Which is precisely why it won't happen. It wouldn't pull ahead a meager amount, but a considerable one. If epic gems do come out then other professions will get new or revamped self-only enhancements to compensate, including JC.

What makes you think that? Blizzard doesn't seem to be interested in keeping all the professions perfectly balanced. There are still several professions lagging behind the pack, and that isn't really changing in 3.1.

As Steelfleece said, Tailoring and Engineering have been behind considerably since Beta and they have just now started to do something about it. I wouldn't expect them to add any new profession-only stuff to make up the difference Blacksmithing gains with epic gems.

Engineering being crappy doesn't mean they will just let one profession become the be all end all, moreso than JC is now.

Only time will tell what happens, but my money is on them balancing it going forward.. something you acknowledge they are attempting to do currently with the one that is lagging behind.

Tailoring also pretty much sucks, and that doesn't appear to change.

Two profs are in the middle, LW and Enchanting with their non-base stat bonusses and BS pulls slightly ahead with flexibility and freedom of stabonusses, and finally JC is just way ahead with not only the same flexibility that BS has but considerable advantages in socketbonusses and metafulfillment.

So, we already have the advantage that BS would gain with epics, just with JC at this time.
BS would go from 32/64 stats to 40/80. I would say that in most cases JC is already better than that. It has 33/66 plus the advantage of another 8-10 base stats from a blue gem for the meta (lets not forget the 'loss' of using an orange to get the yellow part fulfilled), and add another handful of stats for socketbonusses.

BS would become the strongest with epics obviously, and perhaps also more visibly to everyone else, but it wouldn't be any more powerful than JC is at this time, in most cases likely less. So unless JC is 'nerfed' soon, then I would say that Blizzard has paved the way for allowing certain profs to just be that much better.
That doesn't mean that epic gems will be freed up anytime soon if at all. Just that the argument that BS would become too stong is not very good when JC is even better now.

Wrong, with epics comes the nerf of JC. The calculations you use for JC that gives you 33/66 stats are when using rare gems. When epic gems are implemented JC's bonus becomes 21/42, so it starts to lag behind LW and Enchanting. Only if it's advantage when using over a blue socket is calculaetd it equals LW and Enchanting (that is for hunters).
With JC you have one other disadvantage, you have to use 3 prismatic gems in your equipment and when you want to change equipment before a fight that can be a problem. Since if you are using your prismatic gem in the blue socket of your bracers and you want to use another pair with a red one where you have an epic gem for example you loose 1/3 of the JC bonuses (because in the next fight you will have only 2 of 3 prismatic gems in equiped)
BS's have it the other way around. In order to maintain their hight bonus they need to put 2 extra epic gems in their slots, something that can be costly especially at the release of epic gems.
Given all of the above Skining, Enchanting & LW do not need much upgrades as their bonuses are flat and require from zero to little effort to get, something that makes them far more desirable for some players.

My math shows the DK heal to be comparable at best, and usually worse. My pet usually has around 15k health, and a completely untalented Mend would heal it for 5250, which is 35% of its health. That's 5% better than Ghoul Frenzy heals over the same period. Keep in mind that the 60% is over 30 seconds, which is two Mend Pet spells back to back.

But we can't ignore the fact that Mend Pet is made more effective by pet and hunter talents (nor should we really ignore that those talents make non-hunter heals more effective too, but I won't go into it). At the very least, we can't compare a talented pet heal for DKs to an untalented one for hunters. Since DKs have to go fairly deep into their "pet tree" to get the heal, we should compare that to a hunter with a similar investment. This means comparing it to at least one point in spirit bond.

One point in SB increases heals by 5%, so Mend is a 5512.5 heal. SB also regenerates health (which I believe is boosted by SB again slightly, but I won't factor that). Over 30 seconds, SB will regenerate 3% health, which is another 450 health. So over 30 seconds, my 15k pet heals 11475. That is 76.5% of its health. It's worth noting that a 20k hunter pet would regain 58.125% of its health under the same assumptions. That's not far off from Ghoul Frenzy, and we make up the difference elsewhere and then some.

