Proposed Changes to Volley – Is It Really That Bad?

So, we learned that we can expect about a 34% reduction in our damage output due to the proposed changes with Steady Shot.

So let’s see what’s in-store for us with the proposed change to Volley from Ghostcrawler

Volley – reduced the damage by about 30% for all ranks. Note that AE damage from many classes is very high right now and we are looking at all of them. Volley in particular had reached the point where some hunters were using it to the exclusion of most other attacks.

So looking at this we see it’s a straight 30% damage reduction. What does this mean?

Volley’s tooltip states -

505 Arcane damage to enemy targets within 8 yards every second for 6 sec.

That would mean we would see a potential damage from Volley to be 3,303/Mob per Cast.

505 * 6 = 3,303

This damage is impacted by the type of damage it is.

• Volley is Arcane Damage which means it’s actually a Cast, not physical.
  (Ever wonder why while running in Karazhan and facing the Mana Feeders your caster’s turned into squishy melee fighters?? This is why, they were immune to Volley.)

Given, this.. just how much of a loss will this be in a raid?

Well… Of course it’s extremely dependent but probably not as much as your fearing.

See using the WowWeb Stats Report from Myclicque we can see only 1 Hunter really used Volley and of that only 3 times.  So not too much here really to say it’s a critical raid spell, but enough to use as a reference for our purposes.

So let’s break it down..

We know the “Potential” and I use the word “Potential” damage from the tooltip is 3,303/Mob per Cast. But in reality it seems a little different.

In our report we we see that Volley only averaged 5,584 Damage/Mob per Cast.

16, 754/3 Casts = 5,584/Mob per Cast

Why this difference?  Well it goes back to the fact as we state before, there’s Damage and then there’s Critical Strike Damage (Base Damage * 2).

In this case we see that the hunter actually had a 67% Crit rate on his Volley causing the real number to be higher.

So let’s go back to the what our Volley Damage Tooltip should read..

505 Normal (or 1010 Critical Strike Arcane damage) to enemy targets within 8 yards every second for 6 sec.

In this scenario we actually see that our damage potential as (Base, Critical):

Base Volley Damage = 505 * 6 = 3030
Critical Strike Volley Damage = (505 * 2) * 6 = 6060

Ahh much better now we have a Nomal Dmg/Critical Strike Damage of 3030/6060.

Now that we have more accurate numbers both as a Control (Tooltip) and on the Report. Let’s see how the change is going to affect us.

(3030 * .30) = 909/Cast Damage Reduction

So what does that mean?? Well..

3030 – 909 = 2121 base Volley Damage, 4242 Volley Critical Strike Damage

But how does that affect our hunter??

Reported Hunter Volley Damage = 5584
Changed Hunter Volley Damage = 5584 – (5584.30) = 3908
That’s a damage loss of 1,676 or 31%.

Hmm… 31% Reduction instead of a 30%.. but close enough.

As with the Steady Shot explanation, I hope this view on Volley helps you get a better idea of how to see it’s effect on you.

Next up..  Pet Related Changes (The Doom of BM?  I don’t think so.)

[Edited: Changed to reflect that the damage is to all mobs within the 8 yard area/cast.]