In episode 46 of the Hunting Party Podcast we speculated whether the removal of Volley was a bug or intentional. Well GC has confirmed that it indeed an intended change.
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.
I don’t know how prevalent AoE will be in Cataclysm, but it looks as if us hunters won’t be providing much of it. With Volley gone we’re left with Multi-shot, which hits up to three targets, and firing Explosive Trap via the trap launcher once a minute, for our AoE contribution.
I’m not going to cry too hard over this one as Volley was mainly used on raid trash and for soloing packs of mobs. Still though, I hate to see some of our utility get diminished.
EDIT: This is why I don’t like to post too closed to bed time. I completely overlooked the usefulness of our AE in 5-man dungeons. As Nochecazador from http://ofmarksandbeast.wordpress.com/ reminded me of how important it is in places like Forge of Souls.
I haven't been in to check, but there's also the section of the old Stratholme dungeon with the bug traps. As near as i can remember, the bugs don't set off our traps, and had to be Volleyed down if you were soloing (the also couldn't be targeted individually, given the confines of the area)
Not to mention that it's the one shooting ability that we can do within melee. Since they've confirmed that removing the min range for shots is a bug…
Oh well…at least we'll see less and less of new hunters volley spamming single mobs…
At the correct gear level you should be using CC on the trash in H-FoS and H-PoS, tanks (without sheilds at least) really take a beating from those packs at sub 219 gear.
I'm not sad to see volley go, it's plain boring,and I hardly used it prior to the redesign of MD. However, if they don't redesign multishot in someway we could face an encounter like Onyxia where hunters are left on the bench becase they don't do leet dps on the adds.
I did have a sneaky plan for pugs that were plain annoying, fail or asshats. MD> Volley> Readiness> MD> Volley wait for 30 seconds FD and watch hell break loose as the AE threat faded from the tanks, ah but a pipe dream now.
Rilgon over at SES also did a good post on the issue.
@Bindura I'm not sure what kind of amazing pugs you get into, but what I've seen in random dungeons is a complete lack of CC due to the idiocy of other party members–either via spamming AE, or by spreading dots/diseases to anything trapped, shackled, hexed, or sheeped. It's an unfortunate fact that it's impossible to CC if someone is going to run off an smack your carefully CC'd target as soon as you get them trapped properly.
No volley! /cry, but will be interesting to see what they do with multi-shot. HOpe they don't go promising stuff about magical arrows coming from the sky not being like hunters, and change multi-shot to something like that.
Thanks
Alex Vlad.
thedwarfbeforethestorm.wordpress.com
@Ndiayne I don't get into amazing pugs that are able to pull off CC, in fact I would normally get lol'd for suggesting a priest shackle one of the casters, trying to justify to the pugoids that it will actually make it easier for me to tank (on my DK) and the healer to heals gets followed up by "You shouldn't be queing for this if you are not geared enough, fail tank." I copped alot of abuse from "less" geared dps when I first started tanking 5 man heroic ICC, (apparently CC is the devil, a pve throwback and a way that pvp treads on pve's toes) it's ok to que for HPoS in mostly blues and pull sub-2k dps (some less than my lowly tank) on the bosses but God forbid a tank tries to que in a mixture of 219's and 200's, who's tanked Ignis and XT.
I was going to add that speel but I try to avoid qq of other players because I certainly am not the best player out there.
Saying that- on my I got the achieve from H HoR in a pug within the first week of 3.3, and I had very few unfinished HoR dungeons…so I did have a pretty good streak once upon a time.
The fact is the trash packs in FoS and PoS were designed so that at correct gear levels we would need to use CC, according some Blue I read on MMO-Champ. They tried to do the ICC 5man dungeons with the Cata philosphy, some interesting larger single trash mobs and packs that need CC, untill you overgear them at least.