What is wrong with cone aoe?

[Simple_Barghest]

Most of the time, the cones were in combos with circular AOEs, leading to a constant need to bounce from outside the mob group to inside the mob group and then back out.
In addition, because Squeenix is allergic to mobs sharing the same physical space, they'll keep dancing around and adjusting themselves - meaning that nice tidy pack you got clumped up for your conal Overpower has now done the shimmy-shimmy and some of those mobs are now outside your Overpower's damage range. Sometimes even dancing behind you because that's just how SE decided they wanna do the do. As a Tank this leads to the added shitshow of trying to constantly adjust the pack in order to ensure you can keep doing damage, which sometimes ends up not even mattering just so you can keep the pack in the NIN's Doton. Until they, their atoms jittering violently, dance themselves out of *that* to make sure that every mob has its personal space to hit your face.
Thirdly, Overpower and Rockbreaker used to - and Fuga still needs - a target to function. Which with this game's tab-targeting system, was and is a mild annoyance but still an annoyance. I'm not against AOEs needing a target to function, on that particular note. But either make it so all AOE needs a target, or none of it. They're a bit too picky and choosy, and Machinist's AOEs not needing a target even FOR its conal AOEs leaves me feeling kinda "HMM."

[Deceptus]

In addition, because Squeenix is allergic to mobs sharing the same physical space, they'll keep dancing around and adjusting themselves - meaning that nice tidy pack you got clumped up for your conal Overpower has now done the shimmy-shimmy and some of those mobs are now outside your Overpower's damage range.

This is the right answer. It's a repercussion of SE's insistence on making dungeon mobs HUGE.

Unless you were routinely screwing over your casters by standing in the middle of the mobs despite even the circular AoEs reaching all mobs from the pack's edge, nothing was changed.

See above. Many times it wasn't the tank moving the mobs, but the mobs deciding they were going to move on their own to a tanks flank.