There are plenty of arguments in this thread about warlock vs mage in shadow priest groups, but I am wondering if there is any solid math on hunter vs mage placement?

In my guild, the mages view the hunters as not worth getting the shadow priests at all because when they go oom, they can still autoshot and use their pet, but when the mages go oom they can only wand.

I was wondering if there was any solid math that shows that mages need shadow priests more?

I just posted something like this on our guild forums. In a nut shell here are some quick thoughts.

As far as group synergy, a beast build works great with a shadow priest and a feral druid, 3 beast spec hunters, a shadow priest and a feral druid in the same group is an awesome combo. Everybody in the group buffs each other to a degree. The hunters give everybody +3% damage when their pets crit, this adds up to 9.27% more damage for the group, the feral druid adds 5% crit to 7 "characters" the 3 hunters, their pets and himself. Also the extra crit means the hunter FI buff will be up more from higher pet crit. The extra 9.27% damage means the shadow priest does more damage and hence gives even more mana/health back to the group. Also with a shadow priest and feral druid the hunters pets get "free" healing and hunters do not have to waste mana and the global cooldown to keep their pets healed.

Using no pots a beast spec hunter only using steady shot in his rotation will last around 103.26 seconds. If you look at a survival build since you now have to weave 2 special shots between each auto mana usage goes up. Cheekys spreadsheet shows a survival build only lasting 84.87 seconds before out of mana. Of course hunters can use fel mana pots, but these still only get you so far. On top of that a hunters pet will require some healing for many fights. A shadow priest in combo with a feral druid means we should never have to waste mana or a global cooldown on healing.

A survival spec hunter uses 81.49 mana per second according to the spreadsheet. This means a fel mana pot (3200 mana) will give 39 seconds of mana before needing to wait on pot timers. (2 min, 120 second cooldown)

A beast spec hunter uses 67.58 mana per second according to the spreadsheet. This means a fel mana pot (3200 mana) will give 47 seconds of mana before needing to wait on pot timers.

Of course it is possible to use these pots right at the beginning of a fight, but not all hunters can chain fel mana pots because of the cost involved. Also getting free heals on our pets, gives a ton of dps on some fights where we do not have to waste the global cooldown and mana to heal/ rez our pets.

A shadow priest stacked with 3 beast spec hunters gives them a large boost in dps as well. For example if a shadow priest is doing 750DPS that means he will gain 70 more dps from being in the hunter group in addition to healing the pets and giving mana to the hunters.

If you have multiple BM hunters in one group, does the FI buff actually stack? I wasn't actually looking, but I was in a group with 2 BM hunters a couple weeks ago and didn't notice ever having 2 FI buffs at once. (Of course, since I wasn't looking at my buffs much, that doesn't really mean much.)

Just curious, because I've been assuming they don't stack.

They stack and it's very nice indeed to have 3 BM in my priest's group.

When I raid I run full DPS consumables, no mana oil, or anything like that. The only bit of my gear that is more towards longevity than DPS is my meta gem.

We ran with no shadow priest for a long long time. Our group was: Me (Elem Sham), Oomkin, Mage, Mage, Mage

We have now added a shadow priest and have been using: Me, Oomkin, SPriest, Mage, Mage

The Shadow Priest isn't benefiting to terribly much from the +8% crit but the Tranquil Air or 121 damage is certainly a benefit. Also, the 3% (or 4%, if our Draenei auras stack, which we don't know yet) hit means our shadow priest basically gears for all +damage.

Pre-SPriest myself and the oomkin consistantly were top 3-5 (Depended on how Melee friendly the fight was as our 2 rogues will always win on a melee fight, and sometimes even on fights where you'd expect them to suffer). Each of us would also reach 1-2 quite often.

This was with both of us being forced to use Dreamless sleep on most pot timers. Now that we've added the SPriest I'm burning Destruction pots on at least some of my timers and the oomkin can now use super manas. (On fights with regen parts such as Leo I burn destros on every timer).

This basically means our DPS is going way up, and we were already providing 900-1100 DPS. If you run an oomkin give them the Shadow Priest. And an Elemental shaman can also become even more of a hefty DPS force for you raid given a shadow priest.

One added benefit is that without the shadow priest I was alwasy very wary of trying to spot heal somebody in trouble. I knew that throwing a few heals would eventually lead to me OOMing. Also it costs a moonkