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I saw this thread in the halp! section and feel it deserves some discussion in here with our theory-crafters and math guru's (you guys rock).
So I will pose a few questions:
1) How will this effect spells by casters?
2) How will this effect melee classes (ie. Bladestorm/D'n'D)?
This affects all aoe around by like say I think cap is 10 not sure but let's use 10 for calc sakes.
Howling blast default dmg 2k
10 mobs 20k dmg done
20 mobs (2x cap) 20k dmg done 1k dmg done to each mob
The current cap never affected the tanking AoE abilities. I am not sure the new one will either.
Has this been implemented? I get regular 86k Howling Blast crits when I'm tanking Onyxia's Whelps.
It is implemented in 3.3 I believe vine.
I never saw anywhere that said it was implemented for tank abilities. Is there a source on that?
Sorry Jere, a little confusion methinks. I was just saying that the cap is in 3.3. I have no idea how (or if) it will effect melee classes or strictly caster AoE, this is why I am curious.
Well what I mean is, the current cap only affects DPS (both caster and melee...there is no distinction there), but abilities that tanks use (DnD, Consecration, TC, Swipe) are exempt from the existing cap. I would assume that hasn't changed for the new cap eitehr.
What about an ability such as bladestorm?
*curious* :D
bladestorm will never reach the cap because it only targets 4 (maybe 5?) targets at once anyways, this kind of AoE cap mostly affects large packs of mobs (we're talking 10+)
So in general a melee class is not going to need to worry about this based on the number of mobs required for the cap to take effect (like 10+). This would also explain why the tanking abilities won't likely be effected, as the damage output is usually much lower than the threat output of said abilities and tanking 10+ mobs is not really something that happens regularily. But of course that is speculation on my part, if someone has something else to contribute please do.
Rogues will have to "worry" about it with fan of knives, but I mean... there's not much they can do about it and it is still optimal to AoE even with more than 10 mobs.
oh the cap is already there for tanks as well. go to MGT, pull all the wyrms before the 2nd boss and look at your damage. at least there was a cap for thunderclap and shockwave last time I went there.
I just tanked 25 man Ony yesterday and with probably 50+ whelps, i fired off a shockwave for over 88k total damage... i dunno if that's capped or not but that's big enough #s for me not to worry about it.
The cap right now is a flat number, I think 100k damage.
At the current time I've seen no evidence of a cap...
That said, I'm not entirely sure who will be affected by this as tanks. I know DnD was cited as a spell that will be affected. I imagine by extension that Consecrate will be as well. That said, I don't know if Bear Swipe, Shockwave, or T-clap will be. The first two are nice passive set AoE's and can be used by dpsers (DnD more commonly than Consecrate). Shockwave and Bear Swipe are specific tank abilities, virtually never seen for DPS, and I've never seen T-clap used regularly for DPS.
The upshot of the change as proposed are two-fold as I see it:
1.) As DPS or Tanks, this makes AoE abilities a little more useful against smaller group pulls, but keeps it from being titanic if you get, say, enough whelps in one place. The same can apply to tank threat. Because it is being applied to a lot of the large zone AoE's our tools against them get the same treatment as the dps tools. That means the balance should remain roughly the same.
2.) This frees Blizz's hands in terms of certain designs. They create scenarios where they want and expect you to AoE down packs of stuff (I call them swarm-type mobs, lots of tiny guys, low health, low damage, but all combined they are nasty). There are other times where they don't want players to just collect everything up and have each of the more AoE capable raiders do 14k dps total just AoE'ing the heck out of it. If that is a viable option it can spoil other challenges their trying to put to the raiders. They answered this on Faction Champs by just giving them a flat "AoE's don't work on us" buff, but that's not fun, or ideal, and it has some trickle down effects that can diminish some key tools that some class/specs use.
This change serves to free Blizzard some in their encounter designs (ICC here we come), and allow them to keep a handle on balancing dps between classes with these tools that scale near infinitely with the classes that don't have that sort of open-ended scaling (say, DPS Warriors or Enhancement/Elemental Shamans).
I think it will hurt the Blizzard/Hurricane/FoK/Rain of Fire spammers who get giant numbers because the pulls are big enough, but I don't think it will mess the game up really, and I expect we'll see more range available in encounter designs with that potential capped.
Howling Blast on live hits for about half of normal when you've got both sides' collections of whelps from the initial spawn gathered together in one place. At least, it does for me, consistently. Not sure about Death and Decay, since I always lay that down by the entrance to one cave. Blood Boil seems to be a bit lower than normal too, but I use it infrequently enough that I have less confidence in claiming that it's affected by a cap.
Practically speaking, this should change almost nothing in the game other than making it take a lot longer to take out Onyxia's whelps. There are almost no other (meaningful) cases where you're hitting more than 10 targets at once. Even if there are such situations in the future, it won't make them harder to tank, because the AoE DPS will be lower as well. It'll just take longer.
AoE caps were added back in BC with patch 2.2 and worked like this:Quote:
Originally Posted by Satorri
AoE Spell Cap Mechanics - Elitist Jerks
That thread isn't updated for WotLK (I think the caps were increased above 25,000 damage), but has place holders for 3.3 changes.
^ That, pretty sure the AoE cap now is 100k, but not sure, can someone verify?Quote:
Originally Posted by jere