Passing through the WoW Hunter forum on Tuesday, I spotted this lovely tidbit of information:
The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.
Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel’Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.
We don’t think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. F**kin A!!! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! (<–that bit wasn’t in the official blue post, but you may have guessed that). We’ll announce that change when it gets closer. (We have some plans for other classes as well, but we ask that you please keep this thread on the topic of hunters and the ranged weapon changes.)
As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons — as you get better ranged weapons, it’s as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.
I foresee there being some, as they say in the gaming culture, QQ over this change coming from the other DPS classes. But hey, ya know what… Hunters are a pure damage class… no hybrid BS in our talent trees. We’re supposed to be at or near the top of the meters.
Now all I need to do is get my mitts on an ilvl 226 or better boomstick. Well, if my partner and I can put together a few wins this week, I will be sporting this very soon. The tooltip DPS is not accurate at the moment, but I checked it in-game and this baby’s been buffed to 187.1 dps I believe. It’s low-end damage is only 13 below Final Voyage‘s top-end damage. O.O I’ll be able to administer some headshots with this thing for sure.
85 more rating is all we need. Wish me luck. 
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