Volley Being Removed In Cataclysm - General Hunter Discussion - Hunter Forums

I couldn't find the actual post on the official WoW forums, but the people over at the Warcraft Hunter's Union blog quoted Ghostcrawler as confirming that volley is indeed being removed.

"Many people held out hope that the absence of Volley from the latest beta build was a bug. Ghostcrawler just stepped in to confirm that it was deliberately removed.

Yep. Volley was edging out Mult-Shot, even though we think the latter is the more interesting ability. Volley felt too much like a magic spell and not something a hunter was doing with her bow or gun.

This brings hunters full circle. Back in the day aoe was considered a class specialty — a few classes could aoe well, and others essentially couldn’t. Hunters had a Volley back then, that did very little damage, couldn’t crit, and had a very long cooldown. So in aoe situations we volleyed once and then were left with our single target abilities.

Blizzard eventually decided that “aoe” was not a good strength for a class, and started to spread aoe abilities out to all classes. Personally I think this was a good design decision — even if it’s only trash, it’s just plain not fun to be unable to contribute to a pull in any meaningful way, and “fun” is a mechanical part of game design.

But aoe became clearly overpowered in Wrath. It made sense that they were scaling aoe abilities way back (my volley at 83 was doing about 1/3 the damage it was in Wrath). But removing our ability to aoe almost entirely I don’t really agree with.

Now we’ll approach aoe much as we did in vanilla — we’ll lob out an explosive trap then have nothing much to contribute for the next 30 seconds. We can multi-shot to hit 3 mobs, certainly, and it helps a bit that multi-shot is now only 40 focus and got a tiny damage boost, but its damage still kinda stinks. If there are 3 targets to be hit, you might do more total damage with multi-shot than by firing Chimera Shot or Explosive Shot or Kill Command. But maybe not.

MM and SV both have talents that boost their multi-shot a bit, but we can still only fire two off before having to go back to single-target shooting to refresh our focus. Now even before they removed Volley, its weakened state meant we needed at least 5 mobs for it to be worthwhile (whereas multi-shot never was worthwhile regardless of number).

I think giving us a reason to use multi-shot would have been a better solution than removing our aoe entirely. After all even without Volley, we aren’t going to use multi-shot unless it’s better damage than our single-target damage."

From what I have read, currently in beta multi-shot has no cooldown and this is supposedly meant to compensate for the loss of volley. Also there is the fact that in Cata, we will be able to "shoot" all of our traps, which means we can fling out an explosive trap for aoe stuff.

Big Red Kitty has a post on his blog that I think sums up the loss of volley in Cata quite well. At least in my book anyways.

The first time we ever actually used Volley was in Lower Black Rock Spire. Or was it Upper. It was a broken kind of hallway leading to a long ramp that, at the top, we fought a ton of ogres. In that broken hallway, there were ants. Cockroaches. Oozelings. Jeebus we should pop over to WoWWiki and look it up, but pfft. It was in 2005 and who really cares. Leeroy Jenkins was the height of uber-cool and nobody knows who he is nowadays. Kids. They just don’t respect the classics. Wait, we just totally tangentalized.

Volley. We did it in LBRS. Or UBRS. No, it was LBRS. Stupid ants.

Anyway, the entire concept was stupid. We hate Volley. Yes we used it to great acclaim with Gorlladin, but still; it was dumb.

Let’s break-down the DPS-classification to show you why.

Melee vs Ranged

Melee: Rogues, Paladins, DKs, Warriors, Feral Druids, and hunter-loot stealin’ Shaman.

Of those classes, only the rogues are pure-dps. Thus, they should be the #1 melee-dps class.

Ranged: Hunters, Warlocks, Mages, Boomkins, Shadow Priests, and more loot-whorein’ Shaman.

Except for hunters, all the other classes have really natural AoE-capabilities. Not necessarily “equivalent” in either power or effectiveness, but natural. You understand “natural”, yes? A mage using a wand is natural, a mage going stabby-stab-stab with a dagger is not. Yes the mage can hold the dagger, but actually using it to dps is dumb.

Hunters should not AoE; it’s not natural.

When it comes to a single-target, no class should be able to touch a hunter in terms of pure MQoSRDPS. We don’t need AoE because we are the masters of single-target destruction. Imagine a knife-throwing rogue being able to do 95% of a hunter’s damage and you’ll have an idea of how silly it is that a hunter be able to effectively AoE.

Yes, when over-powered, Volley was great fun. Especially with a good AoE-tank!

But that’s not where our bread is buttered. Hunters eat great big tall hungry-man sandwiches of Single-Target Mayhem. If a hunter is permitted to stand still (and has Mana, (and soon to be Focus)), nobody should survive our onslaught.

Which is why paladins suck. Suck giant green pools of pukie cockroachy slime! But we digress.

Every class should have limits, both finite and definitive. Tanks tank, Healers heal, melee dps meless, AoE classes AoE, and Hunters kill the big, bad things that go bump in the night. Volley was an affront to our natural tendency to destroy targets one-by-one.

Are we going to miss Gorilladin and Volley slaughtering talbuks in Nagrand? Yeah, we are. But Cataclysm is coming, and AoE isn’t the name of the game anymore.

It might be a bit early to state as fact, but we think Movement is the next big concept. Karazhan was about Movement, and we think that model is going to be used as the foundation of all of Cataclysm.

When I first posted this topic, I had mixed feelings about volley going bye bye. The more I thought about it though, the more I agree with what BRK is saying. So initially, you were correct Niika, a small part of me may not have wanted it gone.

Our new multi-shot in action in Cataclysm right now.

Here is a list of the current focus costs in beta:

• Cobra Shot: 0 focus  -  2 sec cast – no cooldown – generates 9 focus
• Steady Shot: 0 focus  -  2 sec cast – no cooldown – generates 9 focus
• Arcane Shot: 25 focus – no cooldown
• Multi-Shot: 40 focus – no cooldown – now instant shot
• Aimed Shot: 50 focus – no cooldown – now 3.5 sec cast
• Chimera Shot: 50 focus – 10 sec cooldown
• Silencing Shot: 0 focus – 20 sec cooldown
• Explosive Shot: 50 focus – 6 sec cooldown
• Kill Shot: 0 focus – 10 sec cooldown
• Distracting Shot: 0 focus – 8 sec cooldown
• Concussive Shot: 0 focus – no cooldown
• Tranq Shot: 35 focus – no cooldown
• Hunter’s Mark: no focus – no cooldown
• Serpent Sting: 25 focus – no cooldown
• Venoms: 30 focus – no cooldown
• Aspects: 0 focus – 1 sec cooldown
• Traps: 0 focus – 30 sec cooldown
• Trap Launcher: 30 focus – no cooldown
• Mend Pet: 0 focus – instant
• Kill Command: 40 focus – 6 second cooldown
• Misdirection: 0 focus – 30 sec cooldown
• Deterrence: 0 focus – 2 min cooldown
• Disengage: 0 focus – 25 sec cooldown
• Feign Death: 0 focus – 30 sec cooldown