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.
totally agree. please Ghostcrawler! give us back our volley!
Not really following GC’s logic that it feels like magic. So, does that make arcane shot at risk for the trash heap…isn’t it a magic shot per se? Hell, how about the SV spec in general…it’s all “magicky” right? Oh wait…If we can make our pet big and red in BM is that magic or did we just make it angry by stepping on it’s tail (or an errant appendage for the tail-less) or is that, dare I say it, MAGIC?
I personally prefer hunters as primarily physical damage DPS’ers but this game is sorta filled with sorcery so why not let us keep one or two exceptions to the rule. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater…let us keep some AOE and do what you always do…nerf the hell out of it. Seriously…the only fix I want for volley is to have guns drop some sparkly buckshot (or something) instead of having arrows spring from the barrel.
I sincerely hope the change their mind again.
I disagree with the horror at the removal of volley, I hope this just a sign that times are changing and crowd control will make a blissful return, spamming volley on all trash is so boring, look at all the trapping conundrums in ICC trash for example! Would have previously been hunter heaven! I want mobs to hit so hard that you can only tank 1 – 2 at a time. Get those traps back out
I love the hunter class and enjoy the hunter class with everything it provides. But with all the nerfs that we are receiving the mage alt I am leveling looks like it will be more fun to play in Cata. I’ll probably still level my hunter to 85 and raid with it but it wont be as fun as it is now. If they are removing volley and saying they want multi-shot to be our AoE, Remove the 3 target cap and instead of it being just arrows or bullets at all targets have us just shoot arrows or bullets into the mob for a channeled 8-10 seconds. Make it cost 50 Focus and do a decent amount of damage. Just my thought on this change to the hunters.
I hold out a vague hope that they’ll at least rebalance multishot to either remove/raise the target cap (say, does X damage shared among all targets in a 15 yard cone, maximum of N% of weapon damage per target, no minimum range OR increase the target cap to 4 or 5) or keeps AoE-able mobs health balanced around one-shoting with multishot damage from quest rewards. Without that, we won’t really have anything to contribute to mass pulls like, say, the trash just before High Priestess Azil or the rock borers in Stonecore, or the Gibgoblins in Throne of the Tides.
/cry! Multi shot is lame. I am sad to see my beloved volley go. I guess I will have to enjoy it while I can.
Kinda sad to see it go, but it’s kinda odd that they plan to have multishot to be our main AoE, unless they decide to increase the amount of targets it can hit that’s really the only problem I see. We get trap launcher which allows us to shoot explosive (or maybe even snake) trap so we still have an aoe. Either way, RIP volley
I always thought it a bit weired that I could top the damage meters by spamming volley on trash. I found it a bit OP, but I think removing it is not the solution. We need some middle ground.
It kinda seems like it’d be easy to provide a more interesting hunter-like AOE ability in its place. Howabout some sort of ‘ricochet’ ability, where you should a target and the shot bounces off and hits 5-10 other targets in a 10 yard radius?
It sort of seems like to me that they’ll buff Multi-shot in some way so that it scales better with larger groups of mobs, like increasing the amounts of targets it can hit or remove the cap entirely. Also, they could very well change Explosive Trap around to do more damage during a shorter period of time and have a shorter cooldown. This way we’ll be using 2 abilities to AOE effectively instead of one, both of them feels more “huntery” than Volley imo and I, for now, approve of this change.
I wish I could say I’m surprised at this, but with the changes in the hunter class lately, I’m not.
It seems that whatever abilities we have, are being taken away because they “mimic” another classes’. Example, we’re never going to get an actual stealth ability (ever really been hunting? You NEED stealth) because it’s “too close to the iconic Rogue ability of Stealth” yet rogues get something almost exactly like our Misdirect?
Not fair. But, what is, is.
On the face of it this is horrible news imo and could in certain situations amount to a substantial reduction in the Hunter’s quality of life.
I hope that the posters above are right and that Blizz either intend to make Multi-Shot a more versatile and worthwhile ability or will maybe give us another ability that will (to some extent at least) fill the gap that just appeared in the Hunter’s arsenal.