The rest depends on pet. If you are using a ferocity pet, then you have to factor in Bloodthirsty procs. Even one proc in 30 seconds will push the hunter pet ahead of the ghoul in healing, even if it has 20k health. Usually you can expect more than one proc in 30 seconds, too. If you are using a tenacity pet (which in my own experience is almost required to have a pet with 20k health) you get 40% more healing from all sources because of Blood of the Rhino, and a 20k pet will heal over 80% of its health in 30 seconds. If you are using a cunning pet, it's a bit clunky, but if you have a corpse, you can heal your pet for 100% of its health over 10 seconds, with a 30 second CD. That's before you consider actually maxxing Spirit Bond, increased raid healing received from the "healing taken" talents or using the new Glyph of Mending if you're really concerned about outhealing DKs.

That also doesn't factor in the resource cost difference. Ghoul Frenzy costs an unholy rune, which according to several posters would totally mess up PvE rotations if they "wasted" it on a pet heal. I suspect these accounts are exaggerated, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. In any event, Mend just costs us a GCD and mana -- it won't effectively put other abilities that we want to use on CD like it might for DKs.

You can't compare a hot to a direct heal 1:1 like that, because in a pinch direct heals will always be better especially if its just enough to tide your pet over to get a small heal from an actual healer. Easy example is 3d sarth, if your pet gets hit while shadron/vesp are up(as a hunter) its dead, doesn't matter if you had mend pet rolling on it before it got hit its just not enough healing, whereas with a dk if they have that they can burst a heal when it gets low then follow with a deathcoil and usually keep it up. That is also attributed to ghouls having more hp iirc but I would much prefer a instant heal on a CD to the current mend pet in most situations.

Ghoul Frenzy is a HoT. It heals the pet over the duration of the haste buff. See Ghoul Frenzy - Spell - World of Warcraft

my fault still groggy

I’ve been looking over Raid History quite a bit lately to get a flavor for Hunter DPS once 3.1 comes out. The site is simply a DPS parse for attempts on various bosses on the PTR. A trend that I have seen developing that I am quite concerned about is a lack of LnL procs.

Specifically:
Sore Patchwerk (PTR DPS Test) : Sore - 4’16” duration – 43 BA ticks – 1 LnL proc
Kyridelle Hodir try 17 : Kyridelle 4’07” duration – 30 BA ticks – 1 LnL proc
Hodir try 16 : Kyridelle 2’46” duration – 20 BA ticks – 1 LnL proc
Hodir try 15 : Kyridelle 3’44” duration – 25 BA ticks – 0 LnL proc


and several more examples within these data sets. Is this the true proc rate for LnL now or have others found it to be higher?

While it's true epic gems will diminish the effectiveness of JC's dragonseyes, the ability to match socket bonuses without wasting stats (and also activate a meta without inferior gems) will ensure that JC is still equal to, if not better than the other professions. The little nuances to how each profession bonus is applied simply add flavor. As hunters there's really no reason to change gear for specific bosses (sans resist gear), so the minor inconvenience of switching gems is negligible in the long run.

The only complaints on epic gems seem to come from people who jumped on the bandwagon and leveled JC post-wrath, but never bothered to get blacksmithing as well, despite it being the other "best" profession to have for maximizing dps. There's no reason one profession needs to remain leagues ahead of the others for an entire expansion. And as mentioned earlier, both tailoring and engineering are vastly inferior yet it's taken up until now to have any changes made to them, and even after they are still inferior.

As for comparing the death knight's new pet heal to our own mend pet, the reason it seems acceptable for it to be "better" than our own is that the opportunity cost is so high. One Unholy rune "wasted" on healing the ghoul ends up messing with their rotations as well as losing dps, while a single mend from us tends to cost only one steady shot.

Again, socket bonuses are not a factor when balancing profession bonuses. Just because it's good for us and some other classes doesn't make it universal. It also doesn't mean everyone in the game is going to need to balance gems around it. Just because we have a blue socket or two on some BiS pieces does not mean JC should be balanced around it. It's not that difficult to comprehend. Sockets and bonuses are completely variable. Profession bonuses are not.

Gaining the socket bonuses are still a tangible benefit, and there's no reason to assume JC shouldn't be balanced against it.

Every class in the game favors a specific gem (or gems), making the benefit of grabbing a few extra socket bonuses "for free" while still gemming for optimal stats something that is relevant to profession balance. Hunters favor agility, Casters favor Spellpower, etc.

I'm also not sure where the idea that profession bonuses need to be invariable comes from. Although it's more extreme than the difference between getting an 8 ap socket bonus vs a 4 agility one, enchanting rocket boots vs icewalker or slowfall vs agility to cloak have varying usefulness depending on the encounter.

