It is true, Area of Effect attacks are a bit out of balance since the 1.2 patch. Mythic has pretty much confirmed it in their forum posts. The 2 main culprits are Rain of Fire and Pit of Shades. Back before 1.1 (I think), they were in this same situation. 1.1 increased resistances, which went too far and reduced their damage by a lot. 1.2 dialed back resistances, now they are too powerful again. There are two main issues:
Stacking. Both abilities stack without limit. If 5 Bright Wizards use Rain of Fire on the same location, the poor folks get hit with all 5. This can add up to a lot of damage. The Engineers Napalm (and the Magus equivalent) do not stack. Napalm is also less powerful, but not a channeled attack.
These abilities should not stack, or have a stack limit. This would be a boon for tanks and melee dps in keep sieges. Healers will likely be able to heal the damage easily, possibly tipping the balance too far. It is not a simple problem, but one that needs to be addressed.
Targeting. RoF/PoS/Napalm/Mist are all ground targeted. This lets the player place the attack anywhere their camera can see. So if you are standing in the back of the Lords room, getting hit for damage, this may be the culprit. In the case of channelled spells, it allows the caster to stand in relative safety while casting.
Fixing this could be pretty complicated as it is based on camera mechanics. I wonder if they could only use a portion of the camera ( calculate the camera 10% smaller and use that for the check), which may limit the range of the crazy placements. This would probably cause some strange bugs in legitimate situations though. If they end up getting rid of stacking, this issue may not be that big of a deal.
Changes are almost certainly coming to these AoE abilities. I just hope they are slight, and not too drastic. Balance is getting better, just have to keep tweaking.
Gaming into the summer
1 day ago
