The soft haste cap (when Steady Shot gets to 1.5 seconds) is ~552 haste and that is pretty much completely unrealistic to get to. From what I’ve gathered you only really need to run with 200-300 haste because you’ll tend to reach the soft haste cap with raid buffs. (I’ve got 373 haste and that’s without gearing specifically for haste.)

That said, if I had stuck to my pre-3.1 glyphs (serpent, steady and imp. hawk) a spec that included IAotH would have been ahead of my current spec by a small margin.

I think the main reason for 0/15/56 or 0/14/57 specs to be ahead of something like, say, 3/15/53 is that the talents you have to skip at the bottom of SV to be able to do that are overall stronger talents than IAotH. (Like pulling points from Noxious Stings, Sniper Training, Hunting Party or-godforbid- Master Tactician)

The other thing (and this may just be anecdotal as it’s mostly just what it’s felt like to me raiding the past few days with the new rotation) is that with the addition of Black Arrow to our rotation as well as Kill Shot being back on the GCD we tend to be firing even less steadies than before. (This is part of why I’m a bit meh about the 4pc T8 bonus for SV but I’m reserving my judgement until we know the proc rate on it)

http://elitistjerks.com/f74/t38137-survival_hunter_wotlk/p88/#post1192617 is actually an interesting post in the SV thread on EJ where someone figured out about how much DPS each talent/point in that talent is worth. I could have sworn there was another post stating the DPS/point of IAotH but I can’t find it. :/

I took Aimed because I like the added flexibility/mobility. (And I’m finding that, at least for learning, having increased mobility in Ulduar is very nice.) I would advise against going 4/5 Master Tactician, though, or at least plug it into the spreadsheet to make sure; For me dropping a point from MT showed to be more of a DPS loss than dropping a point from Hunting Party, Sniper Training or Aimed Shot.

I mention this all because I can now happily say that BM is now a legitimate contender with Survival in raid DPS. No longer am I stuck on the sidelines while SV’s dominate the meters. YAY!

I’ve actually written a full post about this exact topic on my blog at
http://bloggialwrath.blogspot.com/, come read it some time if you get the chance.

Also, I’m just like that hunter *cough* Goulet *cough* Can totally see through the blur *cough*. If BRK said it than it must be true, because he has Brain.

-Zolton

P.S. There really needs to be a Heroic Deadmines.

Until then – I still love running around with that spirit beasty too much to put him in the stable for very long.

Many whelps! left side! Handle it!

And I tend to be a min/maxer for raiding so I follow the EJ forums pretty closely (at least for SV anyway). ^^;