Serpent Sting has not been widely used by hunters in PvP since Wrath of the Lich King, when Serpent Sting actually procc'd extra damage when you Chimera'd the target that was afflicted by it.
Hunter's are not a DoT class so it is not going to tick near as hard as a Shadow Priest DoT. Survival's Serpent Sting ticks a lot harder, but even then isn't that great compared to real DoT classes.
But seriously, Serpent Sting is the LAST thing to complain about now. There's so much more. Like our god awful talent trees, or our boring and uninteresting Marksmanship spec, and BM having zero damage outside of cooldowns, and the fact that our DPS is much lower than all other pure classes.
good question. this is also an issue in PvE. other classes use their strong dots to increase their dps on fights with adds. our dot is just so horribly weak it's not really worth it.
I can't tell you why Serpent Sting is so weak. it just traditionally has been so forever... in the old days you cast it because you had nothing else to do, in the younger days you do it because it automatically gets refreshed. but it's just so weak. barely stronger than an arcaneshot. the damage could easily be doubled without distubring balance.
why widow venom? so we have the MS effect. it used to be AimedShot, but that was specc specific thus devalueing other speccs. but for the sake of simplicity it could just be baked into another ability. for example 5sec MS on Arcane, or just put it on SerpentSting, makes the ability "worthwhile" in pvp...
Try use ss and wv with glaive toss in a cast sequence macro.
Glaive toss > ss > wv (if your partner has no healing debuff).
Works very well for me.
And 9k? It does quite alot more damage than that. Then again im heavily geared and you are probably not geared to the same extent.
And dont forget that it deals significantly more damage for survival.
We refresh SS automatically while maintaining our highest dps rotation, and in my opinion, this is not good design. I guess it would make more sense to force us hard-refresh SS even in PvE situations and make it hit for a lot more, as Blizzard changed it's model of auto-refreshing dots to hard-refreshing them in MoP (look at warlock and spriest). This would make it more interesting to use in PvP aswell.