Could BM Hunters get some Help?

In my opinion, players spend too much effort trying to compare their rotation to that of other classes or specs that they may not understand as well. Bad Arcane mages mash two buttons and bad BM hunters mash two buttons. You're not going to top charts as Arcane if that's all you do.

We don't want to buff the pet damage for BM any more for a couple of reasons. One is that it puts too much dependence on the pet. If the pet does 50% of your damage (which is an exaggeration) and the pet dies, then your dps just dropped by 50%. Even if you can get the pet back quickly, you've suffered a lot of damage loss. Secondly, the pet doesn't require that much babysitting. Few players are clicking their pet abilities on and off. As such, it just acts like a dot with cool art. When we talk about the risk of BM being too easy to play, we don't want to over-reward players for just doing Steady and having the pet attack. What I'm saying is that the more damage the pet does, the less the hunter player even has to pay attention. If the pet required more micro-management, then that would change. If pets built up combo points, or Kill Command acted like a Conflag, or something where the hunter had to react, then more pet damage wouldn't be so bad (though the risk of death doesn't go away).

We'd like to buff BM PvE damage, but we have to be careful not to buff it too much in PvP where it still has really high burst. This means we can't just do things like boost the Arcane Shot damage of Ferocious Inspiration or the like. The damage would have to be more of the slowly stacking / sustained variety, and that's harder to implement. (Technically, it's not hard to implement per se, but it's hard to get it feeling right without causing weird things to player behavior, the talent trees or causing other problems that lead to a two hour fix taking two weeks instead.)

Q u o t e:
This is exactly what I thought, sometimes what GC says must just be for the lulz.

Folks in this thread (and others) like to say "LOL Arcane wins meters with only 2 buttons." My advice was not to compare apples to oranges when you say BM has a ton of cooldowns and Arcane hits 2 buttons. If you want to compare complexity between specs go right ahead, but at least try and compare them fairly. Overall, you're probably better off not trying to compare them and instead just sticking with articulating the problems you see with your class. "Buff us because that other guy plays easy" isn't a very persuasive argument to us.

Q u o t e:
In order to incorporate more pet micromanagement you'll have to do a lot more work on pet pathing, paticularly in boss fights.

I meant micromanagement in terms of actually using the pet buttons instead of setting them all on autocast. I didn't mean micromanagement in the RTS sense. If you're just pointing out that pet behavior is unreliable because it's controlled by a dumb computer, then you're essentially agreeing with me that buffing pet damage is a risky thing to do.

Q u o t e:
Many suggestions have been discussed to buff BM's damage that don't result in just upping the pet coefficients. Adding a new shot, for example, was discussed all through WotLK, even by you GC, and yet it never came about. There's no reason for it not to, it just didn't.

Raccoon Shot is not a panacea. If it hits for less damage than Arcane / Steady then you won't use it. If it hits for more, then the "Beastcleave" guy will use it. It would have to be a carefully constructed mechanic so that PvP was basically trading Arcane for Raccoon (or skipping Raccoon altogether) but PvE guy derived a meaningful sustained dps buff.

Q u o t e:
Arp scaling to pet would be a good change, but I believe GC has stated previously they wont bother doing that because of Arp being removed completely in Cataclysm.

No, the actual reason is that it would both A) buff the pet at the expense of the hunter, and B) lead to more PvP burst damage, which are the two things I said we want to avoid. :(

If arpen was a dead stat, we'd stop putting it on Icecrown gear.

Q u o t e:
YOU are the guys who took away pet management in terms of RTS style with the Avoidance changes, you were the guys who haven't come up with a way for my pet to act like he has full raid buffs even when he dies so I don't lose a huge chunk of my damage. Why the hell do I get punished because of that? Instead of buffing pet survivability, you almost completely took away the need to survive as a pet because most of the time your pet doesn't even die.

Hokie, I've read your (often angry) posts. You are just looking for a class that derives a huge chunk of damage from the pet, but we don't think that would be good for the game. We want hunters and warlocks, and to a lesser extent Unholy DKs and Frost mages, to care about their pet. We don't want the pet to ever overshadow the player. You can argue that it wouldn't, but that's our concern. Pet damage needs to be a smaller portion, though not trivially so, of total player damage. Thirty percent seems like a reasonable target on the high end.