Volley in Cataclysm - or Lack Thereof

If you're reading this post, chances are you'll already know about the fact that Blizzard intends to remove Volley and "replace" it with Multishot as our main AoE ability in Cataclysm.

Probably every hunter would have something to say on this matter... and whilst I've resisted commenting much on Cataclysm changes, this topic motivated me enough to post the following on the official Blizzard DPS forums:

If Volley is going to be scrapped, I have the following concerns:

1. You cannot control where Multishot lands. With Volley and other targeted AoEs, you can target a specific area and not hit anything outside of it. With Multishot, anything close to your chosen target may be hit (or not hit, as the case may be).

Example: Pull pack of mobs, mage is slow off the mark and sheeps something right next to the rest of the mobs, everyone else shifts their AoE so that it doesn't hit the sheep, hunter hits Multishot and breaks the sheep.

2. Flare/traps have a long cooldown.

If you know there's a stealthed player around, you can stand on a trap and hit Flare... but since rogues can sap from *outside* the flare area and disarm traps, they can get
around it. Not only that, they can vanish and wait until you waste both cooldowns again before they reappear.

Possible solutions:

1. Make Multishot a targetted AoE, or at least a consistent area of effect so that we can control where we're aiming at.

2. Remove (or at least reduce) the Flare cooldown. If you need to compensate for hunters spamming this ability, make the Focus cost high. Alternatively, make Multishot targetted and spammable (or at least a fairly short cooldown), and obviously as an AoE it will have a fairly high Focus cost anyway.

One other concern I have that I didn't put into my post because Blizzard doesn't really support it anyway - keeping your tank pet alive when doing elite soloing is going to be that much more difficult.

Currently in fights with several mobs, you can easily spam Volley wearing 2pc T5 and have your pet healed 15% of the amount of damage you do.

That won't be possible in Cataclysm unless Blizzard makes Multishot spammable (and even then, we're going to be limited depending on the Focus cost).

Blizzard may want to make classes unique, but really.... the way hunters are looking, it'll be that we're missing abilities rather than having something special to bring to the table. Not good.