Group Buffs

Each of the three talent trees for hunters have a group buff. For Beast Mastery, it’s Ferocious Inspiration. For Marksman, it’s Trueshot Aura. And for Survival, it’s Expose Weakness.

Ferocious Inspiration: Requires 30 points in Beast Mastery Talents
Tooltip at 3/3: When you pet scores a critical hit, all party members have all damage increased by 3% for 10 sec.

OK, lets look at that, first, your pet has to crit, which means that you want your pet to attack as often as possible. This can be achieved with the pet talent Cobra Reflexes, the BM Serpents Swiftness, having a pet with a focus dump attack (claw, gore, lightning breath) and feeding it focus through the BM talent Bestial Discipline and the MM talent Go for the Throat. You can also increase you pet’s crit rate with the BM talent Ferocity. Next, what does you and your group get? A 3% increase to all party members’ damage for 10 seconds after each of your pet crits. This is the only group buff that helps caster types, as it buffs ALL damage. And so to get the most benefit from FI, you could be in a group of casters.
5-mans: Since FI affects all damage, it is very effective in a 5-man, about the only person it won’t help is the healer.
Raids: For this buff to be effective, the BM hunter needs to be grouped with the heavy hitters, basically the top 5 people on the damage meter (one of which is the BM hunter :p)

Expose Weakness: Requires 5 points in Lightning Reflexes, Requires 30 points in Survival Talents
Tooltip at 3/3: Your ranged criticals have a 100% chance to apply an expose weakness effect to the target. Expose Weakness increases the attack power of all attackers against that target by 25% of your Agility for 7 sec.

OK, so what do you need? One crit every 7 seconds, so if you are using a decent shot rotation, you should be pumping out 5-7 shots every 7 seconds, so you really don’t need that high of a crit % to keep it up. But just to be on the safe side, and hitting those crit-strings is so much fun, let’s get all the crit we can. The Survival talent Killer Instincts can give you 3%, the Marksman talent Lethal Shots can give you 5%. The rest has to come from agility and crit rating. Agility converts at approximately 40 Agi=1% crit, and crit rating at approximately 22 crit rating=1% crit. So now that we’re making sure that we crit as often as we can, what do we do to maximize our buff? Agility, Agility, Agility. This is the one group buff that the hunter’s stats affect the buff, 25% of your agility is turned into attack power for everyone in the RAID. Yup, as well as being the only one that the hunter can increase the buff on, it’s also the only one that affects an entire raid. How? It’s actually a debuff on the mob, it will affect anyone attacking a mob with the debuff. Whether you’re grouped or not.
5-mans: because it only grants attack power, this one is heavily dependant on the group makeup. In a melee heavy group (feral druid, rogue, enh. shammy, warrior, ret pally, other hunters) it is great, but mages, warlocks, elem shammys, shadow priests, and boomkins gain nothing for their spells.
Raids: Potentially the biggest raid buff, plus grouping is relatively unimportant because this is actually a debuff on the mob rather than a buff on players. And the more physical damage dealers there are, the bigger the buff the raid gets.

Trueshot Aura: Requires 1 point in Scatter Shot, Requires 30 points in Marksmanship Talents
Tooltip at 1/1: Increases the Ranged and Melee Attack Power of party members within 45 yards by 125. Lasts 30 min.
I’m sorry, I mean no offence to any MM hunters, but you guys got shafted in the buff area. 125 AP. No help to the casters like BM, and it doesn’t scale off stats like Surv. 125 AP is approximately 9 “white” dps. For FI to beat the buff, the person needs to maintain only 300 dps, not very difficult at the raiding level. And a Surv hunter only needs 500 Agility to provide a 125 AP EW.
5-mans: about the same as a 500 Agi Surv hunter.
Raids: I’m not sure whether this one will affect all raid members or just the MM hunter’s party members. Whichever it is, don’t invite a MM hunter for the buff, invite them for the heavy hitting DPS that they can do, the buff is just icing on the cake.