So I was just reading Saedo's post about gaming mice, and it reminded me just how MANY abilities hunter's have, and our need to use them in a raid environment.

I'll admit, that since I use a standard left/right + scroll wheel mouse, I manually clicked several abilities and cooldowns while raiding.  These abilities were situational abilities such as Trueshot Aura, Scorpid Sting, Viper Sting, MD, FD(I really really really wanted to bind this.  I did.  I promise), Tranq Shot, Aspects, Potions(outside my Nuke CD), as well as almost all of my pet abilities(For pet management, I didn't press a key, I manually pressed "pet passive" and "pet defensive").  I thought I would list for posterity what my key binds actually were for most fights, partly to reminisce and partly justify the future purchase of a full on double rainbow calliber gaming mouse when I finally return to raiding.  Some of these are kinda wonky for people used the the "1, 2, 3, repeat" style of play.  Mine is a bit more... feel oriented, and should there by not be taken as a priority list.  Instead, view it for what they are, a list of abilities that are easy to reach(mostly).

~ : Kill Shot
1 : Arcane Shot+Rabid+Kill Command
2 : Chimera Shot+Silencing Shot+Rabid+Kill Command
3 : Steady Shot+Rabid+Kill Command
4 : Aimed Shot+Rabid+Kill Command
5 : Serpent Sting
6 : [This slot varried a lot, and was generally my "go to" slot for the boss mechanic flavor of the week.  Otherwise, Concussive Shot]
7 : Volley
8 : Hunter's Mark (Truth be told, I rarely used 8 or 9.  I "felt" that they were too far to the right from my WASD.  I usually manually clicked HM)
9 : [I've forgotten what I bind here, because like 8, I rarely used it.]
0 : Readiness
- : Big CD NUKE--> Call of the Wild+Rapid Fire+Potion of Speed+any trinket I was saving for important fight moments like breaking XT's heart.

Middle Mouse : Disengage/Deterrence (depended on which was more important for the fight mechanic)

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That is just a PvE list.  In order to play a hunter properly in Arenas, you need many many more macros.  I can't tell you how satisfying slaughtering the first rogue I saw after binding a /cast !Flare macro to the end of all my shots for a BG.  It just wasn't even fair.  Now imagine putting something like that more comprehensively on a mouse button... see where I'm going with this?

Anyways, I hope you guys have been pleasantly diverted by this insight into the Hunter.

This is taken from MMO Champion. I disagree with it strongly, I'll post my thoughts a bit later but would like to see what people's opinions are.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/general-discussions-22/warcraft-raiding-has-...

Copied word for word.

There's a long-running meme that going to 25 man raids from 40, or
easy/hard modes or difficulty tuning has significantly nerfed raiding. 
This is simply untrue.  Raiding in vanilla WoW was, in most cases,
relatively simple from a mechanics perspective.  Molten Core and
Blackwing Lair, which are held up as guild-breaking raids, had boss
mechanics where the whole fight was as simple as "Run away when you are
the bomb," "Line of sight his ability," or "Tank him with your back to
the wall."  There are trash packs in ICC with more complicated
execution requirements than bosses from early raids. 

What's changed is this:

1.  Tuning -
It's very easy to make a boss a progression wall.  If boss X requires a
certain level of gear to beat and boss Y requires much better gear, or
special resist gear, then your guild has to farm V, W, and X for a
couple of months to beat Y.  Blizzard used to do this.  Ragnaros,
Huhuran and Vaelestrasz were originally hard gear checks, Rag and Huhu
required you to farm lots of resist gear, while Vael required very high
raid DPS, which meant a lot of guilds that were farming Rag had to farm
him a bunch more to be mathematically capable of beating the boss. 
Nefarian is another extreme example.  His shadow flame ability killed
anyone without a cloak made from Onyxia's scales.  But you had to farm
Ony every week for nearly a year to outfit everyone in your raid with a
cloak. 

This keeps people from completing an instance for a
period of weeks or months, and some people believe it's more "epic" if
an encounter is active for months before anyone beats it.  But this is
an artificial barrier.  And it's not fun at all when a raid boss drops
resist gear instead of something cool.

2. Guild stability - Unattractive
loot incentives in the old game made it much more difficult for guilds
to push progression.  Bosses dropped 3-4 loots for 40 people.  You
generally took about 5 players of each class.  There were no badges. 
And since the oldest raiders had been raiding outdated instances for
years to gear new raiders, and building massive amounts of DKP, they
got everything first.  That meant that, when you were pushing new
content, about fifteen people in the raid knew that, whatever exciting
might drop from that boss, they would not see it for at least four
months.  So many guilds struggled with attendance on progression nights
and were oversubscribed on farming down-tier content. 

