Blizzard mentioned the sunbeam talent for druids, which had been unmentioned during the preview, so I am hoping there are many talent and mechanic changes they just did not mention in the preview. Currently, the marks "rotation" is quite boring, with no decision making involved at all. (save for refreshing SrS depending on T10 proc) However, I am hoping that this changes with some new talents. One in particular is ISS. Have aimed shot do higher DPS/DPF than Chimera, but ISS proc buffs Chimera to be superior. You may have to give ISS 2 charges with this change, however, as you would already be pressing your next ability after SS before noticing the proc. Also, focus costs and movement could play into making a more complex priority system. Say aimed is the highest DPF/DPM, and Chimera is used to refresh serpent sting (it is always superior to refresh SrS with Chimera obviously). Have aimed shot have a focus cost high enough to prohibit firing two while moving even with 100 focus, and have arcane shot be good enough damage that if you will be moving for two GCDs it is worth using over aimed or chimera. This way, we use all shots in our repertoire situationally. I feel that with talent changes, they have a lot of options with procs and effects to get us to use our skills intelligently, and I really hope they take advantage of this rather than us using Chimera and Steady exclusively as marks. Obviously they could do similar things with surv or BM.

Feanoro, I believe the current understanding is that the magnitude of the special Mastery for a tree a tree won't scale with the amount of Mastery on gear, so we won't be gaining more and more ArP as we get better gear. I'm not entirely sure what is supposed to scale with Mastery on gear though.

The third Mastery bonus in a tree is supposed to scale with the Mastery stat available on gear. GC's post in MMO-Champion BlueTracker | Elemental Tree (mastery)PS increase? suggests that.

I wouldn't worry about Double Shot. They have ample opportunity to balance it to be just what they like now. Come what may it will fit their vision. Personally I think it is pretty boring though. Passive, small (though perhaps frequent) and not really noticeable, unlike the sound of Lightning Overload plus an extra LB flying at the targets. That's pretty obvious. If I didn't use MBT I wouldn't have noticed when Zod's proc, or even WQ (since it is so similar to an autoshot in damage). Also even if they make the thing proc stuff and be procced form more stuff than now, we still can't really do much to help it along.
It would have to proc like a swarm of angry bees for me to make much notice of it. Essentially they could have made it say "Buffs Autoshot by a certain amount" the end.

And indeed ISS is possibly the most boring buffproc. We don't really care about it, if we manage even just minutely well it should be given that we get the 'correct' shot buffed (though we did have that 3:1 Chimera to Aimed calculation). But, I would say that ISS has a lot of potential. Currently we are struggling to see how the rotation could be close to what we have if Aimed is weak and expensive (PvP issue) or if Chimera basically is just SS refresh. Heck no mention of Arcane Shot... ISS could easily throw this off immensely. Imagine it changing the cost of Aimed, buffing Chimera somehow and rewarding Arcane in yet another way. If done well it would require a case to case decision. In such a situation it doesn't matter that most of the time we would only fire Chimera for instance, and MM gets a proc matching LnL for fun and complexity (spreading each ES by 2 seconds exactly is not hard with a timer, but not easy without). The flat % we get now is bland. Or if cooldowns remain in some form ISS can tweak those for some cheap burst (if Chimera retains some cooldown but is cheap).

Except you are thinking of those abilities within today's paradigm. In cata, autoshot could be a higher percentage of our damage, or that double shot scales well. Overhealing will be less of an issue with the large healthpool / smaller heals changes, and avoidance supposedly going down overall and used as overall mitigation rather then "% chance to not get two shot" gibbed.

I think it'll be interesting that it will be adding a new stat to gear, Mastery Rating, that will affect every class in a different way. Imagine a trinket with + Mastery Rating (asuming blizz does their job and makes it useful to all classes). That trinket could be potentially fought over by every person in the raid. Also cool how it would be useful to a person's dual spec as well.

Well, given that they specifically said they want white damage to be lessened to encourage ability choices, I have to doubt Auto will be increased, and indeed I'd hope it wouldn't. Increasing Auto's damage would promptly make moving even more punishing than it is today, unless they allow Auto to fire on the run which I expect to happen shortly after Satan complains of snow.

