I'll probably be favoring BM but we have to see the final outcome of 5.4 buffnerfs ...
I come across a quiet river, that wonders through the trees.
I stare into its running waters and fall unto my knees.
In resignation to the forest, that's held me for so long.
I close my eyes and drift away into nature's evensong.
I'm curious why MM performs better than BM. AFAIK, there is no obvious buff&nerf to MM.
Because Survival's multidot power largely comes from using Spread to maintain Stings and not the extra globals on manual casting Sting between multiple targets.
Norushen has a bit of AoE but most of the fights are spread short lived adds with the encounters having more emphasis on single target damage. You'll get better results by just tunneling down a target with raw single target output unless you're a Warlock or Boomie who can inflate their single target by multidotting. Even on an encounter like Dark Shaman which is great for multidotters, Survival's multidot power still isn't that strong and doesn't make up for its single target weakness. Our entire class is doing poor atm but Survival and Marks are basically dumpster tier until we see damage buffs and rotational improvements.
That's going by the assumption that BM single target is way ahead of SV, which it probably is in 5.3. But 5.4 hasn't seen any number tuning yet, so there's no telling how it'll end up. Spread targets in general still favor survival over BM, simply because survival can gain dps by multi-dotting (even if you have to spread it without multi-shot), while BM gets nothing in that situation.
FL - MM, DS - SV, MoP - BM. So it seems that MM will be on top on next tier
Blizzard has even said that while they have already planned the Stampede adjustments, they haven't finished tuning DPS for 5.4, so still plenty of time to see Hunter DPS increase.
Or it's plenty of time to do nothing for us. As usual