I've been keeping up with this thread for a good while now, as well as doing some testing in game:

Talent Specs:
BM >= MM > SV

Pets:
Cat / Scorpid > Exotic pets (even after 3.0.3) - GftT is still an essential talent point for BM spec (50/11 or 49/12)


Best MM rotation:
Mark, Serpent, Chimera, Steady until chimera is off of CD (Aimed = too much mana, not enough damage w/o barrage, barrage = 6 points to make aimed barely viable)

Summary: BM w/ cat or scorpid still seems to be the top, but MM can compete

I think that is about it. Hope that clarifies things for you.

Awesome thank you

Have you checked Shandara's hunter dps spreadsheet?

Let me point you in the direction of this thread. Whitetooth (and others) has pretty much got it all down. These are also the values I use in my spreadsheet.

For pets I used the warrior values (since they seem to closely match what little information we can get from the character tab).

The Exotic boost seems to be decidedly pointless for theorycrafting. Those pets are already weaker due to inherent factors (like family) or due to their racial. Buffed up they close the gap, but I would be very surprised to see Core Hounds beating Devilsaurs as top DPS Exotic. The Core Hound beating it would be counterproductive in a sense as the Devilsaur would not be interesting at all then (Core Hound = better DPS and better utility? Hands down winner).

That means the Devilsaur should still be compared to the best normal pets like the Cat, Scorpid or Raptor (surprised it isn't mentioned more often). Damn, even the Wasp deserves a spot, not for the DPS but due to the raidutility it brings (saves a Druid from FF).

Anyway, the nerf to Rake looks massive, but it really isn't that bad since it is only the hit of the ability that has been nerfed, the bleed is still as good (in fact slightly better).
That brings me to a point about design. Both cat-type pets, Cats and Spirit Beasts, are badly designed. Cats are obviously hurridly given a racial as we all know. But Spirit Beasts appear to suffer from this too. What I'm getting at is the fact that they scale very badly with Longevity, a central talent for level 80 with the BW glyph. Rake loses one of three, increasingly more important, ticks of it's bleed due to being applied too soon. Somehow it needs to be held back until the bleed has run out. That seems rather hard at this time.
Even worse is the Spirit Beast that appears to have no hit-portion of it's racial, it being a DoT through and through. Further that DoT only has two ticks, but with Longevity it gets applied much too soon. And from what I have gathered it doesn't reset the DoT like certain Warlock talents does to their DoTs, but rather it reapplies it, meaning the second tick will never happen if Spirit Strike goes off at cooldown, or close to it. Especially bad would be 1/3 Longevity since it still forces out the second tick of the DoT but doesn't provide much of the benefits Longevity can offer.
This more than cancels out the buff the Spirit Beast got. If it was ever buffed to the point that one tick per application was enough to even it with other pets, then why even have two ticks?

And the worst part? Longevity is a central talent to get to Beast Mastery, the prerequisite for the Spirit Beast. It is rather surprising that a spec specific pet can be that bad with, not only a central talent, but a central talent of the same spec. It looks like the design team and the talent team missed each other on these two pets. As far as I can see they are the only ones that are directly suffering from Longevity (and really that shouldn't happen).

Why would you do such a rotation with Improved Steady Shot?

Wouldn't it be a lot more efficient to do this:

Serpent > Chim > Steady > Steady > Aimed > Steady > Steady

This would mean that with a 27.75% chance either your Aimed or Chimera will benefit from an Improved Steady Shot proc.

Thats 2 x 15% damage bonus every 10s.

If you do the calculation for the Chim > Aimed > Steady until Chim ready again you'll get a 47.80% chance to get 1 x 15% more damage to Chimera.

Especially later with level 80 and the 3 MM Glyphs being Steady, TSA and either Aimed Shot or Serpent Sting (depending on mana issues at 80) and speccing into Barrage and Improved Barrage i would imagine that Aimed Shot would be reasonably close in damage to Chimera.

