Mmmm, not quite true, pets will still benefit from Windfury totem. Auto attack damage composes the majority of most pet's DPS, so it's still a good boost for the pet.

A few pages back I was discussing the possibility of macro'ing in a Serpent Sting and while
"/cast serpent sting"

indeed doesn't work in the shot macro due to casting it everytime the gcd is done I did find this line:

"/castsequence reset=15/target Serpent Sting,null"

which will cast Serpent Sting on every new target and the "null" appearantly disables the function
for 15 seconds and then reactivates it.

I'm at work right now so I can't test it yet, but if this works, it could be pretty usefull.

Edit:

(I've read mixed comments saying the "null" will disable the FULL macro and not just that line, will have to test)

I'm starting to see the same thing as TBC happening again, hunters are doing very good in DPs now and the nerfs are starting to come in. The WF totem change upsets me because it is making BM the spec to be again and i'm enjoying MM spec right now. We are seing a line of nerf ie WF totem, scorpid poison, and mortal shot which will hurt our DPS by a good bit. The probelm is BM is seing such high numbers because of the scorpid/rake problem which they are correcting but at the same time they add in the wf totem change. Last night on Brut the BM hunter did 3100 but his scorpion pet did 1200 of that so his personal DPS was only 1900. Mine as a MM hunter was 2650 but my pet got bugged on the box so he did no damage but he was doing about 400-500 on trash so lets say i would have been in the 3100 dps area with my pet. they are lowering hunter DPS before they fix the pet issues which to me seems abit odd. Also the bug with BOW really makes it hard to test anything on live because you never run out of mana.

afaik, you can just leave it blank (Serpent Sting, )

Thats one thing that has me worried about these nerfs. They are baseing the nerfs on our dps being much higher then everyone else yet forgot that currently we are not having to switch into Viper currently with the infinite mana bug happening with JoW. If we were switching like we should, then i bet the dps values would be a lot more inline with the other classes. But they havent fixed the bug yet and are baseing all of the nerfs on our bugged dps values. When JoW gets fixed, it's looking like we will take a huge hit in the DPS department. Few hunters on beta are speculating that we'll be on the lower half of the charts.

Vipers getting a double nerf in the next patch. First the 3% on Shots and 4%/3s is showing to be much lower then the current 6% for shots. To be equal, the passive needed to be raised to a combined 10%/3s. Not only that now, we get hit in the haste department where we lose 16% from WF therefor shooting slower and getting viper ticks evey more slowly. MM and SV are hit the hardest with the double nerf while BM can retain a little bit of speed from Serpent Swiftness.

I'm afraid its going to get real ugly here soon.

Because of the GCD. You want things to fit inside one GCD or you are going to waste time because Cooldowns no longer line up nicely.

The flaw with that argument is that you severely over-value the pushback aspect of focused aim. I can't think of one current fight where it'd be a significant increase.

On RoS, sure, it'll be marginally useful. A good hunter can already put out significant damage in P2 by using arcane/multi/serpent (or explosive/chimera if applicable) to avoid much of the pushback. Additionally a problem that arises by being able to hit more, faster, in this particular case is that you will be more prone to suicide.

On KJ, the reduction is only useful if you have fire bloom, and even then a quickshots/dst proc and/or intelligent cast timing allows you to virtually remove the "issue" with an insignificant loss in damage. And that's *only* if you get fire bloom. In all other cases it's not even beneficial to have.

At 80, the extra crit also allows more gftt procs, and if BM more cobra strikes procs as well. Comparing the trade-off is not as straightforward as it initially seems.

It seems for me that history repeats itself. In preTBC patch hunters were way OP, nerfed below all DPS in first days of TBC and each following patches slowly regain their position.

Is really rake such a big problem? I'm more concerned about the crazy amount of multipliers for BM pets. My (admitedly napkin-ish) math indicates that BM scales better than MM (though probably within the error margin of my modeling) *and* has a head start (largely due to raid buffs on the pet giving crazy dps with all the multipliers)

I hate the change they do to WF.
Not only because they should fix the existing bugs first and see how it affects our dmg.
Now the raidleader will always put me out of the dmg group because WF is a great help to melee dmg and he will put a rouge in there and I will be stuck in the Tank or even caster group. Always the same.....
If we had a spare shaman it would always be me who got switched out of the group so he could trigger bloodlust.
And its not because I am a bad player....actually i am always at or near the top of the dmg....its because he thinks the others profit more from it

Yes, that's exactly what I said. My point is that they lowered the dps of survival and mm far more than bm with that change, but they then lowered bm by adding more armor to bosses, as that spec does not have an elemental shot at the end of the tree and relies on pets more who have no armor penetration.

Totems are raid wide now, you'll get them no matter what group you are in as long as you're within range. There isn't really a "damage" group per say anymore as nearly every group buff will now effect everyone.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Changes to Debuffs, Buffs, and Raid Stacking there is a list of all the changes.