Overhealing may very well not be an issue at first, but unless stamina outscales healing, it will eventually occur. Additionally in that scenario, raid bosses have to hit like trains to even make you worry about your tank's survival. They may very well shift emphasis to mitigation, but as we've seen, that also can be dangerous as Sunwell Radiance and Chill of the Throne have been needed to bandaid fix ridiculous mitigation. On the other hand, too little mitigation, and you have healers taking up drinking.

As to the idea of an entire raid wanting a single item, I can't imagine a greater source of disappointment or worse, potential loot drama. All physical dps classes groan every time Deathbringer's Will doesn't drop... now extend that disappointment to the rest of the raid.

Don't worry about overhealing, at least not here. I'm sure there is plenty of that over with the Paladins if it is something to consider.

Doubleshot isn't terribly hard to scale with Mastery if it follows the current Crit/Haste/ArP/Hit calculation, in that each rating adds something worthwhile. If it is like Expertise, then it will suck, but I can't possibly imagine such a situation. The scaling can be done with either harder shots or more of them. Or even with both.
Yes, that means you won't notice the difference without a log or Recount, but really, how many stats offer that? It is hard to even see a difference with 5% crit without those same sources. And that's a huge difference in terms of stats.

Mastery is supposed to be another, interesting, stat. Not the stat that blows everything else away. It is supposed ot make all specs scale in a meaningful and easily understood way all the time. Certainly some specs will want Mastery a great deal, others might not want it all that much. Hopefully this is down to "I don't feel like I actually gain much with it" rather than "the spreadsheets says Mastery sucks/rules".

What I find intersting is that pets are supposed to scale with all our stats in Cata, right? So they don't fall behind as we gear up and aren't unpleasantly powerful at low gear, as well as disconnecting buffs on pets. But the BM special bonus is pet damage... While it is implied that pets gain crit with Mastery and bosses gain critreduction essentially, I can't help but feel that the pet will scale better than the master. It will gain stats as fast as the mater and gain extra damage as the master gears up. Essentially a reverse of today.
If they make the scaling of Mastery poor, it will not be meaningful to BM. If they make it scale efficiently without being the best, well the pet still becomes comparably stronger as times go on. It just seems like a strange stance to take after the entire backpedal on petdamage and the scaling of pets.

Petscaling is most certainly a point when Blizzard has said they want to keep it at 30% for BM. If it remains at 30% throughout the expansion then Mastery adds too little DPS. That is my point. They can't maintain the level with that Mastery for BM. It might very well be balanced within the class and the game, but certainly not compared to their stated aims. Likewise they want MM and Surv pets to remain at some relatively specific percentage too. But those pets gain nothing from the Masteries in those trees.

See the issue now?

I see your issue now. Better pet scaling increases the pet's contribution from let's say 25% in the first dungeons to 35% in the high-end raids.

Or in other words:
MM/SV scale with Mastery and stats, their pets only by a percentage of their stats. BM scale with stats (but not with mastery), their pets with stats and mastery. The latter one should increase the weight of the pet's damage with better gear, the first one shifts the weight to the hunter. If this does not happen, the BM will scale too bad, so that he falls behind in damage (or he'll deal insane damage in the beginning as we could observe in Naxx).

I only thought in terms of the raw combined dps, so I didn't get your idea. Correct me please, if I am still wrong!

That was indeed my point.
The shift will go towards the pet, and if the shift isn't strong enough BM scales too badly with Mastery. It just doesn't feel very clear to me how they want to balance the Mastery and the 30% (ish) rule of pet damage. One or the other has to give.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Could BM Hunters get some Help?

The quote should be considered in conjunction with the other comments about pet damage and pet/player interaction. Ghostcrawler has even talked about the uncoolness about losing the pet if it does 50% of the damage. So to me at least it is clear they want to keep the pet damage limited within a confined range of percentages, effectively limiting how good Mastery can be for BM.

It might not be a problem at the end of the day, but it is certainly a little wobbly right now.