AOE - Limitation on 6 opponents / players - hidden AOE nerf Patch 1.1.

Telly

Dear all,

as I just read some press comments on the planned patch 1.1 and the planned limitation of some AOE abilities I'd like to share my thoughts on this topic with u in order to start a discussion providing community feedback on this issue to zenimax.

Current status of general AOE implementation is - due to my understanding - that AOE is limited to 6 opponents / players. With Patch 1.1 abilities that currenty traget more than 6 players shall get fixed in a way that they also will be limited to 6 opponents / players. The limitation refers to damage abilities and healing abilities. In a consequence e.g. tactical healing is not possible as AOE heals are random. This becomes especially problematic with the advent of the new raids for groups of 12 players. A group healing will in this case not be possible. The mechanic further effects any AOE farming and rewards zerg strategies and is a drawback for small coordinated PVP raid grps.

Question will be if this community wants a limitation of AOE abilities in the above described sense.

Looking forward to ur posts.

Kind regards

GossiTheDog

Did you search for AOE before posting this? There's many, many, many, many topics on it.

Anyhoo - AOE has always been limited to 6 people in ESO. When Tamriel Foundry wrote their article which kicked off all the press, they failed to actually check what they were writing was correct. It wasn't.

Telly

Hi Gossi, thx for ur post. If u can share some of the related links this would be nice. Independently for what already has been written and maybe stated wrongly it is due my understanding fact that there exists such limitation. My question at this points is thus simply if we want to have this limitation or not.

Personally I guess that such kind of mechanic is more than problematic. Especially in regard to the above described situations. I don't know if my concerns are representative, but due to my feeling they might be.

Kind regards & happy treasure hunting

Telly

GossiTheDog

hi hi - try this: http://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/247yuk/aoe_cap_zenimax_responds/

Telly

I just went roughly though it. Summing up the blog actually mostly states that ppl dont want an AOE cap and there seem to be actually good reasons for their concerns. Especially one argument that strikes me personally is, that with any cap u take away the possibility to counter zergs with a smaller grp. In addition imagine playing some shooter and u throwing a flash bang into a crowded room and 90% of your opponents are staying at full health. Kind regards Telly

KerinKor

Telly wrote: »

Looking forward to ur posts.

Hundreds already on this old news . please try to keep up.

South_of_Heaven

Another stupid design decision. I don't need to say why, as you said there are already many threads about it. These people are begging us to leave.

Fenbrae

I don't mind about the AoE damaging spells being capped, but capping the amount of players healed by AoE healing is kind of odd.

Kaiem

Iirc all aoe heals already have the cap in place so there won't be any change there at all! They are going to provide a list of the skills that currently aren't capped and are being changed to match every other aoe skill already in the game. This is apparently only a very small number of skills.

A lot of the people complaining about the 6 target limit don't realise it is already in place for the majority of their skills. If people currently didn't realise they were only hitting 6 targets at a time with most skills is changing the few that currently don't have caps going to make much of a difference?

Telly

Hi Kaiem,
the fact that they already have it in place doesn't mean that its a thing you want to have in an mmo - do you? And the fact that a lot of people complain might indeed make it an issue to be regarded. If u say they didnt recognize it and its thus not an big issue this may disregard the fact that when starting an mmo u dont go so deep into game mechanics but if u advance with ur level and your build becomes more refined people become more aware of the game mechanics. This might make understandable why people didn't complain massively in the beginning when the cap was initially announced.

Just a thought.

Rgds Telly

Kaiem

People are complaining because they think aoes are going to be changed to six targets when most of them only hit six targets anyway! The bulk of complaints I see are people saying that once the target cps comes in their small pvp grp won't be able to take on larger groups anymore without realising that apart from one or two abilities they are doing just that on live with a cap in place!

You state that healing won't be possible with a cap but again that cap is already in place on live and you didn't even know that! Your complaint is that the changes will damage the ability to heal and yet healing won't change at all.

Having said all that don't miss understand and think that I actually like a cap of six on aoes, I don't particularly, but I do think aoe can't be unlimited within its range. In DAoC there was a period where unlimited pbaoe was so powerful that a single group camped in the lords room could hold it against any number of attackers and I'd hate for this game to be like that.

My issue is that people are complaining about how this change will affect the mechanics of the game without actually understanding the mechanics in the first place.

GossiTheDog

To be honest, the topic has been done to death so much I think the community is finally over it. Internet got outraged, internet didn't even know what it was talking about, internet moved on to next PVP outrage (vampires!).

End of the day, the community didn't understand how AOE actually worked in ESO. The community was hailing how the current model works, and Zenimax must not change it. Well, they aren't changing it. If they added unlimited target AOE damage instead, then they would be substantially changing the game.

Zargorius

GossiTheDog wrote: »

To be honest, the topic has been done to death so much I think the community is finally over it. Internet got outraged, internet didn't even know what it was talking about, internet moved on to next PVP outrage (vampires!).

End of the day, the community didn't understand how AOE actually worked in ESO. The community was hailing how the current model works, and Zenimax must not change it. Well, they aren't changing it. If they added unlimited target AOE damage instead, then they would be substantially changing the game.

The community is not over it.
The community was not aware of the current caps as they were not stated anywhere and nobody bothered or wanted to state them.
The community is now waiting for 1.1 patch that will remove the remaining uncapped abilities.
The community is very concerned that the removal of uncapped abilities will severly impact PVP making it degenerate into a zergball fest.

LadyChaos

Fenbrae wrote: »

I don't mind about the AoE damaging spells being capped, but capping the amount of players healed by AoE healing is kind of odd.

has to be both or neither. You can stack and only 6 people get hit but ALL get healed... this is the problem with GW2 for a while, and what led to the "stacking" situation many recite, but it was from the limit on Damage AoE but not on ALL beneficial AoE.

Valkerian

I actually like the fact that AOE heals are limited. Realisitcally, you won't rely on just one person in the 12-man runs to heal. And it would be too OP for Cyrodil in some of the larger battles if you could have tons of healers just spamming these AOE area's everywhere

Merlin13KAGL

How about cap the total spell effect (healing amount or damage amount) vice player count...? Write it up as intended for up to 6 players (minimum effect) and derate for more...?

For example: healing spell does max of 300 hp...max of 50 hp/player... This gives full spell effect for the 6 people, but only half that amount for double the players in AoE?

This way, healing/damaging 6 people give full spell effect...healing/damaging 60 people still does max heal/damage, but with only 1/10th the effect on each person in the AoE?

As a caster, I would expect an AoE spell to be just that...however, I equally would not expect my spell to be equally as effective on 60 people as I would on 6... My arcane energies only pack so much punch...