For the moment though… /cry
For starters I don’t understand blizzards view that Volley is more magic then Multi-shot…
I can believe a hunter blasting away frantically and randomly hit/criting anything in a 10 yard radius then I can three bullet/arrows being shot at the same time miraculously hitting three separate targets.
I think a better option would have been to make the mob targeted to take full damage, it will be our main ‘focus’ & each additional mob around will be hit but the stray (or as tdf says above, ricochet) and will take 20-50% less damage then the last, this way the damage will not be crazy when there is a 10+ mob pull(with a 20% drop each time the 11th mob would be taking less then 10% of the damage the targeted mob is taking) but will still be somewhat useful.
R.I.P Volley. You’ll be sadly missed.
/boo
/hiss
/wail and gnash teeth
… so… no volley, bugger all melee abilities, and we still have a no-shoot zone close to us.
fun. :-\
Am going to go and volley the crap out of whatever I possibly can now, making it a long kiss goodbye.
Ricochet is an awesome idea. I think it should replace multi-shot. They could even throw in the ricochet sound effects from western movies! It’d also be much more believable than shooting 3 bullets from a single barrel at the same instant.
Heh Eurinome i already stroll through 5-mans using solely Volley that i have bound to a mouse button…i’ve even been known to volley 5-man bosses when in guild groups and feeling extremely lazy and never even touch my keyboard.
I wonder how long it’ll take to volley down Marrowgar….
Instead of completly romoving volley they could put it on cd. or nerf it..or boost multi shot ..but completly removing doesnt seems like a good idea.
My Hunter is my main since BC but I surely won´t play Cataclysm without Volley. If they had never pushed the damage of Volley I woul´dn´t miss it. But as it is I can´t imagine playing a hunter who can´t aoe. Actually I guess I won´t buy the expansion at all. Gratz Blizzard! You gave me so much more time! I really love you guys! Way to go!
Oh and by the way guys @Blizzard: If you don´t also remove Fan of Knives it would be kind of rediculous. Don´t you think?
just give us the single shot multi target Ymirjar Huntress “volley” and i would be happy
Retard – I guess Blizzard forgot what AoE means.. I thought it met Area of Effect? How does Multi-shot fall into that? So I guess now when a raid leader calls for AoE I’m just going to go find myself a spot and seat down and let the mages and locks take care of it now.
Maybe I’ll just level my mage up now and roll him over a hunter; If you ask me.. what made the hunter class fun is gone now. We wont even be able to solo stuff now, all the skills to allow us to solo are being removed form the game or nerfed so bad we wont even be able to solo level 60 content now.
A nice solution may be having Multi Shot provide focus the same way Steady Shot would, and having a Volley spell with an extremely high (75+) focus cost. But who the hell am I?
As long as multishot is changed to hit infinite number of targets, I think volley can be removed. Otherwise explosive trap with launcher could be changed to fill in. We’ll see; I’m not scared yet.
Well as a tank I surely wouldn´t let a Hunter in my Group. About any other class CAN AOE. Actually all phys. melee class except Hunter can: Pala, DK, Warrior, Rogue even cat druids and of course all spell casters. So why bother with a Hunter. And the new instances might not be AOEed in greens but as sure as hell starting with T12 or even before. They don´t scale. What really makes me sad is that not only are we the only single target dps class (don´t tell me rogues are single target dps) with this change but also that Warriors, Palas and DKs can all tank AND top the AOE charts. Wouldn´t it be fairer if all true dps classes had AOE and hybrids didn´t?
AoE is being nerfed across the board for all classes in the beta, so it is not surprising that Volley was removed (it already put out very low damage in beta). The thing is, we are the middle of a beta, numbers are going to be massaged, abilities will be tweaked and even changed throughout the beta cycle. As quickly as volley was removed, some other change will come along, volley could reemerge, or multi changed – who knows.
