Unless there's something I'm overlooking, I don't see the value of a 1.5 cobra shot, specifically, when your GCD is now one seconds if you're trying to squeeze 3 cobra between your explosive shot cooldowns. To do that, you need a (6-1)/3= 1.66(repeating) cobra shot cast time which is 758 haste rating.

How useful is the pet skill 'Roar of Courage'?

Any specific pets you'd recommend for Ferocity or Cunning?

4 cobra shots between ExS would require a 1.25 cast.

3 cobras+1 sec GCD like BA or As would require a 1.33(repeating) cast time.

I'm not sure what effect latency has on this. I was interested on what how you guys feel we should approach latency now with the new queueing system.

Like all other pets that bring buffs and debuffs, cats are extremely valuable if they're providing a buff or debuff that your raid doesn't have. Roar of courage doesn't stack with Battle Shout, Horn of Winter and Strength of Earth totem but is a huge dps gain if those buffs aren't present.

As for ferocity vs cunning, I'm personally seeing cunning ahead by 123 dps in femaledwarf.com

I have tested kill command on a target dummy, yes I understand without raid buffs. Kill Command was doing half the damage as my arcane shot. I do not see how it would ever scale high enough even with raid buffs/debuffs versus arcane shot plus our mastery talent.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Notice he had 4 arcane shots for that fight, its very rare to have arcane shot as a focus dump outside of using it for lock and load. During that fight he had 7 lock and load procs. Its quite possible he prioritized BA over arcane shot during LnL procs or he had decided that he needed to regen his focus during LnL procs and fired cobra shot instead. It is the main reason why I am using the Serpent Sting glyph.

I very rarely have enough focus to use Arcane shot as focus dump. Not sure if others have higher haste.

For SV it's not just haste that affects this but our crit too. I've noticed during rapidfire if I get a string of crits (which then partially refund the focus cost) I easily focus cap and have to sometimes use a string of arcane shots to keep from becoming focus capped. This seems to happen more during rapidfire, berserking or bloodlust where the combinations of crit proc from a trinket + haste buff leads to focus capping.

Even with kill command producing less damage than an Arcane Shot, it still would appear optimal to use it over arcane in the LnL proc when you are near focus cap, just because it doesn't waste the LnL proc on an Arcane Shot. KC is just there as a big focus dump, then allowing you to use the LnL procs on Explosives (ES>KC>ES>AS>ES).

In regards to the pet situation, I still find Ferocity to come up ahead of Cunning by about 23 dps in Zeherah's Analyzer. Also, at the standard current gear level of mostly heroic blues and a few epics, crit is still showing as a higher weight than haste according to my calculations on Zeherah's. Although, it seems that the haste weight is not set in stone at all, and changes drastically with simple changes to gear.

I also find myself using Arcane Shot enough in a fight to warrant AS Glyph over SS Glyph. 10-12 AS's in a 5 minute fight seems very standard, and you're most likely overcapping focus if you're producing much lower Arcanes than that.

What are the thoughts on BA before ES at the start of a fight? Getting black arrow up that much faster to provide LnL procs would seem most optimal. In that case, the opening rotation would look like (SS>BA>(Rapid Fire, Call of Wild, etc.)>ES>CS)

-Dark

I would argue that this talent is strong. It allows for extremely high damage for the first 1/5 of a boss fight. I was doing about 24k sustained dps for the first minute of the fight in Baradin's Hold (absolutely zero heroic gear, was wearing 2 green quest pieces and the rest was quest blues and normal 5-man blues).
From 100% to 80% your rotation is still the same except you do not fire arcane shot even if you are focus capped. You still continue to spam cobra shot. By using cooldowns during this first 20%, the damage for me was high enough that it kept me top on the meters for the rest of the fight, even ahead of other raid members who were in mostly heroic gear.

As for glyphs: arcane shot vs serpent sting... considering you do not fire arcane shot for the first 20% of the fight, the damage increase seems very lackluster. I would need to evaluate parses of boss fights and see how often arcane shot is even fired during a 5-min fight.

Also, I'm still earnestly looking for some theorycrafting on which stats have more value between crit, haste, and mastery. I'm sure every hunter out there wants to know which stat they should reforge out of.
If I had to guess, I would assume that there is a certain haste "softcap" we may want to reach for cobra shot cast time. Following that, perhaps mastery is our least favorable stat considering crit strike chance has synergy with certain talents AND increases our damage AND affects all our abilities/shots. Mastery doesn't have synergy with any talents nor does it affect a portion of our damage.

As for Pet Talents - I'm interested to know what other hunters use between Bloodthirsty, Boar's Speed, and Charge. I personally am using Bloodthirsty because I don't want my pet's happiness to drop during a fight because it's almost guaranteed that I won't notice it. Also, with Dash, Boar's Speed seems to be relatively useless in a raiding circumstance unless the boss is being moved a lot. Same with Charge, although it is the only ability of the three that actually contributes to a teeny bit more damage.

Didn't even notice it was you posting Neruse, long time no see! However, i'm not quite sure what's causing the differences, but I did notice that swapping from a ferocity to cunning pet drastically increased the stat weight of haste. Not sure if this is bugged, or i'm missing something here. Just double checked again, and now i'm getting a 48.7 dps loss switching from ferocity to cunning.

Careful Aim seems to provide a solid dps increase instead of putting those two points in One with Nature. Also, I find even without using Arcane shot for the first twenty percent of the fight due to Careful Aim, you should still be outputting around 10 AS in an approximately 5 minute fight. This would appear to give AS Glyph the edge over SS Glyph.

-Dark

Here's an issue I ran into yesterday and I'm wondering if anyone knows a good way to handle it. The situation was that I had Rapid Fire up and my trinket proc'd 1000+ haste just as LnL was proc'ing. I already had about 80 Focus as I was 1 second from getting Explosive Shot back up.

I could not find a way to reduce my Focus before hitting 100. Kill Command didn't have enough juice to stop me from getting back to 100 before the 2nd Explosive Shot and I'm about 95% certain that I got a Thrill of the Hunt proc on my first Arcane Shot after LnL dropped. There did not seem to be anything I could do to stop myself from Focus Capping.

Any thoughts on how to handle a situation like this aside from not having Haste proc trinkets?

There really isnt much you can do. If you get desperate to burn focus, BA is still on cooldown, KC doesnt cut the rapid focus gen, and LnL is proc'd so you dont want to hit arcane, pretty much the only other thing in your arsenal is a multi, which won't be much damage, even if both the multi and imp SS both crit. It may even be less damage than to just hit another cobra and suck it up that you'll be focus capped for that second or two.

For this kind of situation though, I'm staying away from haste-procs. For now, they just seem to create too many situations where you're either capping focus, and having to dump it on inefficient things like KC, rather than happening to proc just when you need them most. I would rather a proc that I always get the most out of (preferrably Agi proc, though will live with a mastery/crit proc in the interim).

As for pet talents, are people still noticing boss fights where the boss is being moved around enough that the pet isnt getting to attack all the time? If this is the case, Boars speed is going to wind up being a clear winner, letting it keep up with the boss and maximise uptime.