As both rotations would use roughly 4 (or 5, but thats irrelevant) Steady shots i'll leave them out for now.

So let's assume both Chim and Aimed do 2000 damage on average (arbitrary value), then the difference between the 2 rotations every 10s would be:

CASSSS rotation: .15 * .478 * 2000 / 10 DPS = 14.34 DPS
CSSASS rotation: .15 * .2775 * 2000 / 10 + .15 * .2775 * 2000 / 10 DPS = 16.65 DPS

Even if Aimed would do only 1500 damage on average the 2nd rotation would still yield 14.57 DPS.

The reason is of course fairly simple: In case you get 2 or more procs from the 4 Steady Shots every 10s then all but 1 would always be wasted for the CASSSS rotation whereas for the CSSASS rotation those 2 procs would need to happen from 2 consecutive Steady Shots which is a lot less likely.

Or to put it differently: With the CASSSS you basically prevent Aimed from ever benefiting from a Improved Steady Shot proc.

I've noticed two things in 3.0.2 that I haven't been able to test yet in 3.0.3
1. My pet didn't take fall damage when I used eyes of the beast to run him from Lumber Mill to Black Smith.
2. When I apply my glyphed and talented hunter's mark on a target that has another hunter's hunter's mark, it overwrites it. If that same hunter applies his hunter's mark again on the same target, both marks stay.

Are these supposed to work like that?

That is just a graphical bug. Only the most powerful hunter's mark will be in effect. The extra hunter's mark might still take up a debuff slot however.

Hmmm, I don't know about that. Aimed shot is showing about the same damage as steady for me without the glyph as MM, which means it is more DPS (about .2 seconds difference). But the problem is that aimed shot costs somewhere around three times the mana of steady shot. For short fights, sure, I can see aimed being great. It all depends on what mana problems are going to be like at level 80 - if we are going to viper at all, the value gained from aimed versus its mana cost will be huge.

Also, I was looking at haste for MM in terms of fitting steadies into a rotation with chimera shot. Specifically, is the ideal to get hasted close to a point where your steady shot becomes a factor of chimera shot cooldown minus gcd (10-1.5) - about 1.7 seconds for 5 steadies I believe - or if it's ideal to get hasted to as close to 1.5 (the effective cap) as possible.

From the spreadsheet my damage for steady/chimera:
steady - 2012
chimera - 5235

Hasted SS to 1.5
Time : Damage
0-1.5: 5235
1.5-3: 2012
3-4.5: 2012
4.5-6: 2012
6-7.5: 2012
7.5-9: 2012
9-10.5: 2012
Total: 17307
Yellow DPS: 1648.3

Hasted SS to 1.6
0-1.5: 5235
1.5-3.1: 2012
3.1-4.7: 2012
4.7-6.3: 2012
6.3-7.9: 2012
7.9-9.5: 2012
9.5-11.1: 2012
Total: 17307 (15295 if you wait out that last .5 seconds)
Yellow DPS: 1559 (1529.5 if you wait out that last .5 seconds)

Hasted SS to 1.7 (1.7*5=8.5. Add on the gcd from chimera and you get a chimera/steady rotation lining up perfectly with the chimera cooldown)
0-1.5: 5235
1.5-3.2: 2012
3.2-4.9: 2012
4.9-6.6: 2012
6.6-8.3: 2012
8.3-10: 2012
Total: 15295
Yellow DPS: 1529.5

-----

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, and my apologies if this has already been covered. But it seems like getting hasted to where steady cast time is a factor of chimera cooldown is not ideal - getting hasted to 1.5 is better. This is good to know because with haste procs maintaining a 1.7 steady is extremely unlikely.

Could you please clarify if your numbers above factor in the haste with regards to a quicker auto shot along with the shorter Steady Shot cast? It doesn't matter much, since hitting the effective cap seems to be the clear winner, i'm just curious.

