that in turn has made tanking very easy, and has removed a lot of the tank gameplay that Vanilla WoW or older MMO structures.
AoE should be significantly reduced in effectiveness, such that it only becomes viable at the 8-10 creature mark. Single-target gameplay should be the norm, except in situations which specifically call for AoE. Single-target trinity gameplay is far more interesting and fun than AoE gameplay, and so AoE damage should be kept under strict control.
I think the problem is not that AoE is to strong, the problem is that it is possible to piecfully AoE multiple groups at once. The solution would be to give mobs abilities like in old Mana-Tombs. The problem is that mobs are just health, instead of fighting back.
ReplyDeleteGive one a 2 second cast that burns 100% of your healers mana, which must be interrupted. You can't fight multiple of these at once because you wont have enough interrupts.
Give one a stun-with-aggro-drop ability which makes it impossible or inefficient to fight to many mobs because from time to time they will all damage the other players when the tank is stunned.
Give one the ability to spread a dot that kills the players if not dispelled in time and therefore making it impossible to dispell groups from 2 or 3 of these mobs because of cooldown or mana issues.
Give one an instant fear which requires you to burn that one down immediately and make it impossible to fight multiple of them.
Give every mob an ability that must be dealt with and make it therefore impossible to deal with multiple groups.
I agree with this but it doesn't even have to be that complex. For example I don't see much mindless AoEing in SWTOR's instances either, and the trash mobs in those are mostly pretty boring in terms of abilities... but they defy easy rounding up (because a lot of them are ranged) and the combination of mob damage output and a limit on threat generation put a natural cap on how many opponents you want to take on at once (as too many at once will result in death).
DeleteWe've been pulling multiple groups in FFXIV since early WP and AK speed runs in 2.0. Some people are just now catching up to the more efficient way of doing things, just as it happened with strength tanking.
ReplyDeleteIf there's a trend in the design of trash encounters, I'd say it's in the opposite direction. WP was ridiculously easy to pull all at once, and there almost no barriers against it. Since then, the devs have started adding doors and such that only open after you kill the previous packs. And there are also mobs with abilities like Kring suggests (think the heretics that turn into dragons and spam aoe in Snow cloak, the channels that get a damage buff in Never read, etc).
Also, there's the "matter" of player's growing power level. When the first 2.0 dungeons came out and everyone was in ilvl 150 gear, it was harder to do big aoe pulls. Now at max sync level, it's trivial, so not doing it is just a waste of everybody's time, so I can't fault healers and DPS from pulling for the tank if the tank is not doing it himself.
Forgot to mention, I think aoe being viable at 3 or 4 mobs adds depth to more difficult encounters. Take A2 for example. There's a choice to make between burning down one mob at a time or not. If aoe only became viable at 10 mobs, it'd be a no brainier when to use it.
DeleteI remember tanking on my pally during Wrath of the Lich King in WOW, literally pulling half of Herioc Utgarde Keep, and then aoeing them down . After that, I would pull the other half up to the final boss and aoe them down. SOC was OP as well, cleave dmg for pally. xD It was pretty fun. Hard to believe that was 6 years ago.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you here, AoE has to be significantly nerfed in FFXIV. I've mostly stopped playing tank because of all the pressure to grab ever bigger groups. I'm not that well geared to survive it nor do I like that gameplay. I very much prefer the mechanics of taking down a small group of enemies one by one than the mindless one button AoE most classes have. Brayflox hard was my most hated dungeon ever in the game, with all the pulls you could chain without gates in between. Let's stop sacrificing fun in the altar of efficiency.
ReplyDeleteI remember back in vanilla WoW, when it was discovered that Paladins could AoE tank and became the preferred tanks for instance runs. It was annoying but at least as a feral I could just switch to cat and look on jealously. It was obvious that the thing to do was nerf paladin AoE so that there wasn't one tank that was far ahead of the rest.
ReplyDeleteInstead, Blizzard took the lazy and bad for the game route of buffing everyone else's AoE threat so all groups could mindlessly AoE. That was the start of a long slippery slope down to where we are today. Mindless spam, boring instance runs.
Wait, hold on.
DeleteNerfing 1 class is less work than buffing n other classes and balancing them all. That's not the "lazy way".
Was it bad for the game? Maybe. But it wasn't the lazy way. At least, not remotely as simple as you lay out here.
It sounds like tanks and healers are overgeared as well. It wouldn't be efficient to aoe multiple packs if the group keeps wiping.
ReplyDeleteI think you nail the problem, but I aggree with some of the other commenters that your solution is the wrong one (it would still work somewhat fcause, I just prefer the other solutions). Up the lethality of the mobs in one way or another and make the tradeoff be one of speed vs surviveability. I dont mind that it is faster to clear 5 groups together, I mind that it is possible. Currently there is a breakpoint for most tanks for how many groups they can handle, it is just way to high.
ReplyDeleteIf the problem with upping mob-lethality is that people will outgear it eventually (think wow patches), do as kring suggests and give them hard to handle abilities that cannot just be bruteforced.
Gimme back my tactical tanking :-)
Solution: add a friendly fire component to AoE.
ReplyDeleteAh, and I remember the days of a Frost Mage spamming Blizzard in good ol' Blackrock Depths, before the devs split the instance into LFG pieces back in Cataclysm. One of the side effects of Cata was to make Mage AoE less powerful than before, but I guess that is no longer the case.
ReplyDeleteBlack Desert Online don't even have single target abilities, everything is AoE. This is not an abomination, it is the new trend. Why?
ReplyDeleteBecause most players are not capable to perform more sophisticated strategies than "spam AoE"