The mana thing that cunning has will also be useful for non-BM raiding hunters. Explosive shot looks quite expensive to cast, and I can about guarantee I'll be packing around some leather gear for extra agility.

Just reminding everyone of this post since people seem to be getting tied up with "the extra points arnt worth the talent". We still dont know what these pets are or what they will bring to the table, or if like the poster said above will they bring an entire new pet tree?

This is how I would spec at the moment:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Of course things will change before WotLK comes out, but don't link AM and BMT too much, you can take the second without the first. I neither like AM nor Improves Tracking very much (though IT looks nice). IT seems nice and IF it workes with marked targets it might be really cool.
But I like the cooldown reducing stuff (Rapid Killing and Longevity). If have no exact numbers abd I'm a little too lazy right now to come up with something, but 30% more BW/TBW and 40% more Rapid Fire surely is some damage boost too. Especially if your Auto Shots aren't clipped anymore.

Thanks for all your information and work so far!

Not noted here as far as I could find, Hunting party is currently broken. It has no cooldown and is as you might imagine quite ridiculous without it. One nice aspect of the talent that differs from TotH is mana on auto crits.

I'm not forgetting it at all... I'm reading it as they intend me to (I hope).
Exotics might have interesting racials (I think that is the most proper way to describe them), but they shouldn't be too strong. Just like the Raptor's racial. It is arguably the best DPS racial, yet it requires a crit on a 1 min CD ability from a pet that isn't exactly stacked on crit. It will be better, but not by a million. Of course, BM hunters can wait until Cobra Strikes are up to use it, but still. In any case, the result is limited and the exotics aren't likely to be better as per the quote.

The 5 points are the power of the talent, and those 5 points don't seem very powerful right now. Give us something to use them on.

I wouldn't be surprised to find an exotic pet with the ferocity tree that has a high focus spammable ability, making it fully worth the single talent point.

You are underestimating that ability. Once your crit is back up at a decent level at 80 Cobra strikes will be up non-stop. Combined with Longevity bringing the CD on Savage Rend down to 42s your Raptor could have the proc on Savage Rend up nearly constantly.

There is no other pet ability that compares to that combination.

Now if only Blizzard would give us some +hit food to give to our pets......

No I didn't say that there was. But what is the AP bonus? Does it last longer than the DoT? As long? Shorter perhaps? Knowing how Blizz generally make these things I am currently assuming it is a quite limited bonus.
Right now Ravagers are top dog (Wind Serpents can certainly beat them but only at specific levels) by a few measly DPS. If Blizz continues that trend the exotics might very well be a few DPS better, but unlikely to be much more than that.

Of course it can happen, but I'm not going to rely on that for an evaluation of the talent when they have specifically said that the power of it lies in the extra 5 points. Until proven otherwise that is what we have to go with.

The buff for Raptors criting there special was posted a page or 2 back it is +10% DMG for 30 sec.

Correct, I posted this back a couple pages - the proc is a +10% damage buff with a 30 second duration. It is not a +Atk buff like the tooltip states.

Sean or anyone else in the Beta,

Please varify for me whether Wowhead has the change to Wing Clip correct. Looks like it goes from Rank 3, 80 mana, 50 damage, and 60% movement speed reduction to Rank 1, 6% of base mana, [AP * 0.1] damage, and 50% movement speed reduction. I consider this a rather large nerf to the ability in terms of mana cost and movement speed for a class that WANTS AND NEEDS to get back to range against someone in melee range. We would no longer have a 10% movement speed edge over a warrior/rogue that hamstings/crippling poisons us.

Of course you're right about that. It looses some effekt.

As mentioned befoe we can assume that we have Steady Shot down to 1.5s cast time.
So let's forget about the effect on Steady Shot. It always affects Auto Show by adding 40% to it's damage. Depending on how much haste we already have, Auto Shot does an increasing part of our damage, because the damage of special abilities, once Steady Shot reaches the GCD, is just limited by the combination and CDs of these abilities, because the GCD can't be reduced.
So if Auto Shot does just 40% of our DPS, let's say 400 and the specials do 600 and we have Steady Shot down to a cast time of 1.5s, Auto Shots will do 560 DPS when Rapid Fire is active. The overall gain from RF in this case is 16% for 15s.
Rapid Fire without Rapid Killing: 15s/300s -> 5% -> damage 0.16*0.05 => 0.8% (before: 2%)
Rapid Fire with Rapid Killing: 15s/180s -> 8.3% -> damage0.16*0.083 => 1.3% (before: 3.3%)

So if my math is correct *looks around at jabbering family* it really isn't that much and right now it is mainly taken to get to the next tier in the tree. It's a pity because I really like the burst damage of RF, especially with BW/TBW and trinkets, but I accept the fact that the points will be better spent somewhere else.

Correct, Wing Clip does have that rather large nerf in Beta.