I'm in no way a number cruncher but I do read this board to get a good BM build.
I'm also a 'lazy' Hunter, so I use Macro's. (if using a macro costs me some dps, so be it

I did some rounds of shots against a target dummy yesterday using macro's and for me I got the best results with the following setup. (I was watching my active DPS in Violation until I ran oom.) I know this is absolutely not the best way to test this, but I'm a casual player.

I have a 50/11 BM build, 1/3 Longevity, 3/3 CS and 1/2 GftT.

I ended up with the following 2 macro's:

1st macro contains BW with trinket.
2nd macro contains Kill Command and Steady Shot.

And thats it. I tested using manual Rabid in the SS macro but it seems ok now leaving it on autocast and using !auto shot also seemed to lower/not improve my dps. My pet seemed to have enough focus now with Rabid, Rake and Claw on Autocast.

What I would like to know is if you guys can confirm the Autocasting of Rabid (pet abilities) is indeed working as intented now and the autoshot bug is also fixed now (shooting next mob when 1st mob is down).

thanks for reading

The exotic buffs were tailored toward making exotics better than non exotic-counterparts, not so much making the exotics have parity with each other. The core hound was buffed to do more damage than the serpent, which is the non-exotic with the most similar ability to it. They did close the gap a little among exotics, as you noted, but that was more of a side effect. They didn't accomplish that goal as much as they would like -- for example, a chimaera only outdamages a wind serpent if you leave their family abilities enabled, but both of them do better damage if you just turn their family abilities off and only rely on focus dumps. This seems primarily to be the result of the focus dumps using the physical crit formula (200%) instead of the magical one (150%).

As for the wasp, it only deserves a mention if the only feral druid you have in your group is a cat. Bears actually want to use FFF because it's a high-threat move for them now. Its dps is actually pretty terrible unless you micromanage it to where it only stings if the debuff is about to fall off. Otherwise, it will keep refreshing sting every few seconds, which takes the place of a much higher damage focus dump (smack).

That assumes Feral MT at this time which is less than likely. They take a bit less damage, but they are with the current gear less optimized for MT than Warriors or pallies are. Until 80 that is. But then with the extra armor thing gone it looks like Ferals will have a hard time stacking stats.

Yes, Sting is less damage than Smack, but not that much since the raidbuffs buff it a fair bit. Of course it will lessen the DPS of the pet, but that makes it a perfect Surv or MM pet. For BM it can still rock. Solo, yes Sting sucks for damage there.

And you can of course make a small macro for Sting if you are concerned.

No feral tanks = bring Wasp.

One item that came up over in the Spreadsheet thread that I thought I'd bring up here... GCD loss seems to be an extremely significant issue with hunter dps. At 70, the primary manifestation of this is a dps *loss* incurred from readiness-rapidfire for a large latent haste range. Has there been much thought given to a "minimalist" dps rotation that eschews gcd-using short-duration effects?

You said the exact same thing that I did, which is that you only want a wasp if you don't have a bear tanking (or offtanking -- basically nearly any time a feral druid is in bear form in a raid they must want threat, otherwise they would be in some other form). I make no predictions on how common that would be, except to note that bear armor isn't getting nerfed. They are nerfing the armor they get from rings, trinkets and jewelry and changing their modifiers so their armor stays the same. It's also worth noting that the reason bear armor was nerfed a little bit during beta (i.e., lowering of Dire Bear modifier) was because GC said testing showed that bears were taking less damage than any other tank, which is also the reason they changed predatory instincts to only work in cat form. If they hadn't, GC said, bears would have been the best raid MTs by a fair margin, because tanking is about how much damage you take and how much threat you generate, not just how well itemized you think you are. It's not at all clear that feral tanks won't be commonplace, and the designers have said that they have every intent on making them able to tank "Ulduar and beyond." Theorycrafting v3.0 has to account for the new raid stacking philosophy, and moroever we should assume that things will be changed to fit that philosophy until they announce another shift in approach. It seems that we as players have a tendency to view any possible exception to the announced "rules" as an indication that they are going to throw all of them out, instead of an outlier that needs fixing.

