Here's some info from EJ about the SV hunter rotation. Rotation: The basic shot priority will be something like the following but subject to minor changes in priority. Explosive Shot - (regardless of Lock and Load state)** Kill shot - If the mob is below 20 percent health. Black Arrow Serpent Sting - (note that this has dropped in significance slightly because we no longer have Noxious Stings) Arcane shot - If you have enough focus to use other abilities when they come off of cooldown Cobra Shot Stampede, Rapid Fire, Dire Beast, the level 75 talents, and the level 90 talents will mostly be used on cooldown with the caveat that you may want to delay them a few seconds for the sake of having them benefit from a proc. Readiness should be used after these cooldowns are exhausted. Cooldown collision priority appears to be a relatively minor concern as long as you are not capping focus (Murder of Crows is a very big focus dump and can be handy to use early or during focus saturation from your level 60 talent) or exhausting focus. Couple this with the uncertainty of Lock and Load proc times (and Thrill of the Hunt, if you are using that) and it would be inappropriate to try to highlight a "typical" opening sequence. With that said, a suggested priority sequence with recommended talents would be: Stampede Rapid Fire Explosive Shot Kill Shot Black Arrow A Murder of Crows Glaive Toss Dire Beast Readiness Arcane Shot Cobra Shot Lock and Load**: This section is a bit of a legacy because our behavior when we get this proc should be very straightforward - spam three Explosive Shots. Past behavior, however, was significantly more complicated so it is worth mentioning what has changed and weird behavior you might notice. In Cataclysm, Lock and Load was changed so that it could only be consumed by Explosive Shot and not arcane shot. This allowed us to weave in arcane shots between Explosive Shots, but we were still concerned about Explosive Shots overwriting each other and causes us to lose one tick. An overall change to damage over time mechanics enabled us to shoot the first two Explosive Shots back to back and not lose a tick unless we shot the third Explosive Shot. If we instead fired three consecutive Explosive Shots we would only get 8 ticks. In Mists of Pandaria, the Explosive Shot DoT now functions under a revamped Piercing Shots/Ignite mechanic. It will still only do 8 ticks but the damage of one tick will get rolled into another, doing the same amount of damage as if we had 9 ticks neatly spread across time. This means that all we need to do to optimize Lock and Load procs is: Explosive Shot -> Explosive Shot -> Explosive Shot. AoE Rotation: Survival appears to still be the top AoE specialization thanks to Serpent Spread and Improved Serpent Sting (I believe this is due to Multi Shot, but EJ didn't specify). Explosive Trap should also be used on AoE packs, at the expense of Black Arrow. Trap Launcher is now a toggle-able ability making the launching of it even easier.
