You see it everywhere; the sentiment that Hunters have too many buttons. Not everyone feels this way of course, but enough of us do that Ghostcrawler commented on the situation, and agreed that they didn't do as good a job on pruning down abilities as they would have liked. I agree that the class doesn't need a complete overhaul, but it certainly needs work. As fabulous as the new talent system is (and it is), I often feel like the class was more fun to play during Cataclysm than it is now, which is disappointing because I feel that Mists is a much stronger expansion on the whole.
I feel like half of the problem is the number of abilities we actually have, while the other half is how many of those abilities we are expected to use rotationally or in combat in general. So here's a basic list of things that they could reasonably implement over the next few patches that would seriously alleviate the ability bloat we've found ourselves facing.
Remove the following:
Rapid Fire
Focus Fire (frenzy can remain as a dps ramp up mechanic, maybe even incorporate it into future talents)
Widow Venom
Camouflage (possibly, this one is mildly useful but I'm not sure it would really be missed)
Aspect of the Hawk - let's make it official and do away with aspects. Roll the damage into abilities, and turn the Iron Hawk talent into a passive aura.
Modify the following:
Serpent Sting - Roll the reduced healing effect from Widow Venom into this ability, can't believe this hasn't happened yet.
Readiness - Now only resets the cooldown on defensive abilities; disengage, feign death, deterrence, master's call, and exhilaration. The result is it would VASTLY simplify the Hunter rotation (especially opening). This could also possibly include some utility like CCs, but that would require testing.
Intimidation - Make it a talent or possibly an ability of cunning pets. This is strictly to balance CCs available to the 3 specs.
Aspect of the Cheetah/Pack - I'd like to keep these, but just as a simple toggle ability, rather than the current aspect system. Remove the cheetah glyph so there's still some trade off to using it.
Silencing Shot - Give in and make it baseline like we've been asking for for years.
Next would be our talents. I still think they have a long way to go. Primarily the entire 90 tier needs to go, and get replaced with talents that augment our AoE, since that was apparently the original intent of the tier, without being rotational. I would prefer talents that augment existing abilities, such as boosting multi-shot or traps. I might even suggest moving the 60 tier talents to 90, and placing the aoe talents at 60, if they don't feel they're "awesome" enough for end tier.
I started leveling (yet another) Hunter at the start of Mists, and I have to say that the class' toolkit really feels complete by about the time you're in your 60s. And yet they just keep throwing more abilities at you. For leveling, or even small group content, I often find myself ignoring many of the abilities I have, simply because I don't need them. You're never really challenged to maximize your damage output at lower levels, and the times when you do get in too deep, it's control that gets you out, not sheer damage output. And yet so much of what we were given in this expansion is just more attacks, more dps cooldowns. Though the reasoning's not hard to guess; we already have all the CC we could want, and they couldn't figure out what else to give us. You'd think that would have thrown up red flags during design meetings, but here we are.
Anyway, I'm interested in feedback, I know there are those of you who think the class is perfect and wouldn't change a thing, I just don't feel the same.