Raid buffs help sting, but it does half the damage of a smack, and raid buffs increase smack just as much if not more than they do for sting. Sting scales with Earth and Moon/Curse of the Elements, but smack scales with Sunder Armor/Expose Weakness. Both of them benefit from AP buffs. And again, I said essentially the same thing that you did, which is that wasps will require micromanagement (via macros) in order to ungimp their dps. So far the best approach I've found is to turn sting off autocast on attack, turn it on autocast when you want it to debuff, and then turn it back off as soon as it has cast sting, repeating as necessary to refresh the debuff. I tinkered around with using /cast instead of autocast toggles, but they require intense spamming to get the pet to do what you want, unless you turn other things off autocast as well. So, for example, this is my "Pet debuff" macro:

My pet attack macro turns off those same abilities, along with Call of the Wild, and it turns on Rabid, just for good measure (Rabid is also part of my Steady Shot macro). Those are mostly to combat the "pet randomly turning on autocast" bug. Note that this is a technique I developed on beta, so there's no need for any "why are you using exotics instead of being 50/11 like everyone else?" comments.

You're generalizing far too much. Ferals can afford to throw FF (and in most cases, want to). However a resto is not always going to be able to waste gcds on such a spell (is it even castable in tree?). Likewise, moonkins take a notable DPS hit from keeping FF up, which is why it is always preferable to have a shadow priest for misery (spell hit debuff) instead of a druid speccing Imp FF.

Wasps still have a place, perhaps more so in 5 and 10-mans, but to generalize and claim that as long as one druid is present, a wasp is not useful is foolish.

MM optimal use of RF/Readiness personal testing:

I've been doing all major MD pulls because I need to time these cooldowns effectively and I can weave them into optimal spots in my rotations if I pull. Reason being, pulling allows me to lead with instants, get them on CD, blow my CDs, hit the instants again and readiness them back up.

So, my pull rotation goes something like...

Chim -> Aimed
Take 4 seconds to get in position, if not required, fire off 3x Steady Shots. You ideally want to be off GCD with 3 seconds left on Chim CD but it's impossible to fuck this up badly enough to affect your DPS adversely.
RF + Trinkets + Blood Fury
Serpent Sting
Chim -> Aimed
Readiness
Chim -> Aimed -> 4x Steady Shots
RF #2
Chim > Aimed

Your second RF will overlap by ~.5 seconds but it's well worth it since it won't delay your Chim shot. Save your RF and Readiness CDs until after Chim and Aimed go off to double up on them. It's well worth it just to save mana.

Nice macro, I think I will take that one along. Wouldn't want Sting to waste too much DPS. However, my own experience tells me Sting does 10% less damage than Smack, of course it could be an AP scaling issue, so that at 80 it will be vastly less. Until now it has been much lower total damage because it often got cut out due to the pet AI and attack priorities. That was good since it still went in before the timer was up. A sort of built in accidental brake on Sting applications. Now that pet AI is fixed it will be applied more... a sort of backwards issue.
Rabid... Well, after removing all my petabilities from my pet I have noticed it fires as soon as I go into combat. Might not be perfect, but it shows that it works. Min-maxers might want to macro it so it only begins from when the pet arrives at the target.

Take note that I didn't say Ferals were nerfed in a direct way. But there are certainly issues at 70 right now. Like many classes their gear isn't optimzed for the new talents. And currently they only get survivability from Stamina, Agility and Dodge rating. Armor is sequential with gearupgrades, not really many options for specific gearing. The point is, Ferals have very few stats going for them in survivability, to spread their gearscaling and statstacking scaling over. How that will pan out is anyone's guess right now. I hope, and assume, it will be good enough at 80. Right now it might be a little less perfect.
Ferals are less vital in terms of utility now, Warriors can provide the crit, the main bonus. So Ferals aren't specifically important anymore. That can lead to less Druids or not. But one thing I think it will be is more fluctuation in their raidattendance. That means someone needs to apply the minor ArP. And there I think Hunters are the best candidate. Unlike Sunder where a Worm is most likely more of a DPS loss than a Rogue applying Expose Armor.

