Cctrings spec is a bit different 44/13/4. No Kindred Spirit, no GFTT and 4/5 Imp Tracking. Kind of odd to starve the pet of focus and gimp its damage output by 20% to gain 4% personal damage increase. That might explain why the WS only had 7 LB procs the entire fight. Testing is testing and trying new things is going to pretty standard I guess, but this spec seems to be slightly counter productive for a BM hunter 3.0. The strength is in the pet/hunter synergy as we know.

Also notice that Cctrings' crit% is a lot lower. It is hard to determine if we are comparing apples to apples though as far as gear is concerned for both hunters since Cctrings armory is showing PvP gear. Maybe Tukela could step in to shead some light on this topic.

Someone posted in the hunter forums that Scorpid Poison was bugged because it was applying the lvl 80 DOT, not lvl 70. Has anyone else heard of this?

I used:
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast Steady Shot
/cast Kill Command
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Scorpid Poison
/cast [target=pettarget, exists] Claw
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

And then only scorpid poison on autocast, althouth that didnt make much of a difference with everything off.
With this I kept the poison up, and still dumping enough focus to not get it full.

If in a raid you would get full focus you can simply turn the Claw on autocast.

I can't confirm that, but I do know Scorpid Poison is doing a lot more damage than it really should be. I managed to get a 5-stack to tick for 1650 with BW up. I think I'm going to take mine to next week's SWP to compare to the Cat I took last week. Just doing some dummy tests, it appeared the Scorpid was doing slightly more damage.

Well i think the easiest way to figure this out is by looking at the actual dmg it should be doing, which is 40-50 per stack over 10 seconds. Thats 200-250 over 10 sec with 5 stacks, I've been observing 500+ dmg ticks with 5 stack in raid gear (2688 rap). So depending on how well the spell is supposed to scale, it might be true, but I doubt it. You have to take into account all of the pet dmg modifiers that bm gets though as well, so I guess we need someone smarter than me to play with some numbers and figure this out.

Metallicarulez, are you sure that was just one tick, I know with mik scrolling battle text it sometime combines the tick dmg so that it will give you a value and say x2 next to it signifying that thats multiple ticks. Last night when I was testing on the dummies I saw alot of 1k+ ticks but they were all x2. Id be very surprised to see a single tick of a 5 stack doing that much dmg, and if it actually is, what were your stats/pet stats looking like at the time if you can remember.

So what pets are best to use for sunwell raiding now? i scanned some earlier posts and seen some ppl using a cat and scorpid. any tips?

I am using MSBT, but I'm positive it was not 2 ticks combined. Using 50/11/0 spec with full Kindred Spirits. The huge tick was with BW and probably Kill Command active as well. I was seeing ~1k ticks average with 5-stack on the dummies. Now, it might be that MSBT is combining them and not showing it (a la "x2", like you said). I'm sitting at about 2750 AP unbuffed, my pet is at around 900ish AP unbuffed (estimates, don't have access to the game at the moment).

MMO Champion has just posted on some upcoming changes to the beta. Basically they are reducing pet specials from 25 focus to 20! I'm wondering if this will be enough to allow us to go 51 in BM at level 70 and get the exotic pets without gimping our dps from focus starvation.

I'm not sure, but it should help a bit with pets choosing to use focus dumps over family skills.

Warning: This started as a dps analysis and became long-winded.

Obviously I am not the definitive word on MM dps, but we have reasonably similar gear, and I was able to put out 3386 dps on Brutallus as marks with a scorpid pet (additionally, I was specced for improved tracking, but not tracking demons... guess I should have gone with imp hawk instead). I haven't asked any officers if I should be going around linking our WWSes, so I'll play it safe and just link my totals:

Brutallus kill, 7.3M dmg, 2'44"

Steady Shot (Physical) 176,230 32 %
Auto Shot (Physical) 155,374 29 %
Chimera Shot (Nature) 54,216 10 %
Trebuchet : Scorpid Poison (Nature) 43,973 8 %
Trebuchet : Swing () 35,051 6 %
Chimera Shot - Serpent (Nature) 22,666 4 %
Trebuchet : Claw (Physical) 21,705 4 %
Serpent Sting (Nature) 21,591 4 %
Wild Quiver Auto Shot (Nature) 13,419 3 %
Arcane Shot (Arcane) 996 0 %

Chimera Shot is extremely impressive. 16 instant casts, or 24 seconds of global cooldown time, accounted for about 24% of my total damage, while only comprising just over 1/7 of my non-autoshot activity (161 seconds of dps time). This isn't a totally accurate figure, as we could subtract one serpent sting worth of damage, sort of, because it was applied with an actual SS cast... but then again I cast CS once without a sting up on the initial pull... but then again it crit... it's complicated so I'll stick with those rough figures.

Scorpid poison is also pretty absurd when stacked up against the % of total pet damage other pet class abilities comprise, at around 44%. The swing and claw damage will of course be somewhat lower than those of a ferocity or cunning pet, inflating the strength of scorpid poison as a percentage of pet damage; but, hypothetically, if you had to choose between scorpid poison and rake on your cat, there would be exactly one right choice the way they stand right now. I apologize for not linking the data for the 3 other hunters, all of whom brought cats to Brutallus, as I have not asked them for permission. Suffice to say, those with scorpids in the stable hearthed to fetch them right after this fight.

