Well, there's the answer to the question of what would become of the former expertise bonus.

Also, there's a pretty good answer to the question of how they intend to address BM's lagging DPS. Odd, though; I could swear GC had said that they wanted to find ways to buff the hunter rather than the pet. I'll take what I can get, I guess.

Edit:

At this point, I'm looking at one of the following three specs come 3.2:

55/11/5

53/11/7

53/13/5

I guess some people prefer a build with Invigoration, but what I'm most interested in testing is the relative values of the extra Kill Command now offered by Catlike Reflexes, the bonus crit damage from Mortal Shots, and the extra crit chance from Survival Instincts.

CLR is about 10 dps per point. Very weak buff.

With the recent buff to Wild Hunt to 15/30% combined with the other changes, I think BM would be somewhat competitive. Only problem is that BM dps will again fall off as better gear becomes available.

My gut feeling is to move the 3.1 mend pet/spirit bond floater to CLR instead and call that a day for the BM tree. It's a DPS boost, but unlikely to be big enough to warrant losing 2 points from better talents in the other two trees to cap it out.

I reckon We're going to see 53/12/0 as the core of the spec with the last 7 floating points reliant on the spreadsheet results (probably standard 7 points in survival for IT and SI given what we've seen on the Colosseum boss types so far):

I'm not sure those particular floater points can migrate that far down the tree, but my testing is showing results along the same lines of your general premise -- the extra Kill Command is probably not worth as much as more points in mortal shots or points in Survival Instincts. Unless they play with the numbers a bit more, I'm thinking CLR will remain most useful for PvP or soloing/off-tanking.

Ah, fair enough. I thought you meant move both points down.

Still, anything less than a full 3/3 in CLR will cause a disruption in pairing Kill Command with Bestial Wrath, and three points are hard to find at that point in the tree.

That's a worthwhile point - we're not going to get 3/3 points into it at that position in the tree. Setting that aside for a minute, I'm not sure the fallout from CLR depaired KC is as bad as people seem to think.

BW glyphed and talented has a 70 second cooldown and an 18 second duration rather than just a 70 second cooldown. In other words, if you're hitting it as often as you can, it should be up for 18 seconds, then down for 52.

KC has a 60 second one when untalented. KC gives a bonus to the first 3 special attacks made by the pet (of various degrees). So 3 GCD or 4.5 seconds duration (in reality, it's less time than this because the third GCD doesn't need to end before BW - to make it easy, call it 4 seconds).

So we want the 4 second KC to occur within the 18 seconds that BW is up rather than the 52 seconds it's down whenever possible.

Lets assume we hold off on KC if the cooldown will not sync up with BW again for a long time.

So, from working through this in excel:
CLR 3 doubles the number of KC during a fight when paired (1 on every BW, 1 off).
CLR 2 gives 3 for every 2 you would use. (1 on BW, 1 off BW, 1 during BW, hold this one to resync with BW)
CLR 1 begins to skip some BWs by necessity. (1 on BW, 2 unpaired by CD, 1 during BW, hold to resync)

So basically, whether CLR 1 is worthwhile comes down to whether 2 non BW KC's are worth more than 1 BW KC DPS wise, by how much and whether the extra complexity in knowing when to hold your KC cooldown is worth that to you.

You make an excellent point, and it's definitely worth further investigation.

To paraphrase your post, getting 1/3 in the talent essentially causes you to go from a place where for every cycle of three BWs, you have three paired KCs, to a place where you have two paired and two unpaired KCs. So is one paired KC worth more DPS than two unpaired ones? If so, then we might as well keep using that floater point in Spirit Bond or Improved Mend Pet. If not, well, we just got a little bit of free DPS out of a point that used to have marginal utility for raiding.

So there is that question. Then there is also the question of if we've already put one point there to get the most of our 53 in the BM tree, is it worth putting one more in and going with a 54/11/6 or a 54/12/5 to get the extra KC between every other BW at the cost of a point in one of two talents that are guaranteed, no maintenance needed DPS boosts.

Anyway, I'm fairly certain that as currently implemented the spreadsheet doesn't model Kill Command usage in a way that can answer these questions, so a bit more good old fashion testing may be in order here.

While I agree that buff gimmicks not applying to pets means a lot of fights put BM at a disadvantage, your argument that the spreadsheet undervalues BW because hunters only use it when standing still is erroneous. It is not possible to move less than not moving at all which is exactly the situation the spreadsheet models, a stand still tank-n-spank fight, e.g. Patchwerk.

Then maybe I should have said it inflates SV and MM moreso than BM because most fights aren't patchwerk. The point remains.

Hardly.

MM/Surv has the advantage of being mobile with their shots. BM has the advantage of being more mobile in regards to the pet. The BM pet is about as good as the instants of the other specs. BM has instants too of course.
But like BM wouldn't use BW while running, similarly Surv and MM wouldn't use Rapid Fire (and CotW of course). Now BM has the advantage that BW is more pet centered (so it doesn't lose as much power if you are forced to move in it's duration) and the cooldown is a lot shorter, so potentially it can be used in more 'pauses'. However BW has more than 25% uptime optimally, meaning it's usage is considerably more vital. Any lost second on it is more damaging.

And we shouldn't forget fights like Mimiron or heck even Yogg where our pets are either at our sides for a good time or attacks a much less vital target (if any is within reach at all).

The benefits of BM are also the detriments.

My gear and my spec gained close to 400 DPS in the spreadsheet, bringing me within 200 DPS of MM and 350 or 400 DPS of SV using the standard specs there with the same gear re-gemmed and re-enchanted. Still not quite all the way there, but it's a very good start.