OK boys and girls, let’s talk a little Raid Synergy. Why the heck should your raid take you before taking a rogue or a mage? What are you bringing to the table, hmm? What’s in your picnic basket?
If you’re a Beastmaster hunter, you’re bringing Ferocious Inspiration.

Pros:
It scales. As your raid’s DPS increases, the extra 3% damage scales.
It affects physical, both melee and ranged, and spell damage.
It stacks. Put two BM hunters in the same party and that’s a 6% bonus to damage for everybody in the party.
Cons:
It only affects the hunter’s party, not the entire raid.
The hunter has to keep his pet alive and cannot focus exclusively on his own DPS.
The hunter has to keep his pet engaged in doing damage. Fights that are pet-unfriendly are terrible for BM hunters as not only does FI not proc, but 35-40% of the hunter’s DPS is lost with the pet sitting on the sideline.
Jumping over to the Survival tree, this guy has Expose Weakness in his arsenal.

Pros:
It affects the entire raid, not just the hunter’s party.
It scales. As the hunter’s agility increases, EW gets more powerful.
Cons:
It is only beneficial to physical DPS, not spells.
It is very gear-dependent. A hunter with low agility will not provide much in the way of an EW bonus to the raid.
And finally, the Marksman tree brings us the old, reliable Trueshot Aura.

Pros:
It’s an aura and therefore it’s always on and benefiting the hunter’s party.
It is not gear-dependent.
Cons:
It only affects the hunter’s party, not the entire raid.
It does not scale. A MM hunter who just dinged 70 will provide the same TSA-bonus as a MM hunter in full Tier 6.
It is only beneficial to physical DPS, not spells.
BM versus MM and SV
If you have the skills to keep your pet alive in just about every raid encounter, if you’re willing to micro-manage your pet and use a good chunk of mana to keep him alive instead of contributing to your own auto/steady rotation, then roll BM. Have your raid leader lump you in with your raid’s highest-DPS casters and thwackers. This is where your 3% bonus to all damage is best used; when it’s scaled.
If pet-management just isn’t your thing, or your guild already has 120 BM hunters, then you should consider one of the other two trees.
SV versus MM
Since MM provides a fixed 125 AP bonus to all physical DPS, the SV hunter has to be able to have EW provide at least 125 AP. Since EW provides 25% of the hunter’s agility as a bonus to the raid’s DPS, the EW hunter needs 500 agility to equal the MM hunter, (500 * 0.25 = 125). But since TSA is always on and EW requires a crit to proc, we go a little further and recite the standard rule, “Until you have 600 agility, don’t go SV.”
But that’s not the entire story. The MM hunter’s TSA is applied to his party, the SV hunter’s EW is applied to the entire raid.
If the SV hunter has less than 600 agility and provides less than a TSA’s 125 AP EW bonus, but applies his bonus over an entire 25-person raid, he could be contributing more to the raid’s DPS than a MM hunter who is only buffing his party’s DPS, (this would depend on the raid makeup, of course.)
Is your guild physical-DPS heavy and spell-DPS light? Don’t be scared to go SV if your agility is less than 600, especially if you’re starting 25-man raid content.
If you are starting 10-man raids and you have an almost all-physical DPS party every week, MM might be a better raiding spec for you. But as your gear improves, your raid-enhancement is not going to change. That’s the inherent limitation of the MM spec for raiding.
Now if you do choose the SV tree, you must remember two things:
1. Your entire focus is on Agility. Crit will come with Agility, so don’t use +Crit gems. RAP doesn’t contribute to EW either, so none of those AP gems or enchants. You are Captain Agility. Crank it up and let the EW-goodness fly.
2. Your purpose in the raid is to enhance the rogues, feral-cat druids, enhancement shaman, ret pallies, arms/fury warriors, and holy priests who like to stab things with their daggers. Your DPS will almost always be lower than the BM hunters in your raid. If you’re a BM hunter who respecs SV, be prepared to be astonished and depressed when your personal DPS drops from top-3 to bottom-5 of the damage-meters.
And if you choose the MM tree, you must remember one thing:
1. You’re raid-talent is weak and going to be chosen only if there’s a spot in the raid they cannot fill with anything else. Or they’re ill-informed. Or you’ve got something to blackmail the raid leader into inviting you.
BRK’s Recommendation to Blizz to Fix the MM Tree
Easy. Make Trueshot Aura scale with RAP. Can you imaging a MM hunter with 2300 RAP and a TSA bonus that converts 25% of that RAP to an AP bonus to all members of the hunter’s party?
So sayeth BRK, so let it be done.