You have that backwards. Damage range is what it uses, not DPS. Easy to test for yourself, even; get a Screeching Bow from Strath and compare your steady shots to your normal weapon.

I'm not entirely willing to just take your word on it. I know that pages like wowhead isn't always perfectly right, but there at least is says weapon damage not DPS. If you are in the beta and have firsthand knowledge, then please give me a link to a shot of some kind as I remember quite destinctly the discussion about Thori'dal and it's DPS bonus.

Steady Shot uses weapon range normalized to that of a 2.8 speed weapon.
When dealing with averages, this is the same as WeaponDPS*2.8.

Has anyone considered looking at the math on the new pet talents?

I'm particularly interested in a wind serpent (cunning tree) vs a raptor (ferocity tree)

Ferocity is obviously geared towards being the DPS tree, however the following abilities piqued my interest in having a "utility" pet with the cunning tree instead:

* Owl's Focus 2/2 for 5/10% chance that each pet special ability will make the next special ability cast within 8 seconds cost no focus
* Feeding Frenzy 2/2 for 20/40% additional damage to targets with less than 20% health
* Wolverine Bite: 1/1 for 20 focus, 10 sec CD attack that cannot be dodged, blocked or parried, but can only be used after the target dodges. Currently listed as doing 5 damage in the tooltip, but that is most likely a typo
(and to a much lesser extent)
* Cornered 2/2 for 25/50% increase in damage and reduction in chance to be crit when at less than 35% health

Also, if mana ends up being an issue, Roar of Recovery (1/1 for 34 focus, 5 minute CD, 30 yd range roar that restores 40% of the hunter's total mana over 8 seconds) seems huge, especially with the 30% cooldown talent bringing it to 3.5 min cd.

Comparatively, the DPS tree gets these.

* Loyalty 2/2 for 10/20% for the pet's attacks to increase it's happiness by 10% and heal itself for 5% of it's max health (my lord that's a good raiding pet talent)
* Spider's Bite: 3/3 for 10/20/30% increased crit damage bonus
* Heart of the Phoenix: 1/1 for auto pet self-res with 10% health once per 10 minutes (not clear on whether or not Longevity will affect this)
* Rabid 1/1 60 focus, 10 second cooldown, 30 second duration Increase pet AP by 5%, each successful attack has 50% chance to increase pet AP by a further 5% (capped at 5 stacks)
* Call of the Wild 1/1 for 100 focus, 5 minute CD, 20 sec duration roar that increases melee and ranged attack power of all party members within 20 yards by 5% (requires 3/3 Spider's Bite)

The other thing that would need to be accounted for is lightning breath's high focus dump vs the raptors new ability, Savage Rend (Slashes the enemy with the raptor's talons for damage, and cuases the target to bleed for damage every 3 sec for 15 sec. Successful critical strikes with this ability temporarily boost the raptor's attack power. (25 Focus, Instant, Melee Range, 1 min cooldown)).

Call of the Wild seems reasonably good, especially if stacked with bloodlust, but at 3000 ap, that's only 150 more AP for 20 seconds every 5 (3.5 talented) minutes. On a personal level, i can't see that being better than an free innervate of sorts.

So I guess in my eyes, what it comes down to is "is molten fury and clear casting better than enrage and a crit multiplier increase"?

I feel like Cunning pets are intended to be the DPS pets for Marks and Survival hunters, and Ferocity will be the BM dps pet of choice. A lot of the Ferocity abilities scale with your pet's stats (for example, Spider's Bite scales with your pet's crit chance, and Rabid scales with your pet's AP) while the Cunning abilities have more fixed scaling (Owl's Focus and Feeding Frenzy). In addition, MM and SV will have more need for Roar of Recovery. BM has more need for their pet to stay alive and happy (and regain happiness once rezzed), hence Loyalty.

Rabid + Spider's Bite is huge. Don't forget that Cobra Strikes makes your pet crit extremely often.

Forgive me if I'm slow to the party, but has the maximum range for Hunters in WotlK been increased from 35 yards (untalented) to 45 yards (untalented)?

If so, wow.

I hope to model them all this week. Hopefully I do a halfway decent job at it and we have some things to talk about.

Only for Kill Shot. All other shots remain 35 yards (41 talented) or less (Scatter).

<deleted, as I don't think the information was accurate>

So just looked at some of the new gear they have on mmo champion, not a sigle piece of the mail hunter gear(stam agil crit ap) have intell on them not one. All the ele shaman mail gear had intell but not on the hunter gear. Could this maybe be a trend instead of moving careful aim up a tier becasue of more intell they moved it up becaue it would have less of an effect being that there is less intell gear.

Also the bow they had was 2.7speed.

Wyvern Sting has also seen a rather strong damage upgrade compared to older ranks, giving it a decent bang per GCD. Does the poison effect still apply if the target is immune to the CC portion? If so, this slightly increases damage calculations vor VP (3 SS, 1 WS per minute).

