As Shanksorg said, Icy Veins is accurate and up-to-date.
Yes, BM has a relatively simple core gameplay loop. But it doesn’t really tell you anything to just look at a rotation page and call it a day. There are other things to keep track of when actually in a boss fight.
Long post incoming: looking at all the things you have to keep track of as BM.
You have three primary rotational abilities: Kill Command, Barbed Shot, and Cobra Shot. Sounds simple. Keep Kill Command and Barbed Shot on cooldown while using Cobra Shot as a filler dump. Simple, right?
Not quite.
Cobra Shot takes 1 second off KC’s cooldown, which is something you have to consider alongside the GCD (1.5 seconds, reduced by haste) and the focus cost of the two abilities. So far so good.
Barbed Shot has 2 charges and it gives your pet an attack speed buff which stacks 3 times, meaning you are best served using a BS and stalling until Frenzy is about to fall off then using BS again, which will allow you to get to 3 stacks and stay there longer. Furthermore, your auto-shot crits have a chance to give you a charge of BS for free so you want to make sure that free charge doesn’t get wasted while still maintaining 3 stacks for longer.
So that already makes the spec a lot deeper, but there’s more.
You don’t just have rotational abilities. You also have Multi-Shot, your AoE ability. It does pitiful damage, but causes your pet to start cleaving for 4 seconds, doing heavy clumped AoE. This benefits from the Frenzy buff so having 3 stacks is important. Also, you don’t want to be spamming Multi-Shot; you only want to be using it enough to keep Beast Cleave up while filling in with your normal rotational abilities.
More importantly, you have cooldowns. The spec comes with Bestial Wrath and Aspect of the Wild. Bestial Wrath increases all your damage by 25% for 15 seconds with a 90 second CD while Aspect of the Wild gives you 5 focus per second for 20 seconds plus 10% crit and -0.2 seconds from your global CD (that last one isn’t on the tooltip but it’s there), with a 120 second CD. Furthermore, Bestial Wrath’s CD is reduced by 12 seconds every time you use Barbed Shot so that’s something you have to take into consideration (with Barbed Shot’s reset, this means Bestial Wrath has a very varaible CD).
Of course you want to pair these whenever you can while also making sure you get as many Bestial Wraths as possible during the course of a fight… while also making sure you take into account factors on the fight that might require you to pool your cooldowns. And make sure to have decently high focus when going into a Bestial Wrath. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a huge part of BM’s challenge is cooldown management.
Then, on top of all that, you have talents. Luckily we mostly have passive choices, barring situational utility like Binding Shot (an extremely powerful AoE root; use it in M+ on Necrotic weeks and your tank will love you). Previously we would take A Murder of Crows which was a powerful 15 second DoT on a 1-minute CD that reset its CD whenever the target died. Managing that properly was pretty rewarding, but now we generally take the passive Thrill of the Hunt which will give you more Barbed Shot resets due to the increased crit chance.
We also used to take Chimera Shot, a 15-second cooldown 2-target cleave that gave focus, but again we now prefer the passive choice One With The Pack to increase Barbed Shot proc rate. Finally, we now take Killer Cobra which causes every Cobra Shot during Bestial Wrath to reset Kill Command, which makes Bestial Wrath a bit more hectic and powerful.
Then, on top of everything, you have the borrowed power i.e. items.
You have azerite traits that change the spec in meaningful ways. Dance of Death, by far our best trait, makes Barbed Shot have a chance equal to our crit chance to give us a big agility buff for a few seconds. Given crit also increases the Barbed Shot reset chance (remember, it’s a proc from auto-shot crits), this magnifies the value of crit. Once you have 3 DoDs and high crit (>30%) this actually takes priority over maintaining Frenzy, although Frenzy is still important. This is why Barbed Shot reset rate was so important to our talent choices. Add to this Primal Instincts which gives your Aspect of the Wild a big mastery buff, with the first PI you get also making AotW give you a Barbed Shot charge (check out the BM opener priority with this trait). Finally you also need to consider Rapid Reload which causes each multi-shot to take 1 second off the CD of your aspects (Cheetah, Wild, Turtle) for each enemy hit, which is spectacularly powerful in M+ and alone makes us one of the more valuable M+ ranged classes.
And, of course, we have azerite essences and trinkets. But they are common to other classes and now you get the point. Don’t forget the utility side of things, either.
TL;DR: It’s not enough to just look at the rotational abilities and say “seems simple enough”. You can do that to most specs in the game. These days specs have a lot of intricacies in how the abilities interact, whether it be with other rotational abilities, cooldowns, or azerite traits and essences. I would still say BM is one of the simpler specs, but it’s not as “afk free DPS” as many people say. You can definitely see a difference between good and average BM Hunters.