Every class is going to have the tools to contribute in AoE situations – including hunters, and every class is going to be less powerful when doing so. AoE became laughably powerful in Wrath – they are changing that model. Basing your rage or /quits on continually changing beta information is short-sighted. One cannot know that playing a hunter is going to suck based on ever changing information, that most people haven’t even seen or played for themselves. Is multishot where it needs to be to function as proper AoE right now? No. Will it ever be the all powerful AoE damage like we see in Wrath? Also no. Will it be tweaked, changed or adjusted? Yep. You will still AoE, you will still be able to solo, you will still be high competitive dps in raids and *shock* possibly even have fun while doing so. :O
amen otto! i agree with taephar. perhaps blizzard is wanting to bring back the CC glory of the old days, and give classes reason to have freezing trap, polymorph, banish etc outside of just pvp. its a much needed change. and will give us that much more reason to use our trap launcher. and who knows, explosive trap might get a few new buffs to compensate as well.
Just change multishot so that its focus cost is vastly reduced if actually hitting 3 targets. And make it hit harder per target if it hits 3 than 2.
I recently Volley spammed my way to 80, and I was shagrinned to be sitting at the top of the meters for that. However, in Wrath not having Volley would have meant being shunned. IF we don’t have it in cataclysm, we sure better not need it. The return of CC and dungeons designed to require it (at any gear level) would suffice.
While I’m fairly ambivalent about the removal of Volley, this sounds more like a (common Blizzard move, really) situation of punishing the player for the designs of the developer. It’s not our fault that Blizzard made Volley extremely strong, that they designed it in a manner that felt like “magic”, but nevertheless it became part of our arsenal, a very useful part. So taking it away because it felt like something a Hunter would not do is not exactly fair as we didn’t design the ability yet we found it more than useful.
It’s fine to redesign, this is a vital part of the game, but to remove something completely because it “doesn’t feel right”, something that’s a core part of our abilities, is not good form. Redesign the ability, or change the way the content is managed instead, but don’t just haul something right out and say “No you can’t have this anymore”.
I like TDF’s idea of a Ricochet ability, make it like the Shaman’s Chain Lightning. That would be very cool and would fit with what a Hunter does with their bow or gun.
I don’t see this being a problem. AoE was nerfed anyway and besides from the worm boss in stonecore, I haven’t run into any situation where I would pull out my AoE.
My guess is that there just won’t be very many situations where you’ll find a big group of mobs that you’re not going to CC in some way and focus fire down instead of running in and aoe’ing.
We don’t need multi to be overpowered either, hell it’s already applying serpent to our targets, that’s pretty hot. Combing that with a trap launcher explosive shot and you’re set. You’ll do more dps single targeting than you will with a nerfed volley anyway.
I’d slip Multishot in before or after Volleys, especially with a MD to the tank for a quick jump in threat, but it’s not as useful in raids as Volley was.
This is really disappointing.
The Ricochet idea is nice, but sounds like something that could not be used in melee range. Multishot has the same limitation. The really nice thing about Volley is that you can cast it on top of yourself and don’t have to keep bouncing around to find range in a tight corner.
The “it looks like magic” excuse is terrible. I’m sure I remember Sylvanas using a volley-like ability in Warcraft 3.
“The really nice thing about Volley is that you can cast it on top of yourself…” This is also what makes Volley our one real counter to Rogue openers in PvP.
Leaves a pretty big hole in the ole’ tool tip. Misdirect/explosive trap toss should still leave us in good standing for pulls here and there. Id have to imagine that we will either see a new ability coming soon or have our cooldown lowered for traps. Still hoping.
Sad to see Volley get the boot. I always enjoyed using it with MD to bring a pack of mobs to the tank (all those big yellow numbers were fun too). I’m hoping they’ll make Multi-Shot more attractive by increasing its damage or maybe have one of the higher ranks increase the number of mobs hit to four or five.
Everyting what i love on hunters and whitch i was enjoying is gone. Cata seems for me as worst expansion for hunters. They make from most unnecessary class something bad.
