Quote Originally Posted by Chopstix View Post
No. Circle AOE is a good thing. It has nothing to do with braindead. The change keeps the aoe pattern the same.

If everything was conal then sure the one circle aoe would be best to be changed to a conal. But it is the other way around.

In practice u have a lot more surface area u can hit now = more dps. Bigger shiny numbers, be happy.
Absolutely not. The increase in surface area is in an exceptionally unhelpful place - surely you wouldn't support dragon's voice style tank aoes? After all they have a far greater area covered than regular circles.
The change has been dire from the perspectives of both tanking and dpsing, as now not only am I actively encouraged to point half the mobs at the party, but I don't have a window where I can step out of the mob aoes and continue damaging to take pressure off the healer. As a DPS it is significantly harder to hit the mobs because there's incentive against the tank properly shepherding them. It is much harder to hit linear aoes with the more spread mob grouping, it is also harder to hit circle-on-target aoes when the mobs are here there and everywhere. A temporary solution to the circle-on-target aoes would be allowing DPS to target the tank with them, but that is a fix on the order of whatever it is they're doing to high jump/mirage dive.

25π y² is not much bigger than 64π/3 y² either.

It also no longer requires a target which is means that casting it is no longer guaranteed to hit anything.