With the gear currently at my disposal, I can get 7763 DPS in MM spec on the spreadsheet, but the build leaves me with VERY little haste (127 or 3.87%). Are there any practical concerns that the spreadsheet can't take into account regarding such a low level of haste or should I not be concerned?

You shouldn't face any problems that would outweigh the benefits of armor pen. stacking.

Taking under consideration that pets in new content patch will scale better with hunters stats, reducing the focus cost of your pet's abilities by 50% is not that bad idea, especially for BM.
BM pet can spam skills twice as intensive as now and it will give more dps for sure.

But is that new bonus better than tier 7.5 2P Bonus (5% extra pet damage)? In my opinion T7.5 2P bonus > T9 2P bonus.

But does that mean that MM hunter you can skip 1\2 Gftt ?
No, because your pet will have same low focus regeneration w/o Gftt and will starve, so for MM this bonus sucks.

Every (serious raiding) hunter should have GftT, so this bonus seems pretty useless to me. In a raid environment, your pet won't focus starve anyway, so there is no point in reducing it's focus cost. It may provide some DPS in a situation where you've to run a lot, but I don't think it's worth going for. If you have it, neat, if you can improve your stats by wearing other gear than 2t9, do it.

Since T9 4P bonus is quite lame to, we will have to wait and see, if there are other nice non-tier 245 and 258ilvl items which can be nice alternative for hunters.

Yeah, but the 258 Set is (apart from the gloves) awesome itemized. Crit, ArP, Hit and loads of agi, I think they could be BiS anyway

Odds are yes, it's a place holder. No one would break their current 2pc bonuses for 5% SS crit.

Every other class' dps set (other than DK) has 5% crit to some ability. Now either their item designers have lost all vestiges of creativity or these are placeholders. It is odd that ghostcrawler created posts to ask feedback on the set bonuses though. If they are placeholders, why would they need feedback? It is also odd that they're asking for feedback on these bonuses even though they themselves (afaik) haven't officially released them. Unless Blizzard is considering mmo-champ as their official news source.

Re: Mim Hard Mode & Pets

#1 - Make sure your healers in your guild can see pets on grid. This might seem stupid, but most healers don't. Speak to them individually and explain how important our pets are to encounter / raid success, especially on a progression fight where every bit of dps helps.

Phase 1 - If you are kiting a fire, keep it on your right as your pet will naturally sit on your left when on passive. Get him out early from shockblast or whatever it's called. If you get napalmed, see #1 above.

Phase 2 - Recall your pet when he's taking damage and send him back in quick. The quick in and out will re-position him behind the damage and if aoe melee heals are going, he should be fine. Keep him on passive for laser barrage.

Phase 3 - Is pretty easy, keep him on assault bots and head when its down but be careful of fire proximity to the head.

Phase 4 - Can be a little tricky, I try to stand in the center while the tank kites along the wall but this can get dicey for both me and him depending on where the laser barrage starts. I try to pull him back to me prior to the barrage hoping I time it correctly. Then make sure your tank is on it for moving from freshly spawned fires, as melee can adjust to the side, our pets don't. Also, I have a /tar macro for him attacking the base as I'm usually on the head and again, pull him out early for shockblast.

Finally, I use this spec for Mim & Gen hard modes: 11/60/0

Assuming neither of them are "trackable" (understanding that there is some debate on General), 5/5 in improved tracking is useless. Though I have kept my pet alive through phase 4 on mim, it's pretty rare and Imp revive pet is awesome. The other hunter in my raid has 3/3 IHM so I spec Trueshot for when Abom / Unl Rage falls off with melee being idiots.

Re: Arm Pen

In my experience, stand and shoot fights, stacking arm pen = win. Movement fights, it's a dps loss. That simple.

I raid with 2 other hunters that are both happily specced SV. I however am keen to permamently be specced MM, the problem is, everytime i specc MM they out dps me. My Arp is only 25% (300 odd) with all my arp gear on, and i realize i should have roughly double this for arp to be truly effective. I have taken arcane shot out of my rotation as well, but i still see very good dps results on these pages with roughly the same amount of arp i have. So , for the moment i stay specced SV and equal or beat the other two hunters until i have 4 bits of t8 (currently only have 2) for the steady shot buff and more pieces with armour pen so i can get to 600ish rating. What i would like to know is, is there any particular fights in Ulduar that MM is "better" suited for than SV, so i can at least change over to MM from time to time and do good dps until i get get to my goal amount of arp of 660 which will hopefully make MM out dps SV everytime (except Hodir and General of course.)?

Iron council should work better for marks because you double dip in +damage effects (serpent does more damage, and as a result serpent part of chimera does even more damage).

Concerning Armor Penetration, after my own analyses of available gear, I personally did not originally think that it is worthwhile to "cap" ArP. It might be for others, but here is why I was leaning against it.

