If they were correctly designed they wouldn’t be useless on PVE without aoe. But it’s a larger problem. Funcom designed the whole combat system one way before releasing the game. Since that time the devs never stopped to change it one way then an,other way, without seeming to know where they wanted to go, nor what they wanted to achieve.
The result is both PVE and PVP are completely messed up with every changes adding to the mess rather than correcting it.