Crude... I coulda taken the mana increase for the nice damage buff but the ability was (and mostly ever was) used for getting back to range (a 10% movement speed difference, while small could sometimes make the difference between winning and losing a 1v1 battle against a melee class). NOT the damage it dealt.

Rapid Recuperation - This ability is currently worthless as it requires you to have both Rapid Killing and Rapid Fire up at the same time for the effect to trigger.

At first I thought it just did not work, and it was supposed to trigger when either of them were up, so I went and tested it for a bit and it does indeed require both to be up.

That really needs to be changed.

Sean could you tell us at what rate resistances are increasing as pets level if they are increasing at all? I know you said they were 120 at 70.

Sean, can you confirm that, in beta, Aimed really does still reset the autoshot swing timer at the end of the cast?

The decrease in cast time for Aimed Shot and its inclusion on several high-end Marks talents makes me thing they're at least considering adding it back into our rotations. Rapid Killing has always made sense to include aimed -- you just killed a mob, it's not a bad idea to use aimed to pull the next mob. But the new talents that affect aimed are not triggered by killing something, they're triggered by middle-of-your-rotation shots. What sense does it make for these talent buffs to affect aimed unless it's intended to use it in the middle of your rotation? The decrease in cast time also points in that direction -- after all, it's only .5 seconds slower than steady shot now.

Aimed on live actually has the exact same mechanics as Slam in that it resets your swing timer at the end of the cast, and slam warriors have a perfectly viable dps cycle that uses it. So just because it resets swing timer doesn't mean it will be impossible to use it in a rotation. I'm not saying that it's the case with the current talents/abilities on beta or live -- I'm just saying it's possible that the designers are looking in that direction and will buff/nerf in order to make it viable/worthwhile.

I personally don't know *why* they'd be looking in that direction; having just 'fixed' steady-threading I don't know why they'd go back to an obsolete model punishing you for pressing milliseconds early or milliseconds late. But I also haven't seen anything indicating Slam is changed in beta, so maybe they consider it 'okay' just because it's optional: used by just one spec of all the ways you can spec the class.

Currently my level 76 pet still has 120 sv all. The Resistance abilities of pets only go up to Rank 4 - 120 in the spell database too. So either that's going to be the cap, or higher ranks are just not in yet.

Aimed Shot is still tied into the Autoshot timer as it is on Live. It is also on the GCD. However, you do not have to wait for your Autoshot timer to fully reset like you do on Live, you can cast it immediately after firing a shot off. Still, it's not something to use in a Shot Rotation. It's a PVP/Pull ability and that's it.

As far as I can tell, Rapid Recuperation is pretty underwhelming anyway. Paying 40% mana 8.3% of the time seems like a pretty poor return. It would make more sense if it reduced all mana costs by 100% while RF was up. Not only would this average out to a fairly generous reduction in mana use, it would increase MM utility in Arenas, as it would allow the hunter to be fully functional even when drained.

Slam is talented down to 0.5 secs, and that is why it is a viable skill. If it remained at 1.5 then it would hurt more than it benefits. An even so it is a full second faster than Aimed. The MM talents include it because MM is the PvP tree and Aimed it a good PvP ability to get off. Getting it off however might not be so easy, but I will let that to the PvPers.

[About Savage Rend] Wow, must have completely missed it. That is in fact a major DPS boost. No, it is an extreme boost. If it lasts until release I will be surprised. Since the skill mentions AP I'm inclined to believe it is 10% AP they really wanted, which is still good, but less overpowering. But I guess we should just be quiet about it.

If they make the same 'mistake' with an Exotic, then Beast Mastery might be worth it, but ther is always the Raptor to fall back on. In fact with the Raptor special that powerful I really doubt any Exotic can match it.

Aspect Mastery needs to be changed, as we already have improved versions of each Aspect: Imp AotH, Monkey, Pack and Viper. What I would prefer is a 5/5 talent that increases scaling.

+Hit?

BM Pets do need more +hit, but since there is a +hit cap, it would be better as someone else suggested, to have this as a food to feed our pet (we currently have +stam and +strength).

+Crit?

Well the new Cobra Strikes talent means that our pets scale with our crit (You have a 60% chance when you critically hit with Arcane Shot, Steady Shot or Kill Shot to cause your pet's next 3 special attacks to critically hit.)

What I recommend is:

Spiritual Ally (or something better )
"You form a closer bond with your pet granting it an additional [2|4|6|8|10]% of your stamina, armour and resistances, and an additional [0.5|1|1.5|2|3]% of your ranged attack power as melee attack power. Only works on pets with 2/2 Loyalty." (Should probably add in spell dmg scaling)

So your pet would then get:

• 30%->40% of your stamina
• 40%->50% of your resistances (if they are keeping this in lue of them getting inate resistance)
• 35%->45% of your armour
• 12.5%->15.5% of your RAP as AP