Question about increased AoE Damage

Hey everyone i just had a real quick (and probably kind of stupid) question about skills such as blast radius, which increases the area of effect and area of effect damage of an AoE skill. If i was to put a point into this skill would it increase the damage that my fireball does to every target that it strikes or only to targets adjacent to the point of impact? Thanks.

Skills that have AoE in the text on the gem are effected by AoE talent points. If fireball has AoE in the text directly below the spell name, it would be effected the way your asking about. If not, it won't.

Increased area damage increases the damage to all targets hit with the explosion including the target that was hit with the projectile. If the fireball doesn't explode on hit (chain/fork/pierce) then it won't deal area damage (and area damage modifiers will not apply in that case). As long as your fireballs are not piercing, forking or chaining, area damage modifiers such as blast radius, concentrated effect etc. increase the damage in all situations.

This comes up a lot, and many have the misconception that a fireball exploding can deal different damage to the target it hits and the targets caught in the explosion, which is not the case.

ok thanks for the quick response now i know what to put my points into.

One thing to remember is that area damage modifiers don't affect fireball's tooltip stats. Since fireball can deal non-area damage through chaining/forking/piercing, it shows that instead of damage dealt by explosions. The actual damage for explosions is still of course amplified by area damage modifiers, you'd just have to calculate it yourself.