Along a different vein, am I the only person to get excited about the potential neat tricks our pets will be able to pull off? I already enjoy having my pet kite mobs across frost traps or into freezing traps placed in a different room (<3 Misdirection) and the new skills just seem perfect for shenanigans of the kiting kind.

Mob goes to the healer, Warp Stalker intervenes (and absorbs the first hit), taunts (maybe an additional Growl here), and warps back to a mob near the tank. Taunt+Intervene to oneself also looks like a perfect way to pull mobs away from shield-throwing Paladins. But then, who uses CC with a Pally tank :/

Of course, this won't work if some of those skills share cd. Could a friendly hunter in the beta have a look at shared cooldowns?

I think pets are definitely going to be alot more diverse now if some of the abilities stay the way they are. If the Tallstrider ability works on boss mobs I think having at least 1 hunter, if not 2, with the Obscuring Dust ability will make a huge impact on Bosses. Combined with Longevity to lower the cool down by 6 seconds, 2 hunters could keep up the ability all the time on a Boss.

Throw in a Carrion bird for a 3rd hunter to lower AP (unknown amount? and unknown duration?) those are both good abilities. Or instead of a Carrion Bird have one hunter with a spore bat for decreasing armor which can be kept up by 1 non BM hunter.

What we need someone to test is if pet families kept their traits like in TBC, e.g Cats get 10% damage. Hopefully with the pet talents etc pets of the same talent tree type got normalised.

Green mail quest rewards are a pretty even mix of:

stam/int/ap
int/ap/crit or haste
agi/stam/ap
int/spellpower/crit or haste

I don't think I've seen any agi/int/anything.

I hope this changes because once again it makes it very hard for a surv hunter to wear mail and have the mana pool of a bm hunter who dosnt need as much agil. Some gear in WOTLK that is clearly made for a surv hunter would be wonderful.

Well I don't think green items are a something to base off of and i am pretty sure i saw some Agi/sta/int/AP blue boots on the loot tables for one of the 5 mans. But don't base off greens not really many if any agi/int/+AP,crit, or hit items in TBC either. But since they have changed shamans to 1str=1AP, 1agi=1AP, and gave enhancement shamans a talent so 1int=1AP too. I think most the DPS mail once you start getting into blues and epics will be Agi/Sta/Int/AP plus whatever other DPS stats they want to put on it like Crit, Hit, Armor Pen, or Haste.

On Steady shot - the formula has changed quite a bit.

Here's our current on Live:

A steady shot that causes base weapon damage plus [RAP * 0.2 + 150]. Causes an additional 175 against Dazed targets.

Here's Rank 1 on Beta:

A steady shot that causes unmodified weapon damage, plus ammo, plus [RAP * 0.2 + 120]. Causes an additional 175 against Dazed targets.

and the max rank, Rank 3:

A steady shot that causes unmodified weapon damage, plus ammo, plus [RAP * 0.2 + 280]. Causes an additional 175 against Dazed targets.

With 16 points the Cunning tree can pretty much pick up everything worthwhile for raiding:

2/2 Cobra Reflexes
1/1 Dash/Dive
3/3 Spiked Collar
3/3 Avoidance
2/2 Feeding Frenzy
2/2 Cornered
2/2 Owl's Focus
1/1 Roar of Recovery

And yeah, Ferocity definitely can:

2/2 Cobra Reflexes
1/1 Dash/Dive
2/2 Loyalty
3/3 Spiked Collar
3/3 Avoidance
1/1 Heart of the Phoenix
3/3 Spider's Bite
1/1 Rabid

I would use something different for leveling with a Ferocity pet (have Charge in there), but I'd use that for raiding as a non-BM Hunter (or one without the 51 point talent). Call of the Wild in its current state just isn't very good and not worth picking up imo.

The Cunning tree actually looks like it could potentially far out damage the Ferocity tree between Feeding Frenzy and Cornered. But, I could not imagine a pet without the Ferocity tree's Loyalty talent after actually playing with it. It is just ridiculously good.

The Tenacity tree is just really unimpressive to me though.

For the raptors ability, it would probably be best to save it for when you know your pet is going to crit a la Cobra Strikes.

My question is, anyone know the potential AP increase it gives?

I haven't tested the AP boost yet, I've been meaning to - and I cant' seem to find the effect in the spell database.

As for saving it for when you know it's going to crit... at 3/3 Cobra Strikes it's always up. I had Cobra Strikes refresh itself over and over at 3/3 when I went out and played with it. I don't think you have to worry about that.

This might indicate that Steady Shot's weapon damage component is no longer normalized to be as that of a 2.8 speed weapon.
If so, it might have been done to devalue fast weapons slightly (with all the procs available, fast weapons might have an edge of slower ones). Might be interesting to test, as well as seeing whether or not ammo DPS is normalized to 2.8 or if it uses weapon speed.