I’ll quit game when expansion comes, or I just make another main character, whitch will be SURE better then hunter. My 4 years happy playing with hunter will gone.
@Taephar
That would be fine if the traps were designed and actually worked to trap them, has anyone else had traps just fail and the mobs come waltzing in to stomp you into the ground in melee range?
I think the removal of volley can ultimately be a good thing. Blizzard won’t leave us without some proper AoE ability and with volley gone they have the have the room (on our button bars) to come up with something way better.
Assuming multi-shot will be changed to target more than 3:
SV: Multi-shot + serpent spread can become something like a DK’s pestilence or warlocks seed of corruption; an AoE ability that is not targeted on the ground. Ideal for fights with lots of movement.
MM: Multi-shots+ bombardement can mean you can fire a lot of multi-shots.
BM: Maybe pets will get a nice AoE ability in the highest tier of their talent trees or they may get an army of dead like ability but with snakes (like Rhumba but better)
Other possibilities are that traps may finally do some real damage, explosive shot becomes a real explosive shot or if we are really lucky we get mortarshot (or grenade launcher), like the warcraft III Mortar team so we can yell “Mortar Combat”.
If they specifically want us to not be able to keep up on the meters down the long AOE hallways where everybody pads their numbers (like, up to Marrowgar) they should just have the balls to come right out and say so. But it seems a little screwy that they’d want us to appear to be performing worse, and want hunters to start getting invited to raids less and bumped for locks and mages more.
If they’re giving us something equally effective in exchange, I wouldn’t have a problem with this. If they’re making multi-shot hit 5 targets instead of 3, do double its current damage on each, and have no cooldown, I wouldn’t have a problem with this. Or, if they’re nerfing every class’ AOE abilities so we’re all a little lighter but hunters are in the same place compared with the other classes, I won’t have a problem with this.
It will be hard to come to a final opinion on this without knowing where we stack up, which will be based on knowing how they’re changing other classes’ AOE ablities.
well rather than qq about the removal of Volley, i’ll go ahead an make a suggestion for the improvement of Multi-Shot. Make it a channeled ability akin to Volley, and keep the 3 target limit.
Multi-shot, chanelled duration 6 sec. Shoots up to 3 arrows every 1.5 sec doing 100% weapon damage per target. cost 40 focus.
This still themeatically (sp?) fits the hunter class. I can see a hunter grabbing a handful of ammunition out of his quiver/pouch, stringing them up and shooting them off.
Oh wait we dont use ammunition or quivers anymore…
I guess it will be time for me to put my beloved Hunter to sleep and get a new main.
If everyone else in the game can do the same single target DPS as a hunter but they have AoE and we do not that makes us a completely unattractive choice for a raid.
Make multi shot hit all targets in range in a cone effect area and maybe we have some sort of useful AoE. Would need to shorten the CD on it so we can spam it like volley and it still does not help us one bit the way volley did.
Volley can hit around blocking areas (awesome for PvP), it can hit behind us, it can save a healer that has many packs running toward them by just letting it rain down on the mobs heading his way, it can be used to send pats over to a tank with MD, it can be useful in so many situations that are not just AoE spam for the purpose of doing damage. Removing it does not only remove our AoE capabilities, it removes a lot of utility function, at least for me and you other hunters as well if you where using it to it’s full potential.
So because they cannot get multi-shot to work, they remove volley in an attempt to make us use multi?
That is negative. Like taking away your green shirts because you don’t want to wear hiddeous pink. Negative enforcement never works.
I get that they nerfed volley an dI even think that is good. It was getting ridicuous when Onxy raid was new. The first nerf then however didn’t do it, so just bring it back to vanilla level. Volley is then a situational ability. I use it e.g. a lot when soloing to get agro away to a pet when there are more than 3 mobs grouped together. Sure I’ll find another way (trap launcher e.g.), but I think it is lame.
Blizzard is overobsessed with PvE raid again, and forgets all the other gameplay aspects.