More on scorpid poison, I saw about a 9% chance to "miss" between Swing and Claw (actually dodges and parries), while I myself was less than 1 hit rating below the hit cap. If this figure held roughly for attempted applications of scorpid poison, that means a 99.19% chance of a successful application during the duration of a given stack (1-(0.09^2)), and a 96.02% chance to achieve a 5-stack from a given starting point. If they remain as powerful as they are, scorpids will shine even more as the pets of players with longevity, as this will, as far as I can tell, allow for 3 chances at renewing a stack instead of 2, meaning even on long fights the probability of the poison expiring will be rather low. Contrast this this with monstrous bite, which has 1 chance to renew itself (granted it only need stack to 3 for full benefit), or rake, which is all-or-nothing, and it is apparent that the lack of a way to eliminate "miss" chance in pets slants things strongly in the scorpid's favor. (I won't do the math here, but it's not complicated). Longevity will also aid cats a bit (I mean their rake uptime % purely), as a rake miss will not mean a total lack of rake damage for that cooldown, but you will still miss a lot of bleed time and the initial damage. Monstrous bite is aided in a similar manner, but never enough to allow for a second chance at re-application, which would improve it's usefulness tremendously.

Sorry for the rant.

This problem has been around for a long time, here are some Blizzard Hunter forum threads with reports/brainstorming/tests related to it:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Stop autoattack on target switch not working?
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Strange targeting behavior
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Auto Target next mob.
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [BUG] 2.3 Hunter Auto Switch Targets and Fire
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Auto Target/Auto Attack!?!

I went ahead and bumped an ancient thread of mine on the Bug Report forum with a solid procedure for reproducing the issue and explained that it was introduced back in 2.3 and was never fixed with the workaround being to disable the "Auto Attack/Auto Shot" option (which, as has been mentioned here, is no longer viable due to the linking of Auto Shot with specials when that is disabled).

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [Bug] Auto acquiring 2nd target when 1st dies

If this is the macro tha you are curretly spamming then not ony are you not giving your autshot a chance to fire, but youare wasting your Kill Command. If you are running a BM spec I would suggest moving the "/cast Kill Command" into a Betial Wrath/Trinket popping macro, and removing it from this one completely.

I agree that timing KC with cooldowns could very well be more lucrative, but how is he preventing auto shot from firing?

Auto Shot fires independently now. It's no longer linked to steady and therefore no longer placed in a macro. You're correct on placing KC on a separate macro with TBW though.

I just played with my surv spec (since that is what my gear is made for) and i did a Hyjal run to see how it worked.
Now i noticed that the attackspeed differs a lot during a fight. Mine was between 2.48 and 1.48
Since i cant find a working speedmeter it is hard to get proper rotation worked out. Even got under 1.5, which isnt good is it? since your gcd on steady is 1.5 s which means you cant use it.

I did read somethiong about haste also had effect on gcd but cant find it anywhere anymore. But if that is right i could use same shotrotation all the time isnt it? To be honest i totally loss grip on the matter.

Someone who can help me understand it again, and give a tip how to get my rotation right again.

Regards

Rabid appears to be fixed in the latest beta/PTR patch, leaving the pet to auto attack the training dummy has Rabid autocasting properly.

another from mmo-champion:

they probably didnt want the min-maxers forcing hunters to go MM for the 2% that other classes who brought the same buff (dk,shaman?) couldnt get.

do you guys think aimed shot is worth grabbing now if you go MM? sounded like before it would be sting-chimera-steady.. does 10% crit on aimed make it worth adding into the rotation? (adding in aimed being added to barrage: increase damage by 12% and increase crit chance by 12%. with glyph thats 22% increased crit chance)

for MM spec'd PVP hunters, that looks like a good glyph.

edit: also looks like rake was toned down: Rake (Cat) focus cost reduced from 25 to 20. Damage lowered. (From 59-83 + 21-27 over 9 sec to 24-34 + 22-28 over 9 sec)

while some other pets had their abilities increased. more tuning to make everything "even" ?

We covered that - my post was like 2 days old! Seriously though, I did get beat on aoe in Hyjal despite doing over 7k dps. I hit the aoe cap doing Jan'alai (all adds at once) only... I assume this is the cap for level 80 damage

So, I was doing some testing in Thunder Bluff (since there's much less people than in Org) and I was comparing a 0/31/30 spec vs. 0/51/10. The actual results/numbers aren't really important, I don't have them anyway, Mal'Ganis likes to crash out of nowhere.

The thing is, though, 0/51/10 was a pretty clear cut winner, but it was still kind of suprising. When I was looking at the numbers, both auto shot and steady shot appeared to be hitting for the same amount in both specs. This suprised me considering the 0/31/30 spec had a solid 300 more AP (self-buffed, TSA and AotH only) than the 0/51/10 spec, and there doesn't seem to be anything deep in the MM tree that would account for the damage (I didn't get a chance to compare Serpent Sting damage before I got DC'd).

I'm probably going to try again tomorrow, but does anyone know a reason of the top of their head why this would be? Only other thing I can think of is maybe just lucky procs or something, I'll have to try tomorrow without any random procs or something.

I think that Hunter Vs. Wild could be attributed to most of the increased AP. But without links to the Specs/Damage charts, its kind of hard to answer your question.

Edit: misread a previous post; please disregard.

Well I know why there was so much more AP (Hunter vs. Wild + Lighting Reflexes), what I can't seem to understand is why all that increased AP didn't seem to affect average shot damage. But like I said, I'll run some more tests tomorrow (though respeccing is starting to get expensive again ).