A change Hunters have been crying out for since ammo was nerf… "reworked" in Wrath of The Lich King. Hope this improves Hunters damage substantially.
Let's see what they have up their sleeve.
Our developers consider Hunters' DPS to be very low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve their overall DPS.
Bows, crossbows, and firearms with an item level of 226 or higher (ie Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar, and Furious Gladiator) will deal approximately 30 additional DPS. This should mean a few percentage points increase in Hunter damage.
We don't think this is enough to get the Hunter DPS to where we would like it to be and we have another enhancement that we plan to add in the coming weeks. This change will be announced as we approach its incorporation.
As many hunters will recall, we planned to change the way ammo works with Patch 3.1. This change ended up being too ambitious and we had to cut it back. However, as part of that change, we stopped stacking the bullets and arrows. Because hunters couldn't get buffs based on the ammo that was available when we cast Wrath of the Lich King, its damage had started to lag behind while other classes were getting buffs for their weaponry.
What this change means, broadly speaking, is that the damage of the ammunition will be incorporated into that of the weapons: as they obtain better ranged weapons, it will be as if they also obtain better ammunition to accompany them. This is most likely the design that we will follow through the next levels (tiers) of content until we can completely redesign the ammo.