AoE nerfed, bye bye BC and Archery

[mcast]

3 mobs at once for full damage

/sadface

[Mechant]

Where is the patch notes, I can't find it

[Crissa]

https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1507-Update-Notes-May-25-2018

[ArkadyRandom]

More than 3 mobs at once without CC is way OP. People shouldn't be mowing down 5, 10, 15 mob packs at a time like there were single target. It's bad balance. It also trivializes CC and tanking skills if content just becomes a DPS race and even worse if it's AOE.

[BabyBlue]

Those weren't the only skills nerfed, lots of skills can be built to rely on AoE's. Its going to be a bumpy ride while Citan tries to get damage right, especially in the next few updates. Also this may be the wrong place to ask, but doesn't BC offer a little too much? It offers amazing speed buffs, crazy mitigation and a multitude of AoE's you can pop back to back. I know its an advanced skill and lacks single target damage, but Ice Magic is an advanced skill as well and offers much less armor mitigation and utility skills. I'm assuming Ice Magic's single target damage and CC abilities are missing in BC's kit, and I may be comparing apples to oranges.

I'm not trying to say BC is OP I'm just trying to understand. With mods my Fire Magic can give me some good speed, and my Ice Armor can give me mild mitigation. If I dropped both and picked up BC I'd still have a ton of AoEs including an AoE freeze, better mitigation, and better speed. All of this not even considering a second skill to pick up. I get BC doesn't offer a lot of crowd control or any real single target damage, but the mitigation and speed alone make it hard to pass up as a secondary skill.

[Tagamogi]

Also this may be the wrong place to ask, but doesn't BC offer a little too much? It offers amazing speed buffs, crazy mitigation and a multitude of AoE's you can pop back to back. I know its an advanced skill and lacks single target damage, but Ice Magic is an advanced skill as well and offers much less armor mitigation and utility skills. I'm assuming Ice Magic's single target damage and CC abilities are missing in BC's kit, and I may be comparing apples to oranges.

I'm not trying to say BC is OP I'm just trying to understand. With mods my Fire Magic can give me some good speed, and my Ice Armor can give me mild mitigation. If I dropped both and picked up BC I'd still have a ton of AoEs including an AoE freeze, better mitigation, and better speed. All of this not even considering a second skill to pick up. I get BC doesn't offer a lot of crowd control or any real single target damage, but the mitigation and speed alone make it hard to pass up as a secondary skill.

Maybe? Yes? I'd consider the BC speed buff to be relatively irrelevant since all existing run speed buffs will get nerfed anyway once we get mounts. Even with that out of the picture, BC is very powerful. I think part of it is that there aren't a lot of abilities for it, so a lot of the gear mods overlap and there are several mods that improve the damage of all bombs (i.e. functionally all your damage abilities) at once. I remember duoing the orc camps in Gazluk with a friend, and I'd basically drop 3 bombs doing close to 1K damage each and it felt like everything around me just fell over dead without much further effort needed. And if my 3 bombs and their fire dot ticks weren't enough, I had 3 extra buttons left over to cover aoe freeze and 2 nice heals... And my side bar extra skin mutation and golem, of course.

I think the main downside to BC is that there isn't all that much variety to it in combat beyond spamming bombs, and that's more of a playstyle complaint rather than a power issue. I really like it as a secondary skill though since it lets me focus on managing my primary skill abilities (assuming there is anything left for me to do after the bombs get done).

I think ice magic offers more in-combat toys and tricks than BC - rage reduction, more freezes, mez, random stun, ... It just feels like it amounts to less overall power since BC does so amazingly well on the bomb damage. If the bomb damage output from BC got nerfed though, it seems BC would need something else to make it a bit more interesting in combat. ( I haven't played much lately, but I'd consider the aoe limit from the latest patch more of a sanity limit than an outright nerf. YMMV. )

[snowe]

Those weren't the only skills nerfed, lots of skills can be built to rely on AoE's. Its going to be a bumpy ride while Citan tries to get damage right, especially in the next few updates. Also this may be the wrong place to ask, but doesn't BC offer a little too much? It offers amazing speed buffs, crazy mitigation and a multitude of AoE's you can pop back to back. I know its an advanced skill and lacks single target damage, but Ice Magic is an advanced skill as well and offers much less armor mitigation and utility skills. I'm assuming Ice Magic's single target damage and CC abilities are missing in BC's kit, and I may be comparing apples to oranges.

I'm not trying to say BC is OP I'm just trying to understand. With mods my Fire Magic can give me some good speed, and my Ice Armor can give me mild mitigation. If I dropped both and picked up BC I'd still have a ton of AoEs including an AoE freeze, better mitigation, and better speed. All of this not even considering a second skill to pick up. I get BC doesn't offer a lot of crowd control or any real single target damage, but the mitigation and speed alone make it hard to pass up as a secondary skill.
I've been playing around with BC/Druid a lot lately, and don't find it to be overpowered, particularly post-patch. For reference, the last three skills I capped before (nearly) capping BC were Animal Handling, Fire and Ice.

Overall, it kills slowly compared to Fire Magic (assuming the Fire Magic mod which makes Fire Breath an AoE, and no others). I like it more than Ice Magic though, which I found to be both an incredibly slow and boring disappointment after fire. I also like it much, much more than Animal Handling (which was played entirely pre-revamp). I took up BC/Druid intending to use it to do surveying runs faster, but given the overall uptime of Haste Concoction, spending time on Psychology probably would have been a better investment (less expensive and unaffected by the AoE nerf to boot).

BC/Druid will probably continue to be my surveying skill set until I level psychology (next up).
Ice/Druid will probably continue to be my 'walking naked through the snow without freezing' skill set.
Fire/Druid will probably continue to be my skill set for actually being productive.

I'm still bitter about AH though, so it has no place on my skill bar for the foreseeable future.