Not sure if Blizz reads this blog (they should) but if you guys are so worked up, go post on the blizzard forums (I know…it is in the Cata forums and not all of us can post there…just post in the dps forums). But please be specific as to why this is a bad idea and don’t just qq. Also, please stop “this ain’t fun no more. I am quitting/rereolling” because it is just not true. If the removal of one spell that is only rarely used on boss fights and only used on trash to flex your ePeen causes you to quit or reroll, then you kind of miss the point of the class and you probably shouldn’t be playing it anyway.
Does it suck a little bit? Yeah, it was a fun ability to see big numbers on trash and did have some uses in PvP and on the rare boss fights. Will we lose a raid spot? Probably not especially since our pets are going to be the new buff/debuff machines. I am guessing that the multishot/trap launcher combo will get some work so that the cooldowns are lowered or something along those lines to keep us in line. And if they don’t, well, they keep saying trash is going to need CC so our volley would have been more trouble then its worth.
Remember how development works folks. We may lose volley, but the beta isn’t closed yet. I have to wonder if blizz has removed volley due to the fact we will be able to launch traps now. Possibly trap enchancement is to follow in the beta… or not lol.
Either way hunters are going to face some challenges going into cataclysm just like we did going into wotlk. Those who experimented and found ways to keep up still play thier hunters. It took a while for me to realize that taking away mana is going to free us up from watching the tub drain rather than take away resources. We press on!
@ Bloodbane
I don’t like how much Recount is used as a sole judge of performance, but that’s the way it is. If everyone else can still AOE just as effectively and we cannot, and I go from being anywhere from 1st -4th in a 25man raid down to 12th or lower, solely because Blizzard decided (A) to put AOE pulls in front of us, and (B) to take away my AOE ability but not anyone else’s, then I’m a lot closer to getting replaced when things start going badly. Hunters being less effective equals hunters being less invited. That’s a major problem. This is not “qq”, this is as specific as it gets.
Good. I’m glad Volley is gone. Literally using AOE on every single trash pull because we could was getting really boring… 6 months ago. Today it just makes me want to wash my eyes out with bleach. I think the really important thing to remember here is that we’re going back to a more vanilla WoW playstyle where constant AoE, both in boss fights, and in trash is less imperative. Yeah, maybe we conly use multishot… but if 1/16 of trash pulls are AoE pulls then why does it matter? And let’s not forget, we don’t really use volley on boss fights because our single target damage is so much better. Currently, in order to compete with mages and warlocks and rogues… etc… we have to run in to the pack of mobs (dangerous) drop a trap, and then disengage out, and then volley. That’s a lot of steps. Granted, with trap launcher, it would be easier… but it’s still multiple GCD’s to start doing damage that other classes can do in one. Why bother with it?
Our utility is not hurt by this change. We bring enough things to the table that not having the best AoE in town isn’t going to hurt us. There will always be a spot for the hunter. Tanks want their misdirects! Stay with the single target awesomesauce. It’s what we were built for.
A nail in the coffin for pet tanking and soloing…MD volley to get AOE aggro no more…:(
@ Grovin
Not many of the raids I go on really care about overall damage done throughout the entire raid. In ICC, does trash even matter? I hit one button, maybe 3 if I decide to get frisky and drop explosive shot first and MD to the tank. If you are being judged on your ability to spam one button on trash then that is just fail on the raid leader’s part. Hell, when the feral druid or DK tops 40K and posts the recount, most of the time they are made fun of for caring about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like Recount Spamming either. I keep it up to monitor my performance to make sure I am pulling my weight but don’t worry about where I placed if the boss is down. No one cares about my dps on Blood Council if I take care of all the kinetic orbs or on Saurfang if I make sure to drop my frost traps and I am able to distracting shot the mobs chewing on the ret pally’s face. Dreamwalker anyone? As long as I kite the zombie, everyone is happy. That being said, topping 17k on the mana shield phase (I was assigned to stay on the shield) on 25 Deathwhisper was pretty cool and not once did I have to use my volley button.
