its wierd how only autocast things work that would have been an epic 20 secs of micro managing the pets

The first question I can not really answer a 100%, but I am seeing the same as you - the pet surviving.

As for the second question; no, it really isn't, unless you are at very low focus when there's 4 seconds left of your BW. A single Arcane Shot will probably be about ~40-50k damage, which would be lost as you're using Focus Fire which does no damage and "wastes" a global cooldown in exchange for a pet basic attack that might not be guaranteed. I believe a single pet Bite / Claw does about 30k damage.

In short, it doesn't really matter, and you're probably best served not bothering and just using those Arcane Shots and Kill Commands.

Looking at an example damage report (and a few others), Force and Verve only targets players, so pets, beasts, etc. are untouched.

Is it worth it to drop the T14 bonus set (6 sec increase for BW and LnL +20%) in favor of the new 522 gear ? Or is it better to wait until you have atleast two parts of the new set before dropping it?

FD shows the data clearly. T14 2pcs bonus is around 1.5K DPS, T14 4pcs bonus is around 1.7K DPS. Replacing a iLvl 496 tier item with iLvl 522 item is an extra of around 300 agility and 500 secondary stat that can be as high as 1.7K DPS.
Therefore I would not replace my T14 4pcs bonus for a LFR version of the new loot and as I like the extra haste (I'm a MM) I would not replace it for a single pcs of a iLvl 522 item. For 2 pcs of iLvl 522 items, the return of agility clearly is better (even if the T14 level tier item was upgraded already)

It is called "Avoidance"and DB got this in 5.2.

Now I have a QUestion: Can Turtles Tank Warbringers if you glyph +60 Healing Glyph?
a) with blue Gear
b) with ~~500 ilvl Gear and Tank Trinkets

Lokrick mentioned earlier that Force and Verve only targets players. Are you sure the DB avoidance is coming into play here? Are you sure Avoidance is working at all for DB?

Blue posts have indicated that they have removed the ability as early as 5.1 from pets because "Pet avoidance previously trivialized encounters against some of Pandaria's rare mobs.". This has affected all types of pets from Death Knights, Warlocks, and Hunters. You can find example bug reports on the Blizzard forums in this post.

This is why our pets die on the snails in ToT, the Galleon AoE, etc.. Our pets are no longer getting avoidance because Blizzard has apparently received reports that avoidance was trivializing AoE on rare mobs.

DB supposedly did get Avoidance Aura on March 15, but I have no idea if that is still in effect after the apparent stealth nerf to avoidance. Can anyone confirm if DB is getting the benefits of Avoidance?

Thanks, Lokrick. In that same thread, after the blue post, there were hunters complaining that Avoidance no longer applied to raid mechanics like Blade Lord's Unseen Strike and issues with the trash leading up to Ji'kun, so I was unsure if the blue post was correct or not.

Another raid mechanics question, there are rumors that the Direhorn Spirit from Heroic Horridon is susceptible to feign death and other threat-dropping abilities (e.g., Mage Invisible, Rogue Cloak, etc.) which result in the Direhorn Spirit turning toward another player (and not being visible toward that player, causing a wipe). Anyone seen evidence of this from hunters who were targeted by Direhorn Spirits in Heroic Horridon? I don't plan on doing this if we attempt him tonight, but it would be good to know in case I'm targeted by adds from the troll tribes.

I tried Feigning when i had a Spirit on me last night specifically to test this and it didn't switch targets but this may have been because we were wiping and there was only a few other people left alive. I'd certainly be interested to see other reports of behaviour when we get targeted though.

To follow up with another raid question, is anyone else having DPS issues on heroic Jin'rokh ? I'm usually quite competitive with the rest of the team but i'm a good 20-30k DPS behind them on Jin'rokh. I'm wondering if the pool buff mechanic isn't applying to all of our pet related cooldowns.

I have for some time looked over recordings and kills from other guilds in ToT and I see a large amount of SV hunters even on single target fight. I have given it a hard thinking and can not find a reason for this. Can any of my fellow hunters explain why I see this shift?

We got a little behind on our 3-day schedule and should be trying Heroic Horridon next week. I plan on trying fd to see what happens, but if you did feign death and the dinosaur stayed on you, then we seem to be safe from this mechanic. The only complaints I've heard from so far are mages with invisible, but I suspect rogues do as well.

As for Jin'rokh, yes we do less damage on Jin'rokh but our pets do get the buffs. We've checked this with both stampede and normal hits. All pets are getting the buff based on the position of the hunter (there are blue posts that confirm this was intended and it's the way things are working in game now).

The reason we are lower than several classes on this fight is probably because of the focused lightning orbs, which often force us to get out of range of the boss (at least, with the way our tanks do this fight, we are supposed to take our orbs to the grates, which is out of range). Warlocks are still ok in this situation because of the dots. We, however, can't shoot the boss. Since in all specs the hunter dps is now eclipsing pet dps (even BM), this results in a significant loss, especially in heroic parses where you are likely to have all 4 pools. In the last normal Jin'Rokh I did, I parsed 8th in BM on World of Logs, but I was still significantly behind other classes in our raid. In our first H Jin'Rokh kill, I ranked within the top 70, and was mostly just competitive with the rest of the dpsers. I expect this gap to get bigger when we have the boss on farm because other classes like melee simply have an advantage on this fight.

What this should mean for your group when this happens is not that you're doing something wrong and not getting your buffs, but that the rest of your group (especially melee) are playing their classes correctly and we're at a disadvantage due to dropping focused orbs/fissures outside of autoshot range. The same can happen on Megaera with strats like my guild uses which kill the blue head and result in range having to kite the blue beams (instead of staying in and simply avoiding cinders/venom bomb like oither guilds are doing).