I have a feeling the net result of these changes is going to result in MM/Survival the more impressive spec. BM took some huge hits. Between Kindred Spirits and Serpent's Swiftness, I'm not convinced there's a significant reason to stay BM.

Who knows, we'll see what lives through the PTR though.

Similar breakdown to Elendril's, copied from my BB post:

Unless they do make exotics a big notch above normal pets 50/21 will still be better for raiding, to say nothing of 5man utility or PvP. While a number of the nerfs were expected, the Steady Shot change feels the most heavy handed. It looks a bit like nerfing Sinister Strike because rogues are too good in PvP and has ramifications larger than just BM hunter DPS. While I'm unhappy that I won't be defaulted #1 on the Patchwerk DMs after some of the proposed changes most of the nerfs were expected and warranted. Quick breakdown below:

1) Steady Shot – Change effects damage too much in PvE, especially for SV which was already miles behind.
2) Volley – reduced the damage by about 30% for all ranks. Note that AE damage from many classes is very high right now and we are looking at all of them. Volley in particular had reached the point where some hunters were using it to the exclusion of most other attacks. - Hunters using Volley in exclusion to most other attacks? On what, single targets? Who cares about trash DMs anyway.
3) Readiness – no longer affects the cooldown of Bestial Wrath. - Yeah, this is probably needed. It'll certainly make BM much less attractive for PvP, but that's only because of the huge control you gain by speccing something else. BM should still be baller for 5s.
4) Deterrence – Ok, whatever. Doesn't effect my damage so I don't care.
5) Kill Shot – Umm, sure. I guess I get 2-3 KS's per boss instead of 1-2 depending on length of fight and Readiness cooldown.
6) Kindred Spirits – Good change. This is exactly the area they needed to hit BM in and I feel just the right amount.
7) Serpent’s Swiftness – Overall this isn't a huge change since pets get WF anyway and haste has a natural tendency to balance itself out, especially with larger, on-crit ones.
8) All hunter pet abilities with a cooldown longer than 30 sec have been moved off the global cooldown. - Convenience changes are cool I guess.
9) Growl— Another whatever change.
10) Call of the Wild – Ability that encouraged group stacking when Blizzard said they wanted to move away from that idea? Yep, needed to go.
11) Rake and Scorpid Poison – Rake change means exactly nothing since it's a smaller portion of Cat damage. Scorpid Poison has been problematic for a long time and was fixed back in TBC, they just rebroke it.
12) Spirit Strike – Exotics are still useless.
Improved Tracking – now benefits damage to all included creature types as long as you are tracking one of them. You don’t have to swap around what you are tracking as much. - Another convenience change, cool I guess.
13) Aspect of the Wild – I do not remember the last time I used this Aspect.


Obviously there needs to be some numbers testing on the PTR when it comes up, but I feel the proposed changes will be softened a tad once we have some data. The main reason hunters are absurd DPS currently is that we get two sets of raid buffs, one for us and one for our pet. Raid buffs don't scale and pet scaling through gear is mediocre. We already had someone post that fluff numbers graph that shows the expected curve for different pure classes and hunters will certainly slow down a fair bit once we move beyond the first tier.

I'm gonna be seriously offended if this goes live without Glyph of Steady Shot being fixed at the same time

That's how I read it as well. It just seemed to fit bliz's mentality of "fixing" through nerfs.

Honestly, could it get any easier to fix hunter itemization than giving haste value to BM hunters by nerfing the talent that devalued it in the first place?