I do understand where you're coming from, but from the perspective of a raiding Balance and Resto druid (admittedly I never raided as feral), FF is more of an inconvenience than a noticeable hindrance to a druid's role. Resto druids have maintained IS rotations on bosses to help with mitigation for a large portion of BC, and maintaining FF is even easier thanks to the longer duration. Resto4Life has plenty examples of how to do this effectively, and the ability to maintain debuffs on bosses is generally viewed as one of those distinguishing factors for a good resto druid vs. a lifebloom faceroller. Whenever I raided as resto, I kept IS up near 100% of the time, only letting it fall off if the effect met a specific cooldown conflict, which I resolved by reapplying 2 seconds later. After doing that every 12 seconds, I would have no problem going to keeping upa debuff every 40 seconds, as I'm sure most other resto druids would as well.

From a balance perspective, yes. No one wants to spec IFF, even I didn't want to pre-3.0 before we even got all the bloated goodies in the balance tree. For the sake of the guild, I geared myself with Hit to the hilt so I could move points out of Balance of Power and into IFF, but in the eyes of most moonkins, speccing and maintaining IFF is seen as the "toilet job" of Warcraft. Regardless, good raiding druids will still maintain it for the benefit it brings to the group (like us hunters; we may take a DPS hit from not bringing a devilsaur or a cat, but we're buffing the group). The only foreseeable scenario where a balance druid would have a legitimate excuse not to maintain FF would be if there is a shadow priest in the raid, as you said. But once again, that gets back to assuming specific specs of specific classes are available in the raid roster.

So what it boils down to is:

You have a bear druid -> Faerie Fire
You have a cat druid -> Faerie Fire
You have a resto druid -> Faerie Fire
You have a balance druid, no S.Priest -> Faerie Fire
You have a balance druid, + S.Priest -> No Faerie Fire

I don't mean to generalize, but there's little point in arguing that a druid maintaining FF every 40 seconds is less of a dps loss than a hunter bringing a suboptimal DPS pet to use for the whole raid.

Don't forget that Curse of Recklessnes also fills the "Minor Armor Debuff" slot. In 10-mans, you are more likely for the warlock to be using CoE (though, that does factor into an increase in Sting damage). But in 25-mans, I'm sure you can swing a warlock to CoR over CoA if it means a raid-wide DPS increase.

Also, I don't believe that FF can be cast from Tree form (FF is Balance, Tree's cast Resto + Innervate + Barkskin), and it's a terrible waste of mana for a resto druid to swap into and out of Tree form every 40s.

This is correct, but neither is IS, and restos had no problem maintaining that at a dismal 12 seconds. Tree shifting is very cheap and cheaper with talents, and restos are expected to do it on most high-mobility fights. It's not like going in and out of bear and being oom after 3 cycles.

It would seem we've got a "hot potatoe" situation wherein no one's sure who wants to do the dirty job of providing the armor buff, but playing both a druid and a hunter, it seems most beneficial to the raid as a whole to get a stellar DPS pet and let the druids handle it. But then there's the question about IS vs. Scorpid Sting... :P

In the end, I'm guessing it's something you'll want to work out in your guilds on an individual basis. Some of you may have awesome ninja shapeshifting trees of healy death, who have no problem keeping up FF. Some of you may have trees that would prefer to focus on healing and healing alone, and you could do them a favor by bringing a wasp. The odds may not be in favor of a wasp, but it's ultimately up to you and your raidmates. And at the end of the day, your presonal preference too.