Also, one final point. It is beta. Blizzard is two or so builds ahead of what is available to beta testers. Maybe they have something planned and just can’t say anything because it will get our hopes up but then they can’t balance it or whatever (like the original camouflage). I would not be surprised to see multi-shot changed so that is is like cone of cold or something like that. Or the cool down removed or lowered on trap launcher or something to that effect.
If not, then Cata gets released, parses are released and if we are lagging that far behind that hunters are no longer invited to raids because they fail at trash (which, again, is going to need more CC and less AOE or so we have heard), then we will get volley back or some other new toy.
Traps resisting? Well it is the beta, so that may happen, but if I had to take talents to make traps work so I could be a good Crowd controller, I would everything I loved about the hunter got wiped out by the AoE whether it be a hunter or a Mage doing it. AoE can plod off entirely for all I care :-p CC made dungeons so much more interesting for all all they need to do now is bring back kiting! (proper required kiting, like from UBRS at the last boss)
Goodbye Volley, I won’t miss you!
those bastards have probley killed hunters all over again….
We should note that the removal of Volley doesn’t hurt us in the charts as much as it would now in Wrath. Even before the removal, you needed much larger packs to make it worthwhile since the damage of all aoes is going down.
Furthermore, the encounter design encourages single-target dps (and occasionally even cc) more than Wrath.
My issue is that I think it’s a poor design decision when those aoe situations do come up and our class has nothing effective to contribute to those pulls after the first seconds (toss explosive trap…. then single target. Or if multi-shot is fixed, we do that a couple times before single targeting). It’s not fun. It’s actually frustrating to sit there unable to effectively contribute, but it won’t hurt your chart dps nearly as much as now (still hurt a bit).
@ Frost
Now that, I can understand. I am not worried about the dps meters but not being able to help out, that I can get my hands around. Have you seen/heard any indication of a possible new skill that will help out?
I also didn’t necessarily agree with GC’s comment about how “we are the only class” usually means that the developers did a good job since they don’t want the classes to be that similar. I mean, I get where he is coming from but when if feels like a class is being left out of the fun as opposed to be different and uniquely special (bonus points if you can tell me where that is from), then I think it is a bad design.
I dont agree with the removal of volley.
I do agree that in wrath it was overpowered (along with aoe that other classes could do) but for cata it would be nice to even have a nerfed version of it just for the sake of having more options for pve situations, also it is useful for pvp (mostly arenas) because it can be used to pull people out of stelth, stop casters/healers from drinking/rezzing if they are LoS.
The loss of utility is the concern I have with the change.
If they buff multi-shot then I’m cool. If they don’t, then I’m against this.
i dont rage much about what blizz does. my heart may break when they make this change or that ( such as the recent aoe dmg cap change) but i go with it. this change, however, caused me to lose my shit.
its their reasoning that killed me. guns that shoot black ARROW, thats totally fine, but volley is to magical!
removing abilities based on themes is a slippery slope (spell reflect anyone?). WoW is fully of logical fallacies, i dont understand why volley gets singled out, its not that bad an offender of breaking themes as some of the other nonsense things that go on (fire mage with icy veins), its just part of wow.
had they removed the ability for any other reason, i think i would have silently suffered, but as it stands… i dont buy it for one bit. i call bullshit, im just saying.
Maybe it’s good to also take a look at an earlier comment of GC about Volley because I don’t think Blizzard intents to remove our ability to AoE. They just want to change how we AoE.
on 23/08/2010 on the US damage dealing forum GC commented:
“It’s gone. We want to make Multi-Shot the spell hunters use for AE.
Channeling a spell that makes arrows fall out of the sky doesn’t feel like a hunter ability and doesn’t even really match the name of the spell.”
source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26560868356&pageNo=1&sid=1
It seems to me they didn’t like Volley (probably thought it was too much like Blizzard or Rain of Fire) and decided to change Multi-Shot to become the hunters main AoE ability.
I don’t think they intend us to use Multi-Shot as it is at the moment.
