[Update: fixed the explanation of the first quote : ) ]

There has been a bit of frenzy over the Volley loss, both over on the beta foums, and in comments here. Not even so much over the loss of volley, but over what Ghostcrawler had to say about it (and possibly a bit about their wonky implementation of the change, which I agree seems poorly done).

I’m concerned that a lot of the GC Volley rage stems from either misunderstanding something Ghostcrawler said, or from deliberately only reading the negative things and not reading any of the positive things. Let me highlight a couple quotes, that will hopefully make the situation look a bit better:

The Volley and Multi-Shot niches were very similar, which resulted in the latter being dead.

This I think is the statement that caused the most misunderstanding. Some people interpreted this to mean that Ghostcrawler thinks that multi-shot (or volley) is not currently used. This is not what he’s saying. He’s just saying that hunters have multiple tools to deal damage to multiple targets — multi-shot, explosive trap, and volley. The end result was that no one used multi-shot… in the beta. This discussion is all about the beta. (And actually, no one used it because it was worse damage than single-target shotting, and, you know, it’s not an aoe).

Why not kill multi-shot? Ghostcrawler also answered that:

We wanted to pick one and we though Multi-Shot felt more huntery and less “clunky”

Now don’t get me wrong, volley is far superior to multi-shot. Volley is, for example, an aoe. Multi-shot is not. And in the beta multi-shot’s damage blows taurens. However, don’t forget this:

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.

They know that multi-shot is not a replacement for volley as it is right now. They will be changing it! Finally, some more words of reassurance:

When you do need to AE, hunters will have the tools to do so.

Now, it is entirely possible that their implementation of the multishot solution to aoe will suck. It absolutely could. It’s also possible that their solution will rock ass. Or be just right for the new Cataclysm gameplay.

But the point is, we don’t know.

All we know is they say they are aware that we need an aoe. They don’t want volley to bet that aoe. They know multishot is not currently that aoe. They are changing multishot and assure us that we’ll be able to aoe as needed.

If you assume that any change being made will suck even when you know nothing about it, either you’re just naturally a pessimist (in which case you really shouldn’t be posting your negative opinion everywhere – pessimists are wrong just as often as optimists, and that’s pretty often) or possibly you just have a very low opinion of Blizzard’s game design… in which case maybe you should switch games.

But if you’re one of the vast majority in the middle — you love wow and your hunter, and Blizzard sometimes gets it wrong and sometimes gets it right — but generally gets it right more than wrong and the game steadily improves over time — then just be sure not to skip over all the good things Ghostcrawler said. There’s plenty of it, and it addresses every concern.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the removal of Volley, and I thought I’d interject a few thoughts about the state of dungeons in cataclysm at the moment.

Right now there are only three available for testing: Blackrock Caverns, Throne of Tides, and Stonecore. I did Stonecore only once when it was first available for testing and we didn’t finish it. In the latest build you have to actually go there, can’t port anymore, and many who try are getting stuck in the Maelstrom. Having just got my character unstuck in the last build, I don’t want to risk getting stuck and losing him again. But I’ve done BRC and ToT a lot.

State of Crowd Control

BRC has no CC required. ToT has two or three pulls that require CC. These are all groups of mobs that have two healers in them. I suspect that when we’re running this as a heroic for badges when we’re overgeared, we won’t be bothering with the CC there.

I don’t remember if we did any CC in our Stonecore run, but I certainly don’t recall any.

The pulls are still far less aoe than in Wrath. When we pull groups of 3-4 no one bothered with aoe, because our aoe was so heavily nerfed you needed larger groups for it to be worthwhile. If we still had our Wrath numbers we’d have aoed most pulls, but with Cataclysm weaker aoe, we just single-targeted stuff down.

AoE

While there isn’t much in the way of CC going on, there are aoe pulls in every one of those instance. In Stonecore there is a boss fight requiring aoe. I did it before Volley vanished. If I were to do it now… well, we’d have to rely on the other dpsers to handle the adds while the boss was submerged. I could take out one of them every here and there, but that’s about it. Mostly I’d just be watching the rest of the dps team play.

So from the only things we know about cata encounter design so far, aoe is still cropping up in every dungeon. It’s still part of the game, just not overboard like in Wrath.

Interaction and fun

Wow used to have a design philosophy where only certainly classes were aoe classes. Other classes either didn’t have aoe or they had crummy aoe. Hunters had the crummy kind — a super weak volley on a 30 sec cooldown. So we’d volley, then essentially sit around for 30 seconds while the aoe guys took care of that pull.