The difference that I found in the spreadsheet between my best in slot gear with traditionally gemming for agility and obtaining ArP where the piece was best-in-slot for this philosophy (resulted in 282 ArP) and the best in slot gear with ArP (with keeping T8 4-set bonus) and gemming for ArP instead of agility (resulted in 562 ArP plus the addition from trinket procs) was 3 DPS in favor of the ArP set. This included moving the 3 points my agility set had in IAS into ISS and removing arcane shot from the rotation (and yes I redid the rotation test).

Maybe others are seeing better differences, but what I was seeing just does not seem worth it to go away from the traditional stacking of agility as a priority. Yes, I realized that the rotation is much easier to consistently implement, but that is not a huge concern. Furthermore, that rotation is worse on movement fights since you have 1 less instant cast attack (if trying to maintain this rotation) and since your Steady Shot cast is longer due to having less haste rating in the ArP build.

But then I realized that I forgot to explore glyph changes, which is something that I have not seen anyone really discuss in regards to the agility or ArP discussion. I was already using the Steady Shot glyph, which has even more value in the ArP build since you are doing more Steady Shots. To get Chimera and Aimed shots on the same CD timer, I dropped the Chimera glyph and was surprised to see that by far and way the best glyph replacement was Hawk (mostly due to the ArP set only having a 100 haste rating). The single glyph change resulted in a 133 DPS boost, making the difference between the two rotations as 136. This is more significant and can make the change worthwhile.

But then I pondered whether that boost was due to the ArP or other factors like the rotation change. So that I could verify that the benefit was due to the ArP build, I took my agility best in slot set and removed arcane from the rotation, moved points from IAS to ISS, and switched the Chimera glyph for the Hawk glyph. To my surprise, I saw a 130 DPS improvement resulting in the difference between the agility and ArP set when both are using the exact same rotation and glyphs that people tout as being ideal for the ArP set as a 5 DPS difference.

This made me ponder why this may be. Definitely factors are the high crit rates and the benefits of PS making such that my Steady Shot and talented Arcane Shot damage are almost identical. So I decided to see how the rotation and glyph change would affect my current gear with 42.6% crit rating and 234 ArP and saw that it improved my DPS by 65.

Thus, at this point in time, I think I am going to stick with the traditional gemming of agility as the priority. The main reason is that I am more confident with its benefits in all situations, while the ArP stacking benefits only seem beneficial now with the right set of gear, which includes having one of the ArP proc trinkets, which I do not have either, and that the benefit is really insignificant in comparisons using the same rotations. I am also afraid that ArP mechanics might be changed again to nerf them some, but since a ArP change may not ever happen, it is not a decisive factor.

What I think is the big find of the ArP discussions is the rotation and talent change due to our now higher crit rates and decent ArP making Arcane Shot less beneficial except when in heavy moving situations.

I do plan though to keep an eye on the situation to see how much more of a difference occurs between the two sets with the new gear available in 3.2, but for now I am not sold on stacking ArP to cap but obtaining it where it makes sense. What I am going to experiment with though is the rotation/talent/glyph change.

Ok so according to my previous post about ArP its said that as an example a boss has 10,000 armor at 100% damage reduction for sake of easiness.

The way i thought
10,000 armor = 100% Damage mitigation
Sunder Armor = 15% damage mitigation(not actually sure if its 15% i cant think right now)
----------------------------------------------------
8500armor = 85% damage mitigation
30% ArP rating subtracted from original 10k armor
-------------------------------------------
boss now has
5500 armor = 55% damage mitigation

its actually
10,000 armor = 100% Damage mitigation
Sunder Armor = 15% damage mitigation(not actually sure if its 15% i cant think right now)
----------------------------------------------------
8500armor = 85% damage mitigation
30% ArP rating subtracted from the new 8500armor
-------------------------------------------
boss now has
5950 armor = 59.5% damage mitigation

so even with that 12.32 ArP = 1%, if you had 50 more ArP that fixes the difference between those 2 factors so why cant u add in the sunder armor fairy fire into the ArP equation and just go for less ArP rating if you have the sunderarmor and FF?

Because you're confusing reducing armor with ignoring it, and as the two mechanisms behave differently, they don't stack. It is possible to ignore 100% of armor; it is not possible to reduce it by 100%.

I've arrived at similar conclusions, finding my best setup at my current gear involves leaving agi gems but dropping arcane from my rotation along with the talent points. I also glyph hawk as my third glyph and it works nicely.

I disagree with your statement about the rotation being "worse." Arcane shot didn't go anywhere, it just isn't talented. It works great on the run if you need it, and it works great on Hodir and General Vezax where magic gets buffed. Ignoring Arcane in a situation where it can be useful because you have decided beforehand that it "isn't in your rotation" doesn't make a lot of sense.