Give us a shotgun blast for our close rang, a cone of damage with us at the center, and give us a machingun ability, for range, something that sprays bullets at a single target giving him the vast magority of our dps output but allowing strays to hit all surrounding targets.
Multishot is already inferior to abilities like cleave. Why take an actual AOE out of the game and leave us with nothing to compete with when it does matter. *Sigh*
sorry, one more comment, just have to add this. a lot of people talking about spamming volley, maybe i missed something, but wasn’t the volley spam already done away with when we took the focus move. without a pool of mana we cant spam anything that doesn’t regen focus, at most we could have dropped two volleys than had to take on a single target to regen our focus b4 dropping another.
No, we could do around a dozen volley’s in a row even in the focus system.
Well, volley was used for content that Blizz developed to be AOE’d down. Now, they say we will no longer have the AOE content, so I can see why the did away with this. However, the MD>Volley was an awesome move, and now it’s gone. I can only assume that blizz is truthful in the CC portions of instances. We know that we will be running the heroics for 12-24 months, and if we have to CC every mob for that long, those better be some short instances. I will not spend 1-2 hrs per heroic just for 2 badges. I think that trap,pull,trap,pull,trap,pull is just as bad as pull, AOE, pull, AOE, pull, AOE. My guild uses CC in Ruby Sanctum, so perhaps it will be like this in the future for our heroics as well. People will bail if the heroics are long or tedious.
Currently there is no CC in BRC, 2 CC pulls in ToT, and I don’t remember doing any CC in the deepholm one, but we didn’t finish it.
All of them, however, required aoe. The deepholm instance required it during a boss fight.
@eltex: we had to CC back in BC, and after gear got better our tanks started tanking everything. if CC is needed in later heroic dungeons, we’ll probably only need to CC for the first 6-12 months before we can blow through them like we do now. and back then we DID do heroics for a good amount of time for just a few badges. botanica comes to mind. also frost, keep in mind that they may not have the normals designed to need CC, but the heroics later perhaps. i agree with the aoe thing, but perhaps glyphs may add some umph to our explosive trap and multi to make our aoe a bit better.
I’m fine with the removal of volley, IF they make Multi-shot a more interesting ability for AoE situations. I’m fine with class-unique things, but the lack of a real AoE (current multi-shot is NOT an AoE) for one single class is not right.
Oy vey. I must say that Volley was almost too easy to use, but if they’re gonna take it away, they should at LEAST buff Multi-shot.
I don’t like this because when I mine I’m in areas with mobs and if u disengage u jumped right in another mobs range and now have two mobs on u in melee range where we are useless drop a few traps and hit with our axe trying to get to shooting range now with three mobs on us. It would be ok if I could shoot in melee range with pistols or just main gun then I’d feel like I was shooting my way out. I use to drop traps and volly not disengadging into other mobs. oh well I guess ill have to take a bit more time to get to node and then have someone jump down and steel it. lol
It also might be interesting if things went back to a kill order, I remember doing instances like heroic Slave Pens when sure you could AoE but it was much more effective to take out tha darned healer or the fearing mob first. Someone mentioned that CC kill CC kill is no different to AOE spamming but traps/sheep breaking made for almost unique fights each time, i hope this will make some of our more useless PVE skills usable again, distracting shot and wyvern sting spring to mind, some AoE would be nice, i hope they are creative with what we have left!
stolen from someone on the mmo-champ hunter forums
Blizzard meeting in early wrath:
GC: “I don’t like that rogues, a pure dps class, don’t have an aoe ability, while all other pure dps classes do. How about we give them an attack that makes blades whirl out of nowhere, even if they aren’t even using daggers.”
Blizzard meeting later in wrath:
GC: “I don’t like that shadow priests don’t have an aoe ability, let’s get them one ASAP.”
Blizzard meeting in early cata:
GC: “I don’t like that ele shamans don’t have an aoe ability, while all other ranged dps classes do, we should get them one ASAP. I am thinking we could make an earthquake that for no apparent has no affect on the area after. What? than levitate would be OP? Well shit, just let people with levitate up get hit by it anyway. Of course it doesn’t make any sense, I am ghostcrawler, goddamnit.