In my opinion, this is bad design. A dps class should be able to meaningfully contribute to the dps of just about any encounter.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to work for a major table top game publisher, and I got to work and talk with some very talented game designers. The way that they viewed game design was endlessly fascinating to me. To them, “fun” was just another mechanic to be balanced, along with strategy, complexity, and intuitiveness. They could sit down and tell you what kind of mechanics made a game fun, and the different kinds of fun and how they appealed to different kinds of players.

There are a couple key things about fun. First of all — not doing anything is not fun. It’s boring, and it makes the game feel slow or long. This was especially a big deal for board games — you didn’t want any one person’s turn to last too long. But it was okay if the other player had ways of interrupting his turn — even if he didn’t use them, he still felt engaged. But just sitting and watching and waiting your turn to play is not fun.

Furthermore, success has to be based on your decisions (or at least have the illusion that it is): you have to be the one winning and you have to win because of what you do and how well you do it. If all you do is roll the dice and the highest number wins, that isn’t terribly fun, even for the winner. If all you do is watch stuff happen, that isn’t terribly fun either.

So let’s say that explosive shot was changed to do the same damage over 30 seconds that volley could do over 30 seconds. You drop explosive trap, and it ticks away just as if you were volleying. This is the same dps scenario, but you aren’t acutally doing anything for more than the first second. Even though you made the decision, even though the dps is the same, you aren’t doing anything, so it isn’t terribly fun.

Now Volley itself runs dangerously close to this. You hit volley and sit there and watch it rain down. This isn’t a winner of an ability, but it’s a zillion times better than doing nothing and watching other people play the game.

Solution

I’m sure there are a ton of solutions to the hunter aoe situation, and I very much hope that Blizzard is just trying to decide which one to use. The fact that they removed volley without implementing any kind of replacement at the same time is very worrying, however.

Multi-shot, I should point out, is not an aoe. It’s a multi-target attack, not an area of effect. Perhaps they could make multi-shot a conical attack or something. But it would in fact be very easy for Blizzard to improve on Volley with multi-shot or another ability. Something that had more interaction, that let us actual do things more than once per 10 seconds.

The LolLovers wouldn’t like it — they don’t like skill or decision making as part of their play experience — but they are an aberration, not the standard. Most people prefer that nice balance. Not too complicated, but not too simple. Enough decisions so they feel responsible for victory and enough interaction so they feel like they’re the ones doing the winning.

I’m going to say mean things about some BM hunters here, exposing the dirty little secret of a certain kind of BM hunter. So let me preface by saying that I’m not talking about all BM hunters, and that I love the BM spec. I love my big red pet, and I played BM from patch 2.0 until it got nerfed into the ground in patch 3.0.8. I am, of course, a dps whore and I follow the top dps spec whatever it is.

The recent post I made over at wow.com got me thinking about the BM players a bit. After some reflection, I think there are three different kinds of BM hunters at the moment.

The BM Die-Hards

Some die-hard BM hunters are BM because they just love the flavor of the spec. They love their pet above all else and they’ll play their spec until the end of days and give god the finger if fluffy can’t join them in the afterlife. I have a lot of respect for these guys — I even knew one of them back in vanilla, raiding MC and BWL with us when BM was far more of a fail spec than it is now.

I can absolutely respect this irrational die-hard attitude — I understand it what with my gun obsession.

Interestingly, the vast majority of BM hunters nowadays would identify themselves as die-hard BM hunters. And I think that these guys are actually a minority.

The Cowardly BM

Another large chunk of the BM population are the youngsters who just fear change. These are the players who started WoW in BC days, when BM was the unquestioned top and overpowered hunter spec. When they started playing they were advised by their friends, strangers and everyone in the universe to play BM for leveling, for raiding, and for pvp. They glorified in the one-button rotation macro and their big red pets and their spot high on the damage meters.

When BM fell hard in the Wrath nerf these were among the loudest complaining about breaking their beloved spec. Most of these guys had never even played another hunter spec for more than a day or two. They really have nothing to compare their spec to. They never listened when their mothers said, “How do you know you don’t like it until you try it?”

Not everyone who started playing in BC falls in this category, of course, but a heck of a lot of BM hunters do.

As Wrath progressed and BM boosts failed to keep up with their scaling issues, it was interesting to see some of these guys finally give another spec an honest chance. I got a lot of emails from them, finally sick of their spot on the meters and taking the plunge and discovering the joy of another spec (and others who grudgingly played another spec only to help their raid group, and stayed BM the rest of the time).

A lot of these guys finally gave another spec an honest try for the first time, and found they liked it. Many more of them, however, never did try. I refuse to acknowledge the latter as legitimate die-hards. They haven’t earned the title, they just fear change.