Where are you moving the points from imp arcane to? I don't really see why it's necessary to drop imp arcane even if you are changing your rotation / gemming for armor penetration.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft is the build I use (pretty standard, no TSA because we have other buffs, only 1/2 rapid recup since we always have judgment / blessing of wisdom).

You say you're dropping imp arcane but where are you putting the points? You still need 1 extra talent point in the first 5 tiers of the Marks tree to move up, so your choices for that 1 point are pretty scarce. Unless you want to pick up imp HM, I don't see why you would need to remove points from imp arcane at all unless you desperately want 1 efficiency and 2 hawks eye or something.

By using that build, you still have a perfectly good arcane shot for when you're moving or on Hodir / Vezax, but then you also don't HAVE to use it in your rotation when you're standing still. No real down sides unless I'm missing something :S

Whytefist i have noticed after looking at your armory gear that you only have 1 T8 piece. I was originally going to get only the 2 tier piece bonus and stack arp, before being told, that if i'm going to use steady shot alot more (which i will if i stack arp) then i should go for the 4 tier piece bonus so i can proc the 600 added ap bonus from steady shot. What are your thought? Have u tried using 4 pieces of tier before deciding that u were better of without it?

Why dont you try going for 4P bonus 600 ap bonus (gloves, helm, chest, shoulders) and put 16/27 arp gems in.
In my opinion stacking arp doesnt mean that you dont need ap procs any more.
600 ap for 15 sec is quite nice proc, isnt it?

I normally raid SV, but my alt spec is MM. I have been playing with the spread sheet for days trying to work with the no Arcane rotation, but it's consistantly 300 dps lower than when using it in my standard priority rotation. I just recently got the 4pc bonus, using legs since we are butting our heads against Yogg still, so my ArP is under 200.

I think I have done everything correctly, to include changing glyphs to SS, SrS, and Hawk. Is my ArP just too low for this to pan out? If you check my armory, you will see that I'm currently over hit-capped. I also got Frost-bound Chain Bracers last night, so I'll be reenchanting my boots soon to help correct this.

I got a 35 dps loss when removing Arcane Shot from your rotation (7488.46 with, 7453.48 without). I guess your gear just isn't there yet.

Yep, exact same bonus: Rift Stalker Armor. The difference between that bonus now and that bonus then is that at the time of T5 steady shot accounted for a large part of our damage (since most of us were spamming it as BM), whereas now it is our last priority, lowest damage, most nerfed shot. Steady being better for MM than it is for SV makes the bonus unbalanced between specs, which while not entirely surprising, is still dissapointing.

The hunter bonus also seems like a joke compared to other pure dps bonuses: Mages get the bonus to Fireball, Frostbolt, Frostfire, Arcane Blast; Rogues get the bonus to Hemmorage, Sinister Strike, Mutilate, Backstab; hunters get...steady shot? If they're going to make everyones set bonuses "the same" they could at least make it the same for our 4pc and give us the bonus to Chimera, Explosive, and I don't know what for BM. I guess that's probably the issue, finding the BM ability to give the bonus to that wouldn't also buff the other 2 specs. Regardless, they can do much better than another 4pc bonus that is unbalanced between hunter specs, weaker than other pure dps specs (again), and reliant on our worst shot (again).

*Note: we should probably have a 3.2 thread to put all non spec-specific discussion in. I posted here because this is where the discussion about the T9 set bonuses was already ongoing*

I am actually wearing two pieces ATM (1 10-man - the helm - and 1 25-man - the chest). The reason that I am not wearing 4 pieces is that I do not have 4 pieces yet. I only have 3. I have the 25-man legs as well but am wearing the better 1-to-1 Saronite legs until I get the 4th piece. I am a little behind in acquiring tier pieces since my previous guild feel apart right after Ulduar was realeased, and it took me a month to get my RL friends to app to another guild.

Once I get 4 pieces, I definitely plan to wear 4 pieces, regardless of whether I go the agility or ArP stacking route. My best-in-slot gear analysis has me wearing 4 pieces. Which 4 depends on which better items I have to replace the 5th piece.

@Kurianna

With the analysis I just provided a few posts back, I am now using the same glyphs as you but I also have not dropped Arcane totally from my rotation, I have only just specced out of IAS and given Arcane a lower priority in my rotation than I did before (I used to have it higher priority than Aimed Shot and did 3 per two rotation cycles). Since my untalented Arcane Shot still hits for a little more than my Steady Shot on average, it still benefits me to use 1 Arcane Shot instead of a Steady Shot per rotation cycle. Once my Steady Shot outperforms my untalented Arcane Shot, then Arcane will only be used in situational cases (certain bosses or while on the move). Of course this decision is affected by whether you are talented into ISS (of which I am not currently) or have the T8 4 set bonus (which I do not), both of which bias towards Steady Shot.