Perhaps one idea to make BM more "challenging" is to make pet micromanagement a more integral part of the class, rather than making the shot rotation more complex. The new pet talent tiers that Ghostcrawler has hinted at could cause the pets to do more damage, but also be much more susceptible damage. Concepts like:

Your pet does X% more damage but takes an extra X% damage;
Increases pet attack power by X for X seconds, but also causes your pet to suffer X damage over the same period;
Your pet gains X ability but also gains (debuff name), which causes X amount of damage and can only be healed with Mend Pet.

And also more hunter/pet interaction abilities like:

Arcane shot has a X% chance to apply (debuff name) to the target that lasts for X seconds, and BM gains a spell that instructs the pet to do a special damage ability that can only be triggered when the debuff is on the pets target - thus forcing the hunter to break rotation and weave the ability in (sort of a BM version of Lock and Load). An alternate version of this would be that each Arcane Shot leaves an Arcane Charge on the target, and once 5 stacks have been reached the ability can be triggered.

Revamping Spirit Bond along the lines of Hunter and Pet do 1/2/3% extra damage, increases healing done by the hunter to the pet by 33/66/100% but reduces healing received by the pet from any other source other than the hunter by 30/60/90%.

Naturally these are just off-the-cuff ideas I came up with while writing this post that I’ve put no real thought in to, but the concept is to make BM far more involving with your pet rather than overloading the spec with more shots. It would be much more challenging for those who just sent their pet in and steady spammed because of the possible constant pet-rez downtime and missed abilities, whilst rewarding those who look after their pets and their rotations. I also like the idea of some of the damage being healable only via the hunter, as I would hazard a guess that a substantial amount of the hunter community has become accustomed to the resto shaman on melee/tank duty also taking care of pet healing inadvertently.

With all due respect, coming from a hunter that played BM exclusively from 1 to 70, and then dabbled in MM for a couple weeks, and then back into BM and levelled to 80, did Heroics, and finally into NAXX 10 and 25 man, etc. All BM.

Now I finally tried out Survival...I can say that hands down, it is by far the most intensive spec. The rotations are far more attention consuming, and you can't ever relax and just cruise while your pet carries your DPS.

Get lazy for even 1 rotation and your DPS notably drops.

Now, that said, BM does of course have its own challenges (I couldn't stand having the pet die), but SV takes the cake hands down for being the most skill oriented and most difficult to manage.

We can argue "hardest spec" back and forth all day and we'll still have people on both sides. Regardless, Blizz will buff/nerf the specs the way they want to. With regard to GC's announced intention off improving BM dps, I believe a change to Arcane Shot's scaling/dps could easily increase both BM and MM dps without affecting Survival dps and I hope that they choose this route over another complete overhaul.

Out of interest - why is everyone so intent on being the 'hardest spec'? Yes at the begining i went sv, i regemmed reglyphed and learnt the rotations etc - but after playing it and seeing how good it is i got extremly bored within a few 3 raids time. I far prefer using my spirit beast and trying to maximize my dps in BM than going a spec thats completely easy. I guess im like petopia guy in that way... lol

Keeping to the point, if you look at the current ways to play for bm and sv:
(these are priorities not shot rotations ofc)
SV: SerpS > KS > ES > AimdS > SS
BM: KS > ArcS > MS > Serps > SS
There is no difference in the amount of things you have to manage in the rotation, if you ignore procs and pet.

What is missing in that approach is that sometimes the hardest spec isn't the one you have a difficult rotation with. Of course a rotation that implies using several spells and taking in consideration procs (like Survival) is hard, having more dps uptime (yours and pet) can also be challenging.

Having less points in frenzy doesn't seems a good approach. I think that frenzy 4/5 is the best to assure 100% uptime, mostly in fights that you aren't able to crit as much as you like.
Regarding the gfft points, just test it on a dummie and see if you can keep your pet focus up with 1/2, if not go for 2/2.

Its true that none of the specs is as hard as it was to achieve perfection in your rotations before the autoshot was unlinked or even before BM came up. Which is also the main reason for most recent nerfs in my opinion. Lets face it, the moment they announced the unlinking of autoshot, everyone could see the departure of the nerf-train. It was just a matter of time before it arrived.

The redesigned BM tree in BC started the whole thing. Only using steady and auto made people look for macros soon. It took a while but by the end of BC even the most uninformed hunter was BM and a very large chunk found a macro to spam on their mousewheel to avoid autoclipping, closing the gap between average and skilled hunters considerably, leaving only room for perfect cd management, good equip choice or similar. Both other specs were not viable from a personal dps standpoint. Even aggro-management was a nobrainer for BM's because it was divided by you and your pet and only the worst tank was not able to generate more threat then half of your total dps.

Followed up by the unlinking of the autoshot, the base of almost equally good hunters was upped to 99%, because no one could clip autos anymore even without macros and just had to send in the pet in and push the steady button as fast as he could. Application of serpent sting didnt even matter in the big picture for a BM. Weapon speed, calculations and equipment planning was reduced to 0. The maximum of dps was achieved only by the perfect synergy of the multiplier talents, the pet and steady shot. Readiness was just the icing on the cake.

As much as I loved it myself and as much as everyone hates being robbed of something, everyone saw it coming.

Since I had to be BM myself, switching to SV in 3.08 for the first time since the first wow beta had me wondering how the heck someone could manage the perfect rotation of 5 shots + pet + cd's + boss + procs, while the rotation could change at every gcd. The first minutes on the target dummy after respeccing made me think its impossible. Playing only 2-3 days showed me that its perfectly managable.

