Ultimately though autoshot dps is weapon-speed irrelevant unless you measure over a very short period of time, unless I'm completely retarded. With the way we're doing the cycle math, it depends very heavily on the speed of the weapon whether you get 3 or 4 autoshots in the time allotted - it's a very short window.

However the slavemaker should have more autoshot damage than the smiting xbow over time. And since the weapon damage is higher, the multi-shots and aimed shots should be hitting harder too. I'm still scratching my head over this.

Edit: math that doesn't matter to my point is removed

The trick being, if you do in fact lose .31 seconds per 10 seconds on auto-shots due to the faster speed waiting for aimed shot to cast, vs. losing .04 seconds per 10 seconds with smiting bow, that means 3.1% of your autoshot damage is gone from the slavemaker vs. only .4% with the smiting xbow. And I think thats the real loss.

How does blizzard fix this? Adding more 3.4 speed weapons? Or change the aimed shot mechanic so that the slow weapons aren't universally better until 20dps improvements happen?

That's another way of looking at it, yes. The problem is, indeed, that going from 3.4 to 3.0 is that, in theory, your individual autoshots hit a bit less hard (due to a lower AP multiplier), but you get more of them so you end up doing the same DPS. But when you're fitting them in between specials, which you almost always are, you aren't actually getting any more autoshots.

One random idea completely off the top of my head would be to add a new hunter passive skill (might be a good example of a mid-60s skill for the expansion) called Quick Shot, that, when you do a special, simultaneously fires off a weaker autoshot, which is regular autoshot multiplied by [(time elapsed since last autoshot) / (autoshot cooldown)], above some minimum floor like 0.2.

So if your autoshot time is 2.5 sec modified, and you shoot at 2.5sec, then again at 5.0 sec, then when you do Aimed/Multi at 6.0 sec, you'd also immediately fire off a Quick Shot that does (1.0/2.5) = 40% of your normal autoshot damage. This way you could recapture that lost damage and autoshot would be weapon-speed-independent as always intended.

But if multi-shot has a 10s cooldown, how's a 9-sec cycle possible?

it's a 9 second average cycle, with the multishot damage per second calculated in, rather than a 10 second cycle including each skill.

according to what I've read that's the way it used to be, but those same sources said it was an across the board hunter DPS nerf. It'd be a dangerous thing to try again.

Aimed shot used to reset the auto shot timer, but was changed to its current form in the hunter review patch (1.7)

They could fix it by continuing to run the autoshot timer even when an autoshot is 'banked' during the casting of aimed shot (essentially completely decoupling specials and auto).

well, the issue is that the slower your weapon is, the more contribution you get from AP, and the way hunter damage mechanics work, FAR more of your damage comes from AP than from actual weapon DPS. these calculations are based on 1400 AP, which actually significantly undershoots realistic raid buffed numbers with naxx gear (i have over 1700 raid buffed already), so the gap will just widen.

the optimal weapon speed for a ranged weapon is fundamentally tied to the cooldown of aimed shot and how many shots you can take during that cooldown/what percentage of shot time you 'lose' during the casting time of aimed shot. with current quiver haste being what it is, ash has pretty much the perfect weapon speed possible - as slow as you're going to get that still allows you to fit two shots in between your aimed shots. it's possible that a weapon that can fit three perfect shots in 6 seconds (with sufficiently high base damage to make up the multishot/aimed shot gap) could outperform the 2-shot cycle, but that's speculative math that i personally can't really do at work, or maybe even at all :)

How sad. Well, the best way for Blizzard to get around this without nerfing hunter DPS is to make all the weapons 3.3 speed or slower, but I doubt they'll do that. Instead, they'll probably do something that nerfs Hunter DPS accross the board again, or speed up the crossbow of smiting.

They could also just reduced Aimed's casting time to 2.0 or even 1.5, and then add the remainer on the cooldown. It'd allow for much fewer, if any autoshots to be lost during aimed; however, I'm sure there'd be some PvP pushback about a 1.5sec aimed.

Banked shots could be a problem too, because it's going to mean an even bigger burst coming after an aimed. People already are pretty annoyed by an Aimed/Multi/Auto combo hitting them, throwing in an extra auto is just asking for more whining.

that's basically what i was saying but with more math :)