There
were also no server transfers in vanilla.  If you lost a player, you
had to either poach somebody geared from another guild on your server
or gear up somebody new.  And new recruits would always be undergeared,
because there was no casual progression.  Between raids dropping about
half as much loot-per-player as they do now, and high raider turnover,
guilds never really farmed out an instance.  Guilds ran MC for years
because new people always needed the loot.  This bloated up the raid
week, making the game an onerous chore.  And if a key raider burned
out, the loss could set the guild back weeks.

Also, having 40
people instead of 25 made ready checks more difficult and
disconnect/afk problems more frequent and time consuming.  Originally
all buffs had to be single-cast.  There were no summoning stones, you
could not summon inside an instance, and warlock summons required a
shard for each use.  Just getting people to the instance took a long
time.

3.  Commitment - This is tied closely to the guild
stability issue; since there were no server transfers, it was difficult
to get a group of the best people in the world together to focus on
breaking an instance.  In many of the world-first screenshots, you'll
see timestamps of 3 AM on weeknights.  Before server transfers it was
much harder to put a guild together that could raid that long.  Some
guilds have leveled multiple alts of the same class and geared them up
into ICC to have more attempts per week at the limited-attempt bosses.
There was no way to put together a raid that would do something like
that in 2005; the world-first wasn't even the same kind of valuable
back then, because there wasn't the same kind of attention being paid
to top guilds' progress. 

Those encounters, except when they
were impossible to beat due to bugs or unattainable gear requirements,
probably would not have stood up as well to the kind of super-guilds
that exist today.

Raiding in Vanilla also required a lot more
time spent preparing outside the raid.  Since the gear available was
often barely sufficient, consumables were very important.  You could
have unlimited elixirs on top of a flask, and pop a potion every two
minutes in vanilla, and there were also special healing tubers in
Felwood that people farmed because they shared separate cooldowns with
potions, and crystals in Un'Goro to farm as well.  And people needed
enchanting oil for their weapons, sharpening stones, etc.

Ragnaros
originally required two greater fire protection potions per raider, per
attempt, and they were a pain to farm.  People who were fourth or fifth
in DKP for their class simply wouldn't do this kind of prep for the
encounters, so officers in many raid guilds often spent 20-30 hours a
week farming consumables for raids.  If there were no fish feast, how
many of your raiders do you think would show up without their buff food?

None of this stuff makes the encounters difficult from a mechanical standpoint.
Players in vanilla had fewer abilities and simpler rotations, and the
fights were generally as complicated as modern 5 man heroic bosses, up
until the last couple of bosses of AQ 40.

As it stands, the
presence of hard modes probably means that a normal mode encounter will
never be as difficult as the hardest stuff in original Naxx or Sunwell,
although Hard Mode Lich King may very well be the most challenging
encounter ever in the game.  But the "difficulty" of the old-world
raids came from them being unpleasant to play, unrewarding from a loot
perspective, and saddled with onerous consumable requirements.

As many of you are aware, I am heading back to school in January.  I have known for a while now, that I will probably have to quit playing wow, or at the very least cut back or eliminate raiding.  I discussed this with Garreth about a month ago, and he suggested that I continue playing until that time came.

3.3 has launched.  Kitten Brigade is looking for solid and CONSISTENT raiders.  I have already decided that I won't be raiding come January, but I intended to raid until then.  With 3.3, I feel this may be the best time to take my leave.  I won't be sponging emblems or loot from the raid, and you can gear up someone who would be able to continue raiding when January comes around. 

I am not abandoning you all, I will still be around if there is no one to fill my shoes.  Know that my presense won't last for long, and that I will be gone with the passing of the new year, so make your decisions appropriately for the next few weeks.

After school is over, I should be ready to raid again but I don't expect a spot.

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To Kwon and Minorthreat:  In regards to our 3s team, I will likely keep my account active.  Please note, that I would not be able to do arenas more than 3 hours total PER WEEK.  I'm trying to make sure I don't screw this school thing up, but I don't want to leave you in the lurch.  We totaly destroy folks, its fun, and isn't time consuming.  I hope 3 hours a week is enough for you, otherwise you might want to replace me here as well.

If any of you have questions, or you want clarification on something, feel free to ask me in game or on vent I don't mind repeating myself too many times.  :P

A perfect example of add positioning on Anub'Arak.