Volley and "Area Caps"Follow

Not sure on no 1

I heard that area damage caps were being lowered (or introduced) but I doubt Volley could ever do enough damage to hit them (unless you get 10+ mobs).

I seem to remember Volley being effected by spell damage as it does arcane damage but it takes effect for the whole duration rather than per tick (eg. +18 spell damage will increase each tick by 3).

Damage caps limit the total damage done by AoE spells (outside of crits). A quick search on the Oboards seem to reveal that, while blue posts have put the cap only when 10+ mobs are being AoE'ed, in reality there appears to be a hard cap on AoE spells, varying per spell. After you hit the cap of however much damage that spell is allowed to do, it gets split between the targets. For mage spells it ranges from 6500 for CoC up to about 28000 for Blizzard, with most towards the lower end.

Pulling these numbers from nowhere, but assume the volley cap is 1600 and you hit for 200 a tick. You could AoE up to 10 mobs before getting reduced damage. Now, if you were AoE'ing 2000 mobs, each would take 1 tick of damage, for a max total of 16000. The cap isn't effected by +dmg, talents, or anything else, but extra crit damage doesn't count into the cap (a 400 crit still counts as 200 toward the cap).
This hit mages hardest, and was probably introduced specifically to nerf them, due to their ability to take on ungodly amounts of mobs and CC/AoE them down (Faxmonkey and his 93-mob pull >.>).

Edited, Oct 5th 2007 1:34am by lsfreak

was that on a video called "stupid mage tricks" or somethin close to that? when we had the scourge invasion and he would round up entire spawns at once. Pretty insane.

edit. this link has some of the movies for ya http://www.warcraftmovies.com/viewauthor.php?id=1387

Edited, Oct 5th 2007 2:05pm by KDenelor

To better answer this, Kelnoen was right. +spell damage does increase the volley damage. I have tested this with various pieces of gear to see how high I could get volley to go. I eventually got it up to hitting 200 per arrow. However this severly hindered my normal shots as I had to sacrifice a lot of agility/AP.

But, this also works with Serpent Sting. You can actually make your Serpent Sting do a lot more damage then it normally should.

So far I've noticed that the +Spell Damage effects mostly Serpent Sting and Volley. It does not affect Explosive Trap or Immolation trap. It also does not affect Viper Sting, but it does affect Wyvern Sting. It gives a slight bonus to Arcane Shot, but not nearly as much as additional AP would.

But the next patch should change this anyway so that our AP adds to Volley, Serpent Sting, and Explosive Trap I think they said? Perhaps I'll use mine for more then just plvling my friends in lower lvl instances.