For those officers/raidbuilders of other guilds.

What do you consider the ideal raidbuild generally for fights?

For me (as Alliance):
2hvy warriors (4-7 dreadnaught 31 in prot tree))
2 offtank warriors (read conqueror+dreadnaught both with piercing howl/imp demo shout)
2 dps warriors

2 warlocks

5 paladins

4 druids

7 rogues

8 mages

7 priests

1 hunter

Most will wonder why only 1 hunter and 2 warlocks, simple reason is no dps. There are a lot of arguments that these classes will say to justify their worth but the facts are that a player of the same skill using a character of equal gear will not put out the same dps as a rogue/mage. Additionally 2 warlocks can cover all the dots/curses.

Why have 5 Paladins? u only need 3... but 4 is nice to have.
You need 3 Hunters minimum for Gluth.

TBH you need a different raid setup depending on what wing(s) you are doing atleast untill you get it completly locked down on farm, even then you get stuck with the Hunters for Gluth which sux =/

We usually have a Mage/Rogue(6-9 ea) heavy raid, keeping Druids, Warlocks, Hunters, Paladins to a minimum and then have Warriors & Priests taking the last spots.

I'm sure your hunters who come just for Gluth don't mind missing out on the rest of the loot.
OP... this post was a bad idea.

The "ideal" raidbuild, as such, would vary with each fight wouldn't it? Going Faerlina? Bring heals. Loatheb? Stack mages. Patchwerk? Swap hunters out and mages and warlocks in. Most bosses you can kill fine with your normal everyday raid setup, unless you have some classes with big attendance holes. I'd even go so far as to say all bosses, minus one. Guess who :-)

He's right though, hunters just don't contribute as much as other classes. I can see stacking your raid that way if you're trying to be on the forefront of progression, but otherwise, you'll just manage to piss off the people who play the lower-demand classes. If that's how you roll, then it's fine, but being a raid leader is about more than just killing bosses.

I could see every naxx fight doable with

1 Prot warrior(MT)
1 MS warrior
6 fury warriors
3 Druids
4 Paladins
8 priests
3 hunters
5 rogues
2 warlocks
6 mages

1 left over for whatever, probably a hunter or lock

We build our raids around the following, and always have:

6 warriors (2/3 prot, 3/4 fury)
6 rogues
6 priests
6 mages
4 druids
4 paladins
4 hunters
4 warlocks

However, in Naxx we often find ourselves going with 2 hunters, 2 warlocks and just filling the raid with whatever else is needed - an extra healer or two for sapph and horsemen, other than that just DPS.

About hunters and Gluth, we had 3 in the raid tonight and one of them was disconnected from 95% - we didn't notice any difference. I guess that as long as your tranqs don't miss, 2 are sufficient for Gluth.

But there's fights like Maexxna where hunter burst damage and target switching capability is invaluable. Our hunters get near the top on Grand Widow. Grobbulus is again hunter friendly. Sure, single target sustained DPS is lacking, but if it was as high as rogues then balance would be out the window, as explained many times.

here is my ideal raid config:

me + 39 other people I like to raid with

on a bwl run last month or so we ended up by accident with nearly 5 of each class. only hunters and druids had 4 of each, rest was all 5. was one of the slowest and most painful BWL runs in quite a while.