Niley: Its always easier to spam heal one target then make Your healer keep switching to pets, back to the tank, to Your team w/e. Thats why priest or shaman healers work best for boxing, one button heals Your tank, one button heals Your whole team.
Here are a couple of interesting things to consider about running a Healer+4xHunter team as opposed to a more common Tank+4xShaman (or any Tank+Healer+DPS) setup:

1.) Most of the time, PvE instance boxers play the tank as the main character and controller the healer with buttons, since it's an alt. I play my HEALER as the main, and all the DPS and tanks are "alts". In my setup, I use mouse-click-casting through healbot to heal and mash buttons to control my "tank" and DPS. I can very effectively chase damage around this way.

2.) Unlike other boxing setups, ALL the characters are in a pile together at range while the "tanks" are farther away. Using an AoE heal (WG, CoH, CH), I can hit all the characters at once easily or all the pet tanks at once easily. There's nothing earth shattering about this observation, just that it is a little different than your normal boxing setup where you have characters split into two groups. I like the way this works since I can easily see everything that's going on with the pulls.

For trash pulls, I really don't mind having aggro bouncing all over the place. I have macros set up to mark and assign tanks to up to 4 targets, but in most scenarios I just let the 4-pack of Gorillas charge in and let natural variations in their Thunderstomp damage split aggro up between 2-3 of them. I set them all to Growl and compete for aggro. This means that the aggro is bouncing around a lot, which is OK since I am using a strong AoE heal in Wild Growth. I can very simply Wild Growth the pack, toss rejuv on pets that get aggro, and then use Regrowth or Lifeblooms on any target that starts taking heavy damage. (In heroics, I will probably revert back to manually assigning tank targets for 4+ elite pulls, however). The nice part about doing this from a DPS perspective is that I can have all my damage on the same target and quickly burn stuff down. Anyhow, the normal frustrations of having aggro bouncing around aren't there for me since I play the healer as main, utilize great AoE heals, and I have basically disposable tanks. If a pet DOES die, I can battle rez it in 4 seconds and keep on trucking.

For bosses, I just need much more healing on the pets, so I try to restrict the tanking to one Gorilla that I can pre-hot and keep WG, Rejuv, Regrowth, Lifebloom all going for the full duration. The Heal-over-Time efficiency doesn't concern me, since pets get such insane healing bonuses, but it's just spike damage I worry about.



homerjunior: If your boxing a 5-man team purely for hunter tanking would not 2 healers be wise? 3 hunters,Priest,Druid for example
Nah, the real magic of this setup is that I can go with a full 4xDPS classes and kill stuff faster than a traditional instance team. The only good compromise would be to run a character like an elemental shaman that would DPS on trash but then also toss a few heals during boss encounters. I don't really want to run a mixed group, though. My focus is NOT always PvE-- the core of my team is 4xHunters for BGs and raiding, and I play the healer only as a way to level and (hopefully) farm heroics.