Originally Posted by
endersblade
You must not have played rift recently then. A lot of the abilities have been changed. I leveled a Cleric (AoE DPS/Energizer build) and by the late 40s, I have one macro with 4 abilities in it, and then 3 others on my hotbar. (All my buffs are in a different location, but you don't have to hit those but once an hour.) Same with my rogue and mage, and I haven't checked out my warrior lately. But they have severely shrunk the amount of abilities you need to play, and I'm glad for it.
As for WoW, if I have to use more than the first 5-6 hotbar slots for abilities, the class takes too much effort to play. I don't have an MMO mouse anymore, so I've lost all of my mouse hotkeys which really sucks. But I'm not very good at setting up abilities to other keys other than the row of numbers, as the way I play limits my ability to do so. Granted, I'm a casual gamer in that I don't raid, and don't really play beyond heroic instances, so it doesn't matter if I'm not at the tip-top of the DPS meters or something. I'm also a bit of a clicker, if I need to hit something that isn't within my immediate reach on my hotbar, I use the mouse to click it. These are usually things that have a CD, or something I don't use very often. Stun/silence abilities are usually in the group, as well as any reactive abilities.
I try to macro things as much as I can, but Blizzard has gone the opposite direction of Rift and made it HARDER to macro things, as they have put a lot of abilities that didn't used to be on the GCD, onto the GCD. Really stupid. However, Blizz has stated they are doing what they can to lessen ability bloat without just generalizing every class, and for some classes that is much easier than others. In the OP's example, remember, Monk is still a new class. It took quite a while for DKs to get to where they are now.