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Azeroth Armory: Forging Gorehowl
Future of Area Damage
John Yang recently tweeted how instead of removing Area Damage and replacing it with another stat, he would rather have it as a viable stat - which may suggest that it might get some attention in the future. How would you tweak area damage to be more viable?
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Twitter)
@_JohnYang Have you tried replacing area damage in paragon with resource regen? 50 plvl's would give 10% of total resource regen per sec.@KrrSplat I'd rather make Area Damage a more viable stat.
Wizard on GR 59 Clear
Wudijo uploaded an interesting Greater Rift run. A GR 59 clear where his clanmate Avoid, with a Wizard, greatly contributes to the group's power. Which is interesting considering where Wizards were in the "meta" for so long and the strategy used. Check the related thread on our forums for more details, and definitely watch their run below. Shout-out to Avoid for figuring it out!
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Posted Apr 4, 2015Area Damage is a viable stat in theory. The only reason why it is not is because the developers/designers/etc are too lazy or too bad to make it proc from more sources, e.g. pets. Last time I checked it didn't work with pets, but how difficult can it be to have 1/10th of your area damage proc from pets? Many spells don't scale many things which auto-gimps that spell/class/stat. In a game where almost everyone can wear any weapon and use it with almost any ability, it would just be logical that all damage increasing stats are working with everything. Maybe tune the scaling of these interactions down, so a veteran player can still optimize its gear, but for the unknowing, huge amounts of stats on their gear are effectively useless with the current system. This is espeically true for things like area damage and pets.
The second problem is: greater rift guardians are all single target fights. While I don't have a problem with that, it feels iffy, as everything in diablo, including the stat in question, revolves around doing aoe damage.
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Posted Apr 4, 2015Make Area Damage proc from EVERY attack, based on Proc Coefficient (so 20% chance to proc AoE, on an 80% proc attack would mean it has a 16% chance to proc AoE)
This is the most important... Make Area damage hit the initial target. The main problem I have with Area damage and one of the main problems I've seen other people have is that Area damage is useless for single target fights (read, Rift Guardians). As long as a stat is 100% useless against Rift Guardian it will never be considered viable.
It's not like it would be overpowered against single target if it COULD proc... Even if you have 100% AoE damage, it would still only be a 20% damage boost, way lower than if you'd use those stats on CC/CD.
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Posted Apr 4, 2015Pets not benefiting from AD is one of the primary flaws with it and WD pet builds desperately need better aoe.
The other problem is that 10yd aoe doesn't do much if the mobs are slightly spread. I would much rather have it be a "chain dmg" effect that hits up to X additional mobs up to 20 yds each jump.
I don't really care about it doing single target dmg but every rg should have a few minions at all times because the mechanics of some class sets get completely shut down without multiple mobs to hit. The devs can't keep designing OP sets to play a specific way and then tell us not to play that way.
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Posted Apr 4, 2015Having area damage double dip with crit chance could be interesting.
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Posted Apr 5, 2015Or create more issues with stats stacking
like I'd really like if area damage was an alternative to Crit, so that it doesn't become what +elemental dmg has become, just another "multiplicative" bonus to stack on top of it. But maybe your idea is good too, on second thought - if we have a half dozen stacking multiplicative offensive bonuses, player will have to choose which ones they want.
Interesting. I've even seen quite a few players saying that the problem with area damage is that it is only slightly underpowered compared to the other "offensive" stats (not crit chance and damage, but +elemental damage or +individual skill dmg), and if it receives a slightly buff across the board it has the potential to become even stronger than elemental damage. Which is quite interesting - not sure about it though.
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Posted Apr 6, 2015The problem with AD is really in the way the game is designed. The vast majority of play time is spent AEing down large packs, followed by a mostly single-target rift guardian. This means that the overwhelming majority of builds are focused on doing large amounts of AE damage, almost nobody runs a build focused on maximum single target damage.
For the AE phase of a rift, AD competes with all the other damage boosting stats directly. This is a BAD competition. Either AD outperforms the other stats, and every build in the game becomes "Stack AD", or it doesn't, and every build in the game is "Avoid AD". That's the nature of a game like this, even a 1% difference in effect is enough for people to say "trash stat".
For the single target phase of a rift, AD doesn't do anything at all. Bad stat.
The way to make AD a viable stat is to buff it significantly, but then restrict it to only working with single target (or very few target) skills (and have it also hit the primary target) Make it the stat that allows a single target build designed to kill the rift guardian also at least contribute meaningfully to the AE phase of the rift, so that a 4 person group would be interested in mixing AE and single-target + AD builds over stackng multiple full AE builds. I think this would do wonders to build diversity, since the game features a lot of 1-3 target abilities that are almost never used. The ultimate goal is to make it the best stat for a specific subset of viable builds, so you want it if you run one of those builds, and don't if you don't.