Blizzard meeting later in cata development:
GC: “I don’t like that hunters can just magically spawn a rain of arrows from the sky, as if from nowhere, so let’s just remove
Volley from the game. What do you mean then we would have a pure dps class without an aoe spell? What do you mean other spells in the game make even less sense? What do you think this is? Fair and balanced? Just let them use multi shot. Multi shot only hits three mobs? and it is far inferior to similar abilities that other classes have? I already told you people, I am ghostcrawler, bitches.
Ghostcrawler decided, reluctantly to give some explanation about the Volley removal and Multi-Shot change
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“I know I’m going to regret posting in this thread again, but I think it’s the right thing to do so I’ll take one for the team.
We think Multi-Shot is a more interesting ability and can fill the hunter AE niche (along with Explosive Trap). We’ll have to change Multi-Shot from the current version to get it there. I’m very sorry if for some unusual reason Volley was your favorite spell as a hunter. We’ve been trying to consolidate abilities and free up some bar space and having multiple AEs that competed with each other seems like a good area to hit up. The Volley and Multi-Shot niches were very similar, which resulted in the latter being dead. We wanted to pick one and we though Multi-Shot felt more huntery and less “clunky” (to use a favorite Wow forums term).
Do consider that you won’t be AE’ing yourselves through Cataclysm content the way you do currently. When you do need to AE, hunters will have the tools to do so. In situations where you do have to AE, you are probably not also trying to CC. When you’re back to the level of trivializing lower level content, nobody is going to say “Don’t bring a hunter. Their AE spam isn’t spammy enough.” We don’t consider easily breaking rogues out of stealth a good reason to keep Volley around.
I think that hits most of the reasonable concerns. I care much less about addressing the unreasonable ones.
As always, those of you whose sole contribution is to post very inane or derogatory things will be banned.
Man, have we come a long way from “AE is only for trash.”
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source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26560868356&sid=1&pageNo=21
Beta is not done yet. Lets wait and see what blizzard has in store for us before we all jump of the bridge.
I don’t care about losing volley that much, but I do care about the fallout. Given the new Serpent Spread talent, I expect that 2/2 points will be a must in order to compete with SoC, FOK, Bliz, etc. The fact that serpent sting can crit now also adds to the urgency of specing for this. However, I anticipate that this will be one of the talents that Blizzard tweaks in order to balance AoE DPS classes, so it may not turn out that bad. The other sad factor is that this is an SV talent, so perhaps a baseline ability will be tweaked instead of this talent.
It may sound like this isn’t such a big deal, but if you want Careful Aim 2/2 or One with Nature 3/3, you’ll need to take a point out of your SV tree. Given the other talents available to pull from towards the end (where other talents become available), this one only seems like a logical choice. You’re only other SV choices are:
Hunting Party
Serpent Spread
Sniper Training
So you’ll have to pull from there or skimp on Careful Aim or One with Nature (given you’d agree with my SV spec, but I have no beta access so no scientific analysis can be done).
“I don’t care about losing volley that much”. That’s because you don’t probably run old instances or raids. But even so, looking at the mage doing awesome AoE damage and awesome single target damage, after having a similar power will feel like being screwed. So the mage does the damage and you look at him and think “Ah, I remember those days when I could do the same. Oh, I have some focus, I should now use this awesome hunter ability called multi-shot. Please, random mob, kill me!!”
OMG, this is bullsh!t! WTF Blizz, why not just slap my mom, crap on my face, and burn my house down.
The only line that gives me hope that this recent change won’t blow donkeys:
“We’ll have to change Multi-Shot from the current version to get it there.”
At least they know that Multi-Shot is not good enough as-is to replace Volley.
So ur talking about op check out a hybrids class AoE druids hurricane my freind no santified gear or anything did 34k dps.. spaming hurricane i did only 20k with volley what gives why is a HYBRID class doing more dps than a physical dps…