This really cheeses me and is so ignorant. Yes, they are middle of the pack. Yes, someone has to be the lowest. But here's the thing, those sims and numbers are on tank n spank normal fights. How many tank n spank fights are there? 3? How many have target swapping, potential for multi dot, cleave, aoe, on and on. And even then, so what? It doesn't matter. The things that matter now days are what do hunters bring. If we don't bring good dps, we don't bring a buff, we don't bring utility, so what does that leave us? The only thing is that we are
slightly better during the gear phase, because we get a few more pieces of mail because nobody brings hunters. And then everyone catches up.
The problem isn't that we're low dps, it's that we're low dps on certain encounter types AND we do not bring a utility mechanic to make up for it. All we want is to be equal, and people are getting riled up because blizzard won't acknowledge or even answer the questions.
And, this has been going on since the start of the cataclysm with the removal of ArmPen and changing of core hunter mechanics. I have stood firmly that hunters were in a bad spot since the start of cataclysm, and I was the main lobbyist behind getting hunters buffs and debuffs on pets during beta. I have seen the exact same people in this thread now, finally open up and realize hunters are in a bad spot. I have watched since the start of cataclysm hunters slowly get changes to core mechanics, which is always usually in a hot fix or mid tier patch. It's extremely upsetting, because this is a launch character I have played since day 1, November 23rd 2004 and Blizzard is slowly pushing hunters to other classes in the competitive raiding scene and probably now PvP.
Let's just call it what it is: Blizzard can not figure out how to design hunters between PvP and PvE.
My simple answer to
part of this is to just give hunter pets a bleed with a decent cooldown (18s duration, 18s cd), that is removed when the target is above 90% health (only players) similar to the bleeds from slave pens.
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=43937 Can even apply to MM or whatever.