In short, yes, if you do your homework, all of the specs and playstyles will be easy for you, but this does not apply to the majority of players. Actually only to a small amount. And you need to get the big chunk of players OFF the highest dps chart if you want to avoid every other class calling nerf until you get one.
To do that you have to implement small gadgets into the specs again, which are only used to their full potential by a small percentage of players. LnL represents a gadget like this, atm its enough for the survival spec, because SV results vary a lot, but even tweaking SV might still be neccessary if too many people achieve perfect results after some time.

So while all might be easy for "you", there is still a difference in the specs. SV does about 10-15% more dps right now. Considering how many actions you perfom per second makes it obvious that you can easily lose on the 10-15% if your reaction is about 0.15-0.2 seconds slower, putting you in line with a BM...

In other words, as of patch 3.08 the devs achieved their goal, if it was to create 3 specs for 3 different types of player skill. But if I understand GC correctly, the real goal was to have all trees in line dps wise, while allowing for more dps potential if you know your class. I might even go as far as saying that the devs did overnerf BM completely on purpose to get everyone of the BM train for some time, so when BM gets rebuffed in some way people did realize that they have a real choice between 3 specs.

Edit: wow, that was long, sorry...

The reason so many people jumped ship is that all the pet unfriendly fights that separate a good BM hunter from a great one don't affect survival as much. Also, survival has replenishment. These alone could be worth a respec even if SV's damage was still sub-par, but now they do more DPS with the same gear too.

After the last patch 3.0.8a Ive noticed a further decrease in DPS ( Kilrogg Server - EU ).

Using the same rotation and BM Talent setup 53/18/0 I went from average of 2100 DPS to 1700 DPS on Thadius.

The raid composition and hence buffs available had not changed. My gear had even improved a bit ( new shoulders from HC Utgarde Pinacle to replace the old T4 ones, enchanted, and providing more AP, etc. ).

Needles to say I decided to respec to Survival after such a poor showing in DPS to ensure my raid spot and actually help with DPS on the raids.

Without knowing well the rotation, and with the same gear, gems, and enchants my DPS went from the said 1.700 DPS to 3.100 on the same boss with the same raid composition ( Thadius 25 Man ).

Has anyone else noticed any further DPS decreases while BM, with the same itemization and spec? or maybe was I just unlucky that day with the damage rolls, and may have jumped to conclusions?.

Surely 400 DPS less cannot be due only to poor damage rolls or latency?, and of course, a 1000+ DPS ( from a 1.700 DPS to 2.100 DPS range to 3.100 DPS - 3.300 DPS range ) increase surely can not be due only to a talent respec?.

Im hit capped, and perhaps even slightly above hit cap, with my current gear (~9%), so missed shots could not be the reason for the 400 DPS loss.

This puzzles me enormously, because I know I didnt make anymistakes on the rotation, and had done a respec of pet to the spec pointed out previously ( with the extra 4 points spent in pet Hit points and resists talents ) which should have guaranteed that I was not missing out any DPS buff the pet was needing.

Is Blizzard implementig tweaks solely server-side during the server reboots?.

Is Recount flawing the data gathering?.

Has anyone got any ideas as to why such a large fluctuation could happen, when in principle I should have experienced some sort of increase - even if it were a minor one - in DPS?.

These fluctuations are common, as with most boss fights, you only fire 150 - 400 shots, and in this small number of shots, crit rolls as well as all other rolls can swing for you or against you.

Less crits means less damage, less pet focus, and less DPS.

Also, Thaddius is a horrible fight to make DPS judgments on, since the strength of your Damage buff is dependent on how many people have the same charge as you, and are on proximity of you in order to stack the buff. Sometimes you get 12-13 stacks for a long time, and sometimes you get 8-9 for a long time. This is a 30 - 40 percent extra damage swing.

The numbers you stated seem very low for a 25 man Thaddius, even as a BM. Are you sure your pet is included as well?

I can't tell why your DPS as a BM went down but Thadius is not a good fight for comparing BM and Survival. As a BM your pet is doing about half of your damage. As a survival your pet is doing like 10-15% of your damage. On Thadius pets are not getting increased damage from polarity buffs. Thus BM hunter suffers a HUGE dps loss when compared to any other non pet dependant spec or class. Add that to current game situation when survival is doing a lot more damage than BM anyway and 1000 dps difference is more than possible.

There is a new post up on MMO-champion. MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Upcoming Class Change Highlights (Part 3)

Hunter

* Consumable ammunition has been removed from the game. Arrows and bullets no longer stack, but are not consumed. Ranged attack speed bonus gained from quivers and ammo bags will be preserved in a different capacity.
* A new tier of hunter pet talents have been added. In particular, this allows Beastmaster hunters to improve their damage per second (DPS) with their 51 point talent.
* Hunting Party – this talent has been reduced to 3 ranks and also grants a passive bonus to the hunter.
* Piercing Shots – this talent has been changed. Your Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of damage dealt for 8 sec.
* Sniper Training – this talent has been changed. After standing still for 6 sec, you gain a 2/4/6% damage bonus to Steady, Aimed and Explosive Shot.
* We are also looking to add additional trap functionality to Survival.

Not fully sure how the quiver or ammo pouch changes will work, but the 51st point BM talent says it ups hunter DPS now, which still I am not sure if that means the pet's DPS or the hunter's shots. Anyway, I am happy they are working on BM.