The Lol-Lover BM

And here’s the dirty secret of the BM playerbase: a lot of them aren’t attached to the spec for any flavor reason at all — despite what they claim — they love the spec only because it is ridiculously easy to play. They loved their one-button macro back in BC. They think they should have every right to just press the same button all fight and still do just as much dps as the most complicated spec in the game to play.

These guys became very clear when I wrote about the BM spec at wow.com. I pointed out that in the current incarnation the spec was way too easy. Their rotation is literally just two buttons. I expressed disappointment in this after being very excited about some of the proposed BM changes, and many of the Lol-Lovers jumped on me in the comments.

The gist of their comments were something like this:

Not everyone wants to theorycraft to the sixth digit and have elitist jerks tell them what to do. You like to play that way but it doesn’t mean everyone does, and we should be able to play the way we want and still do the same dps.

You shouldn’t have to be the greatest player in the world and spend hours theorycrafting to raid.

I’ll agree that you shouldn’t have to be the greatest player in the world and spend hours theorycrafting just to be able to raid. And in fact you don’t. However, I do think that the greatest player in the world should be capable of doing more dps than the average player. I mean, don’t you?

But these guys clearly did not think so. They felt — very strongly — that it made perfect sense to have a spec that was easier to play, and further it made sense (in a way I don’t understand) that the easier spec should also do just as much dps as much more difficult specs.

First of all, I can tell you now that if this were the case — BM with a easy rotation summed up as a 1-button macro, and still do the same dps — then 80% of all hunters would be BM. Doing the exact same dps in a vastly easier way doesn’t make you equal to the other specs, it makes you better. And players will drift to the spec that is best.

But I also totally disagree with every element of this Lol-Lover mentality.

Your Decisions Should Matter

I want my in-game decisions to matter. Further, in good game design, you decision have to matter.

If you really want to be able to play the way you want without regard to theorycraft or advice and have no “best” whatever, then every single one of your abilities has to be identical. You can have Blue Shot and Red Shot and Yellow Shot — but all of them cost the same, have the same cast time, and do the same damage. Now you can play however you want to play and still perform as well as anyone… but no decision you make matters.

I remember when Hrist was in town. We were going to do some table-top gaming, but he had his two little girls with him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They have this online game they can play forever.”

And sure enough they were entertaining themselves by playing some game that involved dressing up dolls — that’s it. Just choosing clothes and hair styles and stuff. It enthralled them, kept them busy and engaged for hours. But it wasn’t really a game — it’s an activity.

If you really want to be able to play any way you want and have the result be the same as doing it any other way, then maybe I can talk to Hrist about getting the name of that dress-up game for you. That sounds more up your alley.

But once you have a choice between two abilities that are different — once you have a decision that matters — then one answer is going to be better than another for any given situation. If you can cast either Arcane Shot or Kill Command, you want to cast Kill Command. One way of doing things is best if you’re trying to optimize your dps.

But now that you have that decision, now that you have abilities that are at all different, now you’re subject to theorycraft and the Elitist Jerks telling you the best way to do things. Either you’re dressing up dolls or you’re killing dragons. You have to choose one or the other, you can’t have both.

And again, I’m not saying you have to be an uber-skilled wow-savant to be able to raid. But I do think that the uber skilled savant should probably perform better than you or me.

Spec Equality

I really, really want to see all three specs being about equal in Cataclysm. While they’ll never be exactly equal as long as they aren’t exactly the same, getting within 5% or so of each other is a fair and probably achievable goal.

But if the specs are going to have approximately equal dps, they also need to have approximately equal complexity, or difficulty to play. Because without equal complexity, the specs won’t be equal. If a spec is clearly much easier, it needs to have lower dps; if it has the same dps, it needs about the same complexity.

In Frostheim’s world this equality among specs is the ideal, this is the goal. Three hunter specs with about the same dps and about the same complexity.

This way you’re going to do the best dps in whatever spec you are best at playing. You can play whatever spec you enjoy the most. And for us dps-whore min-maxers, we’ll also get to pick the spec that we like the best, rather than the spec that maths out in the lead.

And hopefully all the specs have enough complexity to allow skill and practice and knowledge to play a role. When you’ve been practicing and reading and playing for a few months, you’ll be a better player than the guy who just bought a hunter off of ebay. You’ll do more dps, and stay alive longer.

Who wants to play a game where skill doesn’t matter? Where on day 1 the ebay guy is just as good as you?

I don’t, and I can only say that I’ll be using every resource I have in the beta to push for this kind of spec equality, not just in terms of dps, but in terms of complexity and opportunity for quality decision-making.

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.