Why do max targets on AoE exist?

eternalvale · September 2014

I mainly ask because its kind of annoying on my GF or CW when I'm fighting something and I have a ton of stuff on me for whatever reason and I can taunt everything in the entire freaking zone, but Frontline Surge? 5 targets. I mean because I did dragon dailies from the time I could until now I was fairly over lvled (3 lvls above everything I was fighting) so I would sometimes drag groups of 10~20 mobs together and kill them with my GF (pretty easy in Rothe Valley and The Chasm.) It would have taken MUCH less time if Terrifying Impact and Frontline Surge didn't have an arbitrary cap on it. It almost seems like removing the cap is needed with the way these fights as the game progress with more adds than there are grains of sand on a beach.

Also, don't bring up PvP, its not hard AT ALL to have skills act differently depending on the circumstances (If a korean MMORPG in the form of Dragon Nest can do it, how can these developers not?)

mircalla83 · September 2014

Easy, if there hadn't been the early exploit waves, proliferation of high ranking Enchants and the introduction of Artifacts and Boons, you would drop down dead with 20 or more mobs on you.
Players are not supposed to do 'Bossroom to Bossroom' pulls, but sadly, with the ease of Freeze and a couple other skills (Tyrannical Threat, OF, Dreadtheft), these are dispatched in seconds.

And before the usual 'then introduce a T3 Difficulty' - this would help for what, 1-2 months, before the 'whales' either revert to content they can farm for stuff they can pawn off for AD, or shout for 'harder content!'. And it would be worse if you actually could get T3 gear.

abecassis · September 2014

My guess is only to increase the difficulty. Because their imagination only stretches as far as adds, so in order for them to be "difficult" they need to tweak the skills.

oicidraz · September 2014

mircalla83 wrote: »

Easy, if there hadn't been the early exploit waves, proliferation of high ranking Enchants and the introduction of Artifacts and Boons, you would drop down dead with 20 or more mobs on you.
Players are not supposed to do 'Bossroom to Bossroom' pulls, but sadly, with the ease of Freeze and a couple other skills (Tyrannical Threat, OF, Dreadtheft), these are dispatched in seconds.

And before the usual 'then introduce a T3 Difficulty' - this would help for what, 1-2 months, before the 'whales' either revert to content they can farm for stuff they can pawn off for AD, or shout for 'harder content!'. And it would be worse if you actually could get T3 gear.

Welll, if the mobs were hard and had more HP we couldn't do 'Bossroom to Bossroom' anyway, unless we overgear the dungeon by a lot... but the fact that sometimes you have 10 mobs on you and you only hit 5 because reason feels weird since I'm here.

mircalla83 · September 2014

And again, the issue is: The longterm players that complain about lack of a challenge have high grade enchants, gear, boons and artifacts.
Make the existing T2 Content harder: Whales are happy, they can still faceroll the content, and make even more profit from selling BoE gear for AD, on the Auction House.
Introduce 'T3' content: A few 'for the challenge' players will keep doing it, even if it would only net cosmetic stuff.
The majority would scream 'Still not more OP than AoW/RG/HV/AD/HP Set, we need harder content!' again. And return to facerolling T2 content that drops gear which can be pawned off for AD.

burkaanc · September 2014

mircalla83 wrote: »

Easy, if there hadn't been the early exploit waves, proliferation of high ranking Enchants and the introduction of Artifacts and Boons, you would drop down dead with 20 or more mobs on you.
Players are not supposed to do 'Bossroom to Bossroom' pulls, but sadly, with the ease of Freeze and a couple other skills (Tyrannical Threat, OF, Dreadtheft), these are dispatched in seconds.

And before the usual 'then introduce a T3 Difficulty' - this would help for what, 1-2 months, before the 'whales' either revert to content they can farm for stuff they can pawn off for AD, or shout for 'harder content!'. And it would be worse if you actually could get T3 gear.

dont blame the players for devs being unable to create challenging content, or making content for "casuals"(as they politely call them) on purpose. or the gear - i could run about any dungeons in blue gear without much problems.

target caps are just a stinking pile, no reason whatsoever to have them. if my sword goes through 50 enemies then i want to do damage on ALL of them.

have you been in the new dungeon ? its t1 at best, if i bought enough sausages for motivation i could get my dog to run it

oicidraz · September 2014

mircalla83 wrote: »

And again, the issue is: The longterm players that complain about lack of a challenge have high grade enchants, gear, boons and artifacts.
Make the existing T2 Content harder: Whales are happy, they can still faceroll the content, and make even more profit from selling BoE gear for AD, on the Auction House.
Introduce 'T3' content: A few 'for the challenge' players will keep doing it, even if it would only net cosmetic stuff.
The majority would scream 'Still not more OP than AoW/RG/HV/AD/HP Set, we need harder content!' again. And return to facerolling T2 content that drops gear which can be pawned off for AD.

Well, I just said that because in my experience about other games, if the content could have a real chance to kill you, then doesn't matter if you don't have a hit cap, unless you are very good geared and/or have a healer, but here everything is soloable, except for the dungeons and Epic HE...

And speaking about the dungeons, on those games a 'Bossroom to Bossroom' is impossible, cause it's hard to survive the normal mobs on the hardest ones, not like here where you can actually run the 50%.

lordfuzun · September 2014

The AoE target cap comes from lessons learn from City of Heroes (Cryptics first game). When COH first began there where no target caps. And when players finally learned how to play their character, they powned the PvE content of the game. Tankers were damned near indestructable and no aggo cap either, they would gater up literally every NPC on a big map into one player. The Defenders (Buffer/debuffes) and Controllers (Uber CC) would contanin and debuff the NPC and DPS classes would AoE them into oblivion in no time flat. So of defeats the intended designed of taking X amount of time to complete missions/quests.

Cyptic learned their lessons by adding AoE target caps, deceasing the effectiveness of CC powers, decreasing the effectiveness of players abilities by adding diminishing returns on power enhancers, adding aggo caps, etc. Players complain, some players left the game, etc. But after players adapted, they could still kick assets of the NPCs, but they hard to work at it rather then being fact rolling easy.

And Cyptic took those lessens learn into creating their new generations of game, Champions Online, Star Trek Online and Neverwinter. One new lesson they added was smaller team size (5 vs 8) which meant it was easier to build PvE content. And regardless of what you all think or believe thee are reason for the various hard and soft caps in the game. And for what it's worth, I agree with the most part fo Cryptic's decisions in game design. I've live though it all. I'm speaking as someone who knows. I've been playing Cryptic's game since the close beta of City of Heroes.

mircalla83 · September 2014

And sadly, in STO, they introduced even worse Powercreep. Not via their counterpart of boons, but via Lockbox/Itemshop Equipment, and their counterpart of our 'Active Companion Bonus' system (with some of the really strong of the latter system coming from an Itemshop pack, too)

chemboy613 · September 2014

I personally hate target caps and thing they make no sense, I would rather see maybe a reduction in damage the more mobs you hit, for example. Ivy and of have no caps and they allow big pulls but things like sing and fi and steal time with caps really slow you down, plus the ai picks mobs at random. If we automatically targeted strongest mobs that would be an improvement.

I am also dying for harder content. The other day I three man facerolled cn with little to no effort.

Easy content drives down prices, which means there is little differentiation between good and excellent players. High end players should be able to farm expensive loot. T hey earned it with their skill and experience. Please teir three soon.

Most dangerous thing in neverwinter? Lag in iwd

17 k cw, p sf, p terror, 3 legendary artifacts, rank 9-10, 7 epic pets, 1600 Draco kills,

Chem

Unknown · September 2014

This content has been removed.

bioshrike · September 2014

I'd love to see a system where mob type and abilities scale based upon how well the players do - a group starts a dungeon vs typical enemies, and if they steamroll the first few groups, start introducing more "boss-type" enemies into regular groups of enemies, and mix things up with some buffer/debuffer types as well. Add enemies that use control abilities or ones that try to flank/surround players. Dynamically spawn more environmental hazards and so on...

deus69xxx · September 2014

There's no real need for caps, they just need to learn how to deal with their damage via AoE. it's really simple, all they do is leave damage = damage when up to the cap they have, when cap exceeds it up to 3, divide damage by 1.5, up to 7, divide by 2, up to 10 divide by 3, up to 13 divide by 4, beyond 13, divide by 5. there's the answer, now, if you pull excessive groups, your AoE does <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>, and your group pays the price for pulling too much. makes content a lot less faceroll when suddenly you're only doing 1/5 of your damage because you figured rounding up two groups was a good idea.

chemboy613 · September 2014

+1. 10 char

vasdamas · September 2014

Because CWs have too many privileges already

ianthewizard2012 · September 2014

Target cap on AOE powers is to contradictorily destroy the nature of AOE powers because of some stupid balance reasons. While melee powers like Frontline Surge should have target cap because a melee doesn't have enough strength to prone 20 or 30 mobs at a time, spell casters' powers like Arcane Sigularity should not have target cap.

burkaanc · September 2014

ianthewizard2012 wrote: »

Target cap on AOE powers is to contradictorily destroy the nature of AOE powers because of some stupid balance reasons. While melee powers like Frontline Surge should have target cap because a melee doesn't have enough strength to prone 20 or 30 mobs at a time, spell casters' powers like Arcane Sigularity should not have target cap.

and cws shouldnt be powerful enough to create black holes, or ice in warm places like karr or lostmouth

burkaanc · September 2014

ianthewizard2012 wrote: »

Target cap on AOE powers is to contradictorily destroy the nature of AOE powers because of some stupid balance reasons. While melee powers like Frontline Surge should have target cap because a melee doesn't have enough strength to prone 20 or 30 mobs at a time, spell casters' powers like Arcane Sigularity should not have target cap.

and cws shouldnt be powerful enough to create black holes, or ice in warm places like karr or lostmouth

casting spells should take time reagents, and after casting x spells they should rest for a day

lucifron44 · September 2014

eternalvale wrote: »

[h=2]Why do max targets on AoE exist?[/h]I would sometimes drag groups of 10~20 mobs together

Agreed, it makes no sense whatsover. You have this time-consuming animation with your 2H sword and only three or four of the twenty zombies in front of you are getting hit. So counter-intuitive, so remote from DnD.

vasdamas · September 2014

You people playing CWs are so funny, let's just roll mages and kill this mmo shall we?

burkaanc wrote: »

casting spells should take time reagents, and after casting x spells they should rest for a day

Not sure how the things are in 4e but yeah, in 3e this would be true.

jrfbrunet · September 2014

Honestly, comparing how AOEs do damage in Neverwinter vs other MMOs, Neverwinter AOEs have damage amounts that are comparable to single-target damage. AOEs, as a concept, should only be used when there are more than 3 mobs to kill because there damage is otherwise to small compared to single target skills.
This is NOT the case in Neverwinter. Instead of toning down the damage amounts, the Devs elected to limit the number of targets. It's purely a balanced issue that is unique to Neverwinter: the only way they know how to make Dungeons harder is by increasing the number of mobs per pull or per boss phase.

Why do max targets on AoE exist?

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