The real trouble with BM is that in the beta, since they haven't done even the slightest bit of damage balancing between specs and classes, BM is the only hunter spec doing acceptable damage. So it's hard to be super critical of your rotation when you're doubling the damage you had been doing as Survival. Still, I'll try to go over a couple of the changes, even if they are slight.
Levelling:
BM levelling is in a pretty good place, as mentioned before, because it has by far the most damage possibility of the three specs. I did run into a couple of issues where I would have to keep my pet on passive and make sure I got off a shot before my pet killed them. Especially if you're used to opening on mobs with Kill Command, if you get the kill command perk early, or empowered pets, it will be really easy for your pet to one-shot things, which you don't get credit for.
Pet Perks:
Speaking of Empowered Pets (and Enhanced Basics, and Improved Beast Cleave, and Improved Kill Command), the percentage of your damage being credited to your pet is going way up in WoD. Most logs I've seen have the pets hovering around 60% of the total damage. This isn't going to make a huge difference in your rotation, but it will mean that getting off the most KCs possible will be even more important than it is now.
AoE:
Of course, as I always say, it's too early to make a definitive statement in the Beta, but, I feel like we can already, fairly certainly, see that BM will continue to be the best AoE spec. Even if you adjust to consider that SV and MM are way behind the curve in all damage, their AoE potential still doesn't compare with BM's.
Improved Focus Fire:
I'm really quite excited about this change to Focus Fire. As it currently is, Focus Fire is a delicate art which has the potential to gain you just a small amount of dps, while being able to cost you a significant amount if you use it incorrectly, or have bad RNG. This perk, however, adds in a little more incentive to use it at the appropriate time.
At first glance it may seem like this will be another neat ability that won't at all affect our playstyle/rotation, but if you really want to get the most out of it, it will change the rotation just a bit. Where before, you generally wanted to use Focus Fire right after Bestial Wrath, in order to give your pet full stacks of frenzy during BW. While that's still going to be important, we're also going to add in that to get the most out of Focus Fire, you'll want to be close to focus capped before you use it. Without any snapshotting, there's not a lot of opportunity to take advantage of a small, short buff like this, so having a lot of focus to burn will allow you to smash through some harder hitting shots.
The other thing we'll want to look at, is getting off two Kill Commands and one Glaive Toss during the Focus Fire buff. That should be fairly simple to do, but will require just a little bit more planning than we've currently been doing.
Overall Impressions:
There's not really that much more to say. As I was writing this I realized that in the MM and SV articles, I really didn't spend much of any time talking about "perks", but since there's not that much new to BM, that's about all there is to talk about here.
I do appreciate that they left one spec fairly unchanged, even if it makes that spec a little on the boring side. BM was in a good place all through MoP, so as long as it continues to do competitive damage, I feel pretty good about how it plays.
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