Regardless, The Profession Thread may be a more appropriate place to continue this discussion.

I am not surprised to see the proc rate of LnL diminished. After all it was procing 10% of the time off of serpent sting which you could maintain 100% of the time . With black arrow a dot which lasts 15 sec with a 30 sec cool down its up only 50% of the time and in that time it has a 6% proc rate . Its blizzards attempt to nerf the damage done by explosive shot and it works.

1 proc in 4 min (43 ticK) is not 6% that's closer to 2%. In otder to hit 6% we would need to see 1 proc / 14 tick. Does this mean every 1.5 min SV will see a LnL proc? Am I missing something or is this just a fluke? At that rate why not just give hunters another cooldown to watch so we can at least use the damage vs RNG (proc when Twilight torment kicks in).

What really concerns me the most is that the patch notes seem to be less and less about hunters (tweaks if you ask me) which makes me feel Blizz is happy with our class (mechanics, DPS, pets, glyphs, etc).

As was noted earlier in the thread, the proc rate for LnL will be significantly lower after 3.1 and it has to do with the fact that LnL is greatly affected by RNG (which wasn't the case pre-3.1). With the old system, you supposedly had 10% proc chance per tick with 100% tick uptime (20 ticks per minute). Statistically, you could have averaged 2 ppm without the 30s cooldown (basically 10% * 20 = 200% ppm). The 30s cooldown throttled this to ~1 ppm with serpent sting (obviously trapping still resulted in 2 ppm).

With the patch, the absolute max statistical ceiling will be .06 * 10 ticks per minute for 60% chance to get a proc in 1 minute. This is without resourcefulness. The actual rate will more often than not be lower (RNG).

Pre-3.1: Throttled down to 1 ppm
Post-3.1: Max ppm of .6 (without resourcefulness)

GC said that if the proc rate was too low, they'd fix it. However, with where LnL is located tier-wise in the survival tree, this may actually be where they meant for the dps per talent point to be (for LnL).

The new LnL creates some large variances in dps. I have only spent a few hours on the boss test dummy on the ptr, but I have seen dps ranges from 2800-3400 (3k average). This is unbuffed with hawk only, with resourcefulness and until OOM. I was not using KS (therefore no KS glyph), glyphs were ES, SrS & SS. It is fairly common to go 4 black arrows without a single proc. A 600 dps range seems a bit excessive to me. Lucky RNG will now play a major role in overall dps, far more than the pre 3.1 LnL. All gear being equal, RNG currently plays less of a role and the hunter that can maintain the most efficient priority typically has the highest dps. Post 3.1 it will be who gets lucky. Personally, I would rather trade a reduction is BA bonus damage for a less RNG based LnL (increasing BA to 100% uptime, change in LnL proc chance, return of the cooldown, etc).

In regards to IAotH, I have noticed that the priority is very clunky without at least one point (unglyphed). This will especially be true for those currently using a 6/15/51 spec, but also to anyone using glyphed IAotH with any number of points when they switch to 0 points. I have about 360 haste on the ptr at the moment and without a point in IAotH fitting a third special when 2 of the 3 are steady shots is probably a dps loss. I would approximate a 0.75 sec or more delay in Explosive shot. Based on calculations done earlier in this thread anything over ~0.85 sec delay is most likely a loss. Raid haste buffs will hopefully smooth this out.

It appears that BA is far from working as expected:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [BUG] Black Arrow

According to blue posters the power of talents is not really dependent on how deep in the tree they are. The rule of thumb of 1% dps increase per talent point is the same for everywhere (except for the 1 talent point talents).

While this is true, GC has also said several things that indicate that they are aware problems concerning hybrid speccing, and that the talent points deeper in a tree are increased in value, so you don't get the same from a 23/24/24 spec as from a more focused spec.
Most of the improved value comes from synergy, but I am pretty sure they weight the 41 point talent a whole lot more than a 21 point talent even before synergy.


EDIT:
That was of course what I wanted to write, it is now corrected

If you correct that to say the 41 pt talent, then I'd agree but selmarix already pointed out that single point talents, e.g. intimidation, readiness, counterattack, beastial wrath, TSA, wyvern sting (ok maybe not that one) etc are quite different.

Silly question about Lava Breath.

Does it effect bosses?