With the AOE 'adjustment' this week quest length has gotten a lot longer due to the corresponding longer battles. Part of the apeal of GW was the 20 min + missions that limited the number of bailers due to thier Real Life issues. Especially in the later missions with 8 players that were already long duration.
While the AOE 'adjustment' is more real world in itself, gameplay is going to move a lot slower for most players even with rebalanced crew builds. This a is a foundational game play change, and I would suggest this mod might turn people off to the game that migrated here from WOW and the like, where I hear missions are in excess of an hour.
Given the above I have ask if the is some way to decrease the play time for the quests now that AOE is so effectively 'adjusted' to do less damage. I don't know if Arena Net considered the longer mission play time when putting this mod in, but I think the conept should be reviewed, as it changes the demographic and play style, this one change could nerf game sales overriding the 'no monthly fee' perk and making GW more like the rest of the pack in play style.
I don't see an easy answer here, while this AOE change is a lot fairer to the enemy AI it doesn't add value to the average player.
I have noticed that in large swarms not all enemy flee from AOE, so the flee feature must be done via % table calcs. Perhaps the percentage of enemy fleeing could be could be adjusted to balance thier survival rate and still allow less of a long mission clock time.
I will admit someone with no game experince will only notice a baseline of longer / harder missions, but people currently playing the game network and will most likely effect game sales in the future, and they are very aware of this foundational this change.
AOE 'adjustment' and PvE quest length
Capella