The urge to expand, extend, develop, mature

Okay! Very little preamble this post. Here are the addons I'm using that are most relevant to the project. Of course I use others -- roleplaying addons, Auctioneer, and so on -- but these are the highlights as they relate to the melee hunter project.

UI Addons!

Aspected Again

Q: What deals holy damage, uses mana, has over 12,000 health, wears metal armor, prefers a two-handed weapon, lays down AoE on the ground that damages anything that walks into it, and has a row of buff icons laid out in an aura bar?

A: A melee hunter with the Darkmoon Card: Vengeance, explosive traps, and the Aspected Again addon.

This addon places a series of buttons for Hunter aspects into the shapeshift bar for convenience. It also will provide a priest with Shadowform or a shaman with Ghost Wolf buttons. This is an almost complete rewrite of PoeticDragon's Aspected mod in order to work with the 2.0.1 patch of WoW.

Fizzwidget's TrackMenu

This indispensable addon causes the tracking icon on your minimap to function as a dropdown menu of tracking skills. It works with all tracking abilities, including hunter talents, gathering skills (like mining), and even the dwarven Treasure Finding talent. This should be part of the default WoW UI. It's that good.

Fizzwidget's Feed-O-Matic

My incredible Feed-O-Matic features state-of-the-art nutritional analyzers to make sure your pet’s hunger is satisfied with a minimum of fuss, advanced selective logic to make your pet doesn’t eat anything you have another use for, and a weight optimizer to make sure the food in your bags stays well organized! Just press the “Feed Now” button and it’ll intelligently choose a food and accurately toss it to your pet.

This is a very handy addon, but my favorite part is the emotes. "Gweryc feeds Cafall a nice [Clefthoof Ribs]. Yum!"

Combat Analysis Addons!

KombatStats

This is the addon I prefer for analyzing my own DPS/IDPS. The breakdown is very detailed and lets me analyze myself and my pet separately or together.

DamageMeters

Another tool for analyzing my performance. It's a lot easier to see where my DPS stands in a group using this than it is with KombatStats.

KLHThreatMeter

Another valuable analysis tool. I like watching my own threat-per-second, even just against my pet, to know where I stand.

Gear Addons!

TrinketMenu

This is a mod to make swapping trinkets easier. It will display your two equipped trinkets in a bar. Mouseover on either trinket will display a menu of up to 30 trinkets in your bags to swap.

TrinketMenu is a key component of the Raptor Bite macro listed in the last post. TrinketMenu doesn't just make swapping trinkets easier -- it makes it automatic. As the documentation says: "3.0 introduces auto trinket queues to TrinketMenu. In options you can sort a trinket slot to the order you want trinkets equipped, turn on Auto Queue for that slot (Alt+Click the trinket on the bar or check the tab in options), and the mod will automatically swap trinkets as they're used and come off cooldown."

That's what the "/use 13" line in my Raptor Bite macro is for. It automates use of my melee trinkets for a dps boost any time I've got a trinket available to use, which I nearly always would, thanks to TrinketMenu.

Today, however, I've removed the "/use 13" line from my macro and stopped using TrinketMenu in that way, because I've obtained a single trinket that easily surpasses the utility of a chain of lesser ones. My Bladefist's Breadth, Terokkar tablet, and Core of Ar'kelos have all been put aside in favor of the Darkmoon Card: Vengeance. A ton of stamina and dps? Do want.

TankPoints

This addon is absolutely brilliant. Before I used it, I took it apart and looked at the code, and sure enough, it not only takes into account your class, it even accounts for your spec. It knows, for example, what it means from a tanking perspective that I have points in Lightning Reflexes. It knows that, as a Hunter, I can't use shields, so it disregards the +block value on a given item when calculating its tank points. Brilliant work.

Rating Buster

Another gem from the author of TankPoints. This converts the stats listed on an item into values that are more meaningful, for example, representing str and agi as AP. When used together with TankPoints, it's a lot easier to see where I'm making trade offs in gear.