Your ideal 25-man raid group

[Kevin]

True dat. I guess you have to figure out where best gains are from your shadow priest(s), and this may actually vary from fight to fight. But warlocks look to me like a case of obvious synergy since they're the ones that suffer the most on mana, and rely on lifetapping to fix it. A shadow priest's mana restoration will help healers, but generally not the life restoration.

Yep I fully acknowledge that it might be best to give them to locks. A lot depends on the encounters though. As mentioned a pet can be used to do damage on every mob in MC. And BM pets looking to push 150 DPS already with just the changes in the patch that is something that should be considered. Too many people simply rule out pets because of encounter design and because they are such low DPS even for beastmasters now when they can be active and because the BM spec'd hunter themselves loses so much DPS. A lot of that is changing in TBC. Some theorycrafting shows that BM spec in the new patch will out damage other specs in both MC and BWL (BWL the pet may not be doing damage but on many fights can parked in a safe spot used to buff the hunter with activation of beastial wrath). And I don't expect the party buffs that pets can provide to be only good for 5 mans.

I know we often give a shadow priest to hunters on Vael and don't change the groups around sometimes afterwards and if I get VE healing for the pet it's another 50 DPS for me on all the trash packs in BWL because the VE healing keeps up with all the cleaves and other AoE attacks.


The other thing with hunter mana is that current shot cycles thanks to aimed have the hunter getting spirit regen a fair bit which isn't negligable. New shot cycles even with down ranking (if it will still work effectively) are going to change that as well.


But yeah I'm not sure I can say without seeing encounter design the best place for a shadow priest to go since VT and VE are both highly valuable. I do know that I will still want at least one around though. :)

And yeah I speak a lot on hunters here because I do play the class a lot and because there are a lot of thoughts about hunters and raiding that I've found are simply wrong if you are willing to pay a bit more attention (pet usage being one of the biggest) at least in MC, BWL, ZG, and AQ20. Haven't really been in AQ40 or Naxx with a hunter. I don't see hunters trying to trap enough in the suppression room, explosive trap + entaglement off an FD then back on the hatchers with pretty much no DPS time lost isn't just good DPS, entrapment means that some of those whelps end up not being able to hit the mages because they can't move. So I speak up on it when I see hunter abilities simply ignored in raid situations.