Derra wrote: »

Dude you have to look at daoc bombing videos. People were so fast to spread out when an 8 man grp rushed the 40 ++ zerg bc if they wouldn't they died in seconds...

Yea that kinda tactic makes a great video until other players wise up and realize AoE bomb groups are the winning tactic. What do you think happens the next time that 8-man bomb group runs into a 40-man bomb group?

Believe man I was in that game. I ran with an organized group and that is what the game boiled down to at the end (end for me anyway). Just blobs of players running around popping off AoEs in any largescale encounter. Boring.....

The quicker the better.

AoE caps maybe made sense back when they were implemented - due to dynamic ult generation.

This is not the same game it was back then, and no longer makes sense in todays meta.

Another way to combat blobbing: turn on friendly damage. Even if it's 10-20% I think it would discourage aoe spamming blobs.

Sureshawt wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

Dude you have to look at daoc bombing videos. People were so fast to spread out when an 8 man grp rushed the 40 ++ zerg bc if they wouldn't they died in seconds...

Yea that kinda tactic makes a great video until other players wise up and realize AoE bomb groups are the winning tactic. What do you think happens the next time that 8-man bomb group runs into a 40-man bomb group?

Believe man I was in that game. I ran with an organized group and that is what the game boiled down to at the end (end for me anyway). Just blobs of players running around popping off AoEs in any largescale encounter. Boring.....

I only played it until like 2009. Never has such a thing occured to me. I´ve never seen a blob we´re encountering in ESO or GW2 daily in daoc ever in 8 years of playing that game. Also i´ve never seen pure bomb grps - they were not vaible in encounters involving smart enemies - which is why things balanced out.

But yeah those game had dedicated support, hard interrupt, long time CC and useful tanking mechanisms. Probably would not work in ESO too well.

Still the current meta promotes blobbing up which is exactly the opposite of what the game should do in my opinion.

Sureshawt wrote: »

Sublime wrote: »

Sureshawt wrote: »

Well I would leave that up to ZoS to decide based on their engine's capabilities. However, the intent would be to make it so an AoE is not optimal in every combat encounter but rather a zergball buster.

Something along these lines.
e.g
1-5 Players hit would result in 50% of the tooltip damage
6-10 Players hit would result in 100% of the tooltip damage
10+ Players hit would result in 200% of the tooltip damage + blow out mechanic

Wouldn't this make AOE's far stronger than the other option? Or is the 50% against 1-5 the important part?

Exactly. I'm not against opening caps and even making it stronger the more targets it hits. This makes it a tactical skill useful for busting big zerg blobs.

I'm against it being the go to skill in every situation. Thus weaken it against single or just a few players. Decent at mid number range and make it a real ball buster against big blobs.

Where were aoes more useful for singletarget dmg in daoc? I mean they were hardcasted and you had to run into freaking melee range for them to do dmg. Staying at range and smart positioning was the most important thing for a caster to be good at in daoc (imho) apart from moc every so often.

Please go away aoe-cap. Almost nobody likes you. Hush.

Muizer wrote: »

I'm starting to think that damage and damage distribution may be a completely wrong way to deal with the zerg problem.
Perhaps it would be better to slow the zerg down: the more players bunch together, the slower they get. Basically that would restrict the zerg to defensive actions only while it's on the move. It can still fire on anything within range with all its power, but it can't pursue, as a group. Just a thought.

I have to say, this is an interesting idea.

Muizer wrote: »

I hate all AOE. The more they get nerfed the better.

Do you know what happens without AOE? Zergs literally become unkillable, as in you are f**ked

jamesharv2005ub17_ESO wrote: »

One of the developers explained why they cant remove AOE caps on an eso live episode. I cant find it now but they said something to the effect of it would kill the already bad performance in cyrodill. Plus also affect the PVE game negatively. Maybe someone can find the link to it.

The only statement regarding aoe caps on ESO Live was when Eric Wrobel said "no we are not removing the aoe cap, because it would impact PvE".

There is literally no reason in the game's code that the aoe cap cannot be tweeked/removed. This is already demonstrated by the fact that ZOS was able to raise the cap from a flat 6 to a multi tiered fall off style. With the fall off system in place you can change the values for how many targets take 100%, 50%, 25% dmg, or you can change the % values themselves. This does not involve writing new code, it is simply editing values in the existing code.

Yet Wrobel refuses to do this because it would require a rebalance of PvE trash pulls.

scorpiodog wrote: »

Everyone talking about "code" please provide source and line numbers to what you are referring to.

Maybe upload some commented "code" so we can see what you are talking about in programming language?

Is there something I'm missing? Is ZOS's code open to review somewhere? Or are people just talking out of their ass referring to some "code" they've never seen, and wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of if they did see it?

If I'm wrong and people have actually gone through the "code", please educate me and let me know how I can get a copy of said "code"

If you had been reading you would understand that nobody actually knows how its coded, of course there source code is not open, but based on experience with programming, playing the game for a long time, and information we have from ZOS we can make educated guesses on how its structured with out seeing the actual source code. Also we can objectively say that even without removing AOE cap, raising it to full damage to 60 targets will result in fewer server side calculations per cast, to say otherwise for anyone with any knowledge of programming or servers would be nonsensical.

Muizer wrote: »

Ghost-Shot wrote: »

Muizer wrote: »

I hate all AOE. The more they get nerfed the better.

Do you know what happens without AOE? Zergs literally become unkillable, as in you are f**ked

Let's not lose sight of the bigger picture. We were promised something akin to medieval style combat, and in that context numbers should count for a lot. That a small group/individual is not able to confront an army successfully in open combat is not a problem. It would be a problem if they could. However, small numbers should have a chance in a siege defense situation and they should more or less be able to disengage/stay clear of armies at will.

Making AoE abilities more powerful just gets it wrong in every respect.

I totally agree, and even without AOE caps there will only be a select few groups that can take on huge numbers with a few, however numbers are always an inherent advantage, they don't need to be a mechanical advantage too. Though like Zheg says damage needs toned down on AOE's if the cap was to be removed, some of them already hit extremely hard.

The more information the system has to send between clients, the more lag we experience.

No because the devs have already explained how much re-work they'd have to do just to make it possible. It would take their focus and attention away from fixing current issues such as lag and continuous improvement.

TheMachineKiller wrote: »

No because the devs have already explained how much re-work they'd have to do just to make it possible. It would take their focus and attention away from fixing current issues such as lag and continuous improvement.

There is so much fail going on in your post I'm going to have to resort to bullet points

• The devs have not "explained how much re-work" removing aoe caps would entail. The only statement was Wrobel's bit that he "will not" remove aoe caps because it would "impact PvE". I trust you are intelligent enough to inference what type of PvE situations would be different with removal of aoe caps in any meaningful way; it would be trash pulls in vet dungeons and trials, that's it.
• Removing or changing the aoe cap is very simple; it literally can be done as easily as adjusting individual values in the code (the number of targets in each aoe dmg group or the % of the dmg caps themselves). As I already stated, this does not involve writing any new code, it's lterally a "find, replace" function.
• Take focus and attention away? I'm sorry, but you just triggered my inner FENGRUSH. ZOS's focus and attention could not be any more 'away' from PvP performance without literally deleting Cyrodiil from the map!
• Continuous improvement? What, pray tell, do you think removing aoe caps would be? It would be one of the largest most significant improvements to the PvP meta there has been since launch. Possibly even the most important improvement. (Meta, not performance improvement)