In truth, this was a common weakness of plant-type martial souls. They tended to excel at control and area-of-effect soul skills, yet rarely possessed powerful single-target attacks.
Take Chrysanthemum Douluo Yue Guan from later generations, for example. Like Xiao Wu, he was another Titled Douluo saddled with the wrong classification.
Chrysanthemum Guan was nominally a Power Attack System soul master, but a closer tally of his soul skills could only leave one laughing in disbelief.
His third soul skill, [Aura Barrier], was a restrictive control skill;
His sixth soul skill, [Golden Stamens Flooding the Sunset Glow], turned petals into a meteor shower of attacks, shelling the ground like an artillery barrage-a textbook area attack;
His seventh soul skill, [Martial Soul Avatar], offered nothing beyond area attacks apart from enhancing his own abilities;
His eighth soul skill, [Boundless Radiance], fired beams of energy from multiple stamens, taking his area attacks to even greater heights;
As for his ninth soul skill, [Chrysanthemums Wither, Wounds Cover the Ground, Falling Flowers Break the Heart], it unleashed soul power as petal blades that spun around him to form a gigantic tornado. An area attack taken to its utmost extreme, it was still an area attack.
Then there were several other abilities whose soul skill numbers-or status as secret techniques-were unknown: [Lone Blossom Admiring Itself], a buff that increased offense and defense; [Strange Blossom], a cloning skill that created doubles for attack and defense; [Beast's Last Stand], a control skill that condensed soul power into spinning petal blades to restrain enemies and prevent their escape; and [Singular Velvet Light], a defensive skill that released purple-gold light to form a spherical shield with formidable defensive strength.
That made things rather awkward.
For single-target attacks, he actually had only his fifth soul skill, [Gathering of Cold Blossoms], which