AoE spam is getting old

[tren89]

You can deny it all you want, but the game gets boring and feels agonizingly slow when every fortress battle devolves into the defenders turtling and both sides spamming braindead AoEs, there is little strategy involved and the rewards are terrible compared to the time investment.

[nebelwerfer]

The narrow funnel fights is not for everyone.

Boosting rewards is not the way to make the game more enjoyable imo..

I also think a problem is the waiting - everyone is waiting for morale 4's for their push which takes a long time and it's hard to coordinate. Perhaps an increased morale gain in this area would increase the amounts of pushes and make the fighting feel more dynamic.

On the other hand, continiously getting kills on the enemy to reset their morale is dependent on it taking a while to rebuild. This is harder when you cant focus pump morales anymore with archmages.

Another idea could be to impose the terror debuff on players - making rezzing impossible. If this were to be the case id drop the jail, and simply let the players respawn at their base (defenders would respawn in front of their city gates) with a 1 min wounds debuff.

For aoe spam, yeah it's bad and it efficacy should be curbed. But thats a balance topic and in my view thats a dead end until the new balance system is in place and even then we are at the mercy of the "realm champions" afaik

[Ashoris]

how often is a coordinated push from the roof used ?
(1 WB flies upt to top Group for Group) The problem is not that there are no Options - but that Options are in need of some organization.
And as you can read - even building a Group is too much for the majority of the people (constant complain in SC related Topics).

People want to have it easy ...

[wachlarz]

You can deny it all you want, but the game gets boring and feels agonizingly slow when every fortress battle devolves into the defenders turtling and both sides spamming braindead AoEs, there is little strategy involved and the rewards are terrible compared to the time investment.

U can use single target skills.

[Scottx125]

Honestly it depends. I do feel that AoE is currently way too strong. Indicated by the fact that Slayers, BW and WL are the go to DPS on order. If you stack a WB full of slayers.. RIP destro. I think AoE should be more about providing damage pressure to multiple targets, not being able to stack 8 players AoE in order to effectively nuke anyone in the radius. ST should be the go-to nuke spec. AoE should have its cap lowered. But in such a way that provides damage pressure without being so much that it can be used to effectively wipe out a group within a few seconds.

[Fenris78]

One way to nerf aoe without rendering it useless could be a decreasing RoI, i.e. the more you hit targets, the less damage each target will take ; this way you will spread damage around, but you can still be strong hitting small groups of enemies.

For example :
- 1-3 targets at once : normal damage
- 4-6 : damage -10% on each hit target
- 7-10 : damage -20%
an so on...

This way will calm a bit the AoE overstacking, making AoE morales more useful in the process (normal rules for moral damage still apply), and shaking the meta a bit, while making ST classes more useful in WB play.

As for the feasability, since I'm not a dev, I dunno if that will be possible without performance impact, but it could be a solution to the current issue, wich is AoE overstacking and blobbing.

This wont alleviate much blobbing (since you could still take less damage by being packed), but the more packed you will be, the more total damage the wb will take.

Although solo, small groups and ST classes could use that to be less at danger into the melee blob (using shield walls), instead of being nuked by AoE flying everywhere...

[Garamore]

If anything AOE should be increased. With the state of RvR there is nothing you can do when outnumbered, if you nerf AOE you will make it worse where the team with more numbers always wins.

[mynban]

I remember a when AoE limit was 9, but too much changed since then; especially in terms of balancing time to kill. I fear a change to AoE now might end up with resulting a never ending fights where healers can outheal all of incoming damage indefinitely.

This is obviously a very complex problem where devs probably crunched different numbers for different situations to balance, so it might be dangerous to break that delicate balance around tdk.

One thing I might suggest is potentially bringing it a tad bit closer to WoW warzone battle structures, where resource management is a big factor, where healers has to balance strong outgoing healing vs mana efficiency. At the moment in RoR healers can spam forever, not only that they can spam forever while running.

To avoid upsetting the existing balance, would it be a good solution to apply a diminishing return on AP gain in lakes/forts/cities for healers on WBs. So that the longer battle goes the slower their AP regen becomes which makes resource management a key. Then we could drop AoE cap back to 9 without worrying about healers being able to outheal indefinitely.

[Avanos]

Go do your own thing instead of sitting at the funnel, either solo gank or small group.
I personally don't sit at the funnel or even enter inside a fort as its a waste of my time since I'm solo. Wayy more fun hunting people down or killing stragglers.

[Scottx125]

If anything AOE should be increased. With the state of RvR there is nothing you can do when outnumbered, if you nerf AOE you will make it worse where the team with more numbers always wins.

That only works if the outnumbered side has more AoE compared to the stronger side. Which is unlikely considering the fact they're outnumbered. In fact the opposite is true, the weaker side tends to field more ST classes like WH's, picking off individuals rather than facing the zerg. It's not an issue that can be solved by making AoE stronger/weaker. The problem as it stands is AoE is too strong in 24v24 or more. And AoE should IMO work off the concept of doing a lot of lower damage to tons of people. ST damage should be really high and the type of damage that kills people quickly. AoE should provide pressure against multiple targets, opening weaker targets, or targets not being healed or guarded to being more easily nuked down by ST damage. As it stands, you can run a WB with 8 slayers and they'll kill everything and everyone in their path.

In my mind the only way to help an outnumbered side is to provide incentives for people to join the outnumbered side, maybe via a mercenary 3rd faction system where players can join an outnumbered side, from destro or order for extra rewards. OR, provide a scaling buff that increases the strength of outnumbered players based on however many people are within 200ft of you.

Go do your own thing instead of sitting at the funnel, either solo gank or small group.
I personally don't sit at the funnel or even enter inside a fort as its a waste of my time since I'm solo. Wayy more fun hunting people down or killing stragglers.

Way more fun for you perhaps, but the game isn't balanced around WE's ganking solo's (or really designed to be played that way). It's balanced (and designed) around 24v24 warbands battling it out in ORVR.