Quote Originally Posted by brancinaed View Post
Frontlines is 24v24v24, so imagine Player 1 - Player 19. Imagine you have 19 targets stacked, then 4 enemies show up and cast conal Area of Effect (AOE).

What AOE damages who in the stack? If the targeting logic is good, ideally lowest health enemies are targeted first or squishier targets before tankier targets, people may die but the only way to guarantee any one person is hit would be targeting them.

Since there are 19 targets stacked, clicking may be ineffective, we have to tab quite a long list of people... ugh.

Are low health targets receiving AOE damage before higher health targets? Are ranged taking AOE damage before melee because they take more damage? Is it based off distance? This requires all sorts of new balancing and weird interactions that are not as intuitive as area of effect is area of effect.

Capping AOE will require all new targeting logic, it may be less intuitive than uncapped AOE, and it would make grouping up tightly have no meaningful weaknesses. A more realistic solution to problematic AOE is reducing range or damage rather than reworking how AOE works.
Consider, somehow this was solved in games that were designed for PvP, and we had literally hundreds of people onscreen at one time, so forgive if I find your diagram rather underwhelming, and while I find brainstorming useful, I honestly believe your introduced way too much complexity.

In the specific game that I'm thinking of when we had fort sieges it wasn't unusual to have cluster of 50, 100 or even more people in one area. The game did not introduce anything so complex in its logic as "who is squishier, who is lower health, etc". Instead it was based solely upon the distance to target. It was up to the player skill - and if you are dealing with a battle on that scale, you should not be tab targeting anyway but keybinding and hitting marked targets (anyway I abhor tab-targeting in PvP in general).

In that specific game, it wasn't "weird" interactions, to summarize some classes and attacks: melee would take more damage at close range, but they had more defense to those melee attacks, whereas magical ranged would take more damage to melee attacks but they'd be at range and they would take less damage to magical ranged attacks