The increased area node feels weak without heavy investment and not worth putting more points into, other than as requirement for other node down the line. Putting point into them do barely noticable upgrade to the area. Only on detailed testing with dummy that I can perceive the slight improvement on the skills.
The skills that I have tried involving area node are 2-handed warpath, melee puncture, sync strike without cascade, abysal echo, ice barrage, smite fissure. All of them feels like taking a lot of area node will be detrimental to the build by sacrificing too much damage.
Line shaped ground AoE is also too narrow and visually underwhelming
I understand we should avoid increased area causing OP full screen decimation like PoE, but at the moment I feel we are at the other end of that power spectrum.
Back to this topic. I have done some testing, and pretty sure the %increased area is based on area and not radius (it is in the name duh). The problem in using area is that some skills are very concerned with the linear distance between the player and the enemy (most melee) and are now subjected to inverse quadratic rate of return when investing in increased area. For example: warpath had +15% area increase for each skill point. This translates to just roughly 7% radius for each point and feels rather underwhelming.
Hence, I propose that skills that centred on the player such as puncture, fire aura and warpath use a linear increment like radius or length. AoE skills that can be targeted away from the player can stick with using area increment since they do benefit more from the whole area increase. Otherwise, please adjust the number higher so an investment in the skill area feels more impactful.
EdIT: puncture does have increased melee range in the skill description but I don’t think it is working as intended when I test it on the dummy. Tested using polearm. Without the increased range, I can hit the dummy just outside the circle indicator. Adding 2 point in it(+30%) gives me the increased range of exactly 1 dummy away which is meh…
