World of Warcraft developers have implemented a buff to ranged weapon damage in an attempt to boost hunter DPS, which the team felt was "too low." According to the announcement, "Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent."

Hunter DPS will also be receiving another buff in the next couple of weeks that hasn't been announced yet. These updates are being implemented because the team's proposed plan to change how ammo works was too ambitious to complete by 3.1, and hunters haven't been able to upgrade their ammo since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. So according to the post, "this change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them."

Check out this thread by Bornakk to see which which ranged weapons have received the DPS increase. The post also lists some other Ulduar weapon updates. You can read the full announcement regarding the buff to hunter DPS below and discuss it in this thread in our hunter forum.

The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.

Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.

We don't think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We'll announce that change when it gets closer. (We have some plans for other classes as well, but we ask that you please keep this thread on the topic of hunters and the ranged weapon changes.)

As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.