How to level... hmmm...Follow

The online version of the gear spreadsheet at femaledwarf.com shows that for my SV hunter, who's right on the cusp of raiding, mastery is 2/3 as valuable as crit, 1/3 as haste, and 1/4 as hit, which matches what idiggory was thinking.

Even between breakpoints, haste speeds up both autoshots and cobra shot, which is SV's regen ability - and with aspect switching and the 4.0.6 buff to autoshot, SV can use close to its normal rotation even on the move these days.

So my cat DPS toon who just hit 85 is stacking mastery, my SV hunter is gemming for agility and reforging to hit, and my healadin is matching socket bonuses. Keeps me thinking flexibly, at least.

Pretty sure that rogues only want throwing weapons these days, although I must admit to not having played my rogue yet in Cata. Too busy getting my 2 druids, hunter, shammy, mage and priest to 85 :)

Hunters don't care about Mastery because it's not agility, hunters, especially SV, don't really care much about anything if it's not agility (or hit below hit cap).

And as idigorry said somewhere in this thread it buffs a lower % of our total damage than crit for the same amount of rating.
Mastery does beat out Haste when your cobra shots are 1.66 sec cast because beyond that all haste does is speed up auto shots until you reach 1.5 sec cobras.

There are a couple that have either agility as stat or a +xx agility buff that stacks and pretty much has a 100% uptime.

Hasn't that ALWAYS been the case with Hunters, though? I'm pretty sure I remember that a blue ilvl 200 trinket was their BiS for a lot of Wrath (which made GS a pain in the *** for them).

A blue necklkace was second BiS only to a Kael Thas necklace until sunwell during BC, for Survival anyway.
Then again, BM had the wolfslayer sniper rifle that dropped from the big bad wolf and beat everything until Archimonde/Illidan

Cata gearing makes me sad. It's just so... uninteresting.

From the EJ guide.

I hate mastery.