Well crap...I thought I struck gold. Thanks for the clarification!

You are terribly confused as to how Chimera Shot works. It does *not* do extra damage or mana return based on the damage done/drained. It does the extra component based on the total in the tooltip. If your Serpent does 1k, the Chimera component is going to do 4k every time. If your Viper drains 3k, it's going to return 1k back to you every time regardless of how many ticks its done.

I went and tested it myself - it works exactly like that.

So yes, it doesn't work as a Mana return at all. It covers the cost of Chimera/Viper. Viper also doesn't actually give you Mana, so yeah.

It seems like a potentially really good PVP mana-burn ability though. You can force a fast drain on someone with it.

Also, I'm not exactly sure how you missed the big 30% on the tooltip. You didn't even mention 30% in your post.

Thing is, if you want to argue along those lines, marks may have more attack power and individual shots do more, but beast mastery's got 20% more of them. The marks shots aren't THAT much more powerful. Even the new talents don't really close the gap because although the new talents in BM don't really help the hunter, they do help the pet deal damage, and the rearrangements of marks and surv will benefit the BM hunter more greatly. If you want damage to be balanced between the two trees, you have to put a major nerf on Serpent's Swiftness because the +20% (hunter and pet) very nearly manhandles the entire marks tree by itself.

So marksmanship is not only NOT the hardest hitting spec over time, but it also has no mana return component. There's also no remarkable utility that makes you say "wow I gotta have that" unless Chimera Shot with Scorpid ends up being amazing. All other things equal, I'm not sure why a raid would prefer a marks hunter over a BM hunter for any reason at all....that's not to say nobody should ever spec marks. Some people just like it better, and I'm not going to rain on their parade. But it's not mathematically superior.

Survival probably does less damage than either, but it makes up for it by providing better support skills like Expose Weakness and Hunting Party.

I wouldn't write off Marks so fast with the new Autoshot and Steady Shot changes. The only thing that really matters with haste now is getting Steady down to 1.5s from 2.0 so that you can perfectly ride the GCD. Marks shouldn't be anymore Mana intensive than steady is, no? They'd pretty much be the same "rotation" - Steady shots until 20%, then Throw in Kill Shots every time they refresh - the exception being that Marks also can throw in Arcanes when Imp Steady procs above 20%. Marks also gets Efficiency while a heavy BM spec won't. The trade off is that BM gets Invigoration which is pretty big sure, but with raid wide totems assuring you have Mana Spring and Mana Tide and Paladin talents encouraging to Judge to get some nice self effects Wisdom should be up constantly as well and that allieviates a lot of mana concerns.

With Autoshot not being interrupted anymore I think haste loses a ton of value outside of getting that perfect steady cast time.

Quiver + the new windfury totem will bring even 2sec cast time steady shot below gcd, making Swiftness only affect auto shot dps and pet auto attack (unless Swiftness somehow affects steady gcd, Sean?).

I'm still going under the assumption that both Arcane and Multi would be more damage per GCD than Steady. That being said, I truly do hope that the raid mana returns are enough to bump our longevity to the point where we're not running OOM before half the fight is over. Of course, I could be wrong about the initial assumption. I've never been a hardcore number cruncher.

BM would use the exact same rotation in that regard as well then.

Though, when playing with Marks earlier on Boom - Steady was always significantly higher than Arcane except when Imp Steady proc'd.

Is the "Aim Shot" referenced in the talents a different shot from Aimed Shot? It would seem that if there's no seperate shot, those talents have wasted components unless Aimed is taken. Unless Aimed no longer resets Auto, it's still a pull shot only and not really worth a point.

Anyway, I could easily speculate either way and have decent arguments, but what does our resident beta reporter have to say?

"Aim Shot" is indeed Aimed shot and just a bad tooltip typo. And yeah, Aimed is *still* tied into Autoshot so it's still just a pull/pvp shot.

Doesnt the windfury tooltip read melee haste?
So I assumed that that doesnt work for us... unless our ranged weapons are suddenly seen as melee.

So BM hunters are going to default down to 36% haste? That should make for some interesting stuff.

If WF goes live like this I really hope that they bring some 3.3 or 3.4 speed weapons out assuming there's still haste rating items in wotlk.

Assuming Blizzard makes windfury raid-wide like they've said they would, and the fact that Improved Windfury Totem increases it to 20%, BM Hunters will actually start with 40% default haste. 55% if you factor in our Quivers.

Haste effects are multiplicative, not additive, so it would actually be 65% (1.2*1.2*1.15=1.65).

This means a 3.0 speed weapon would become a 1.81 after haste effects.

Hopefully hunter gear won't come with much haste. Would be largely wasted for bm between having no effect on steady and having no effect on pets.

Just about every quest I've seen has at least one haste rating item as a reward. So, yes, there's still plenty of haste rating. There was even a 36 passive haste rating trinket with a 140 haste Use: effect.

Any info about ranged weapon speeds from quest rewards?

Am I missing something, or is ranged weapon speed irrelevant now that Auto and Steady shots no longer interfere with each other?

Sorry, I hadn't been paying attention to that. I'll keep an eye on it as I continue to level (only 72 atm, current cap is 77, so lots more quests to do).

BTBlue Weapon Hunter Gun has 3.1 speed. Not in the 3.3 range, but moving in that direction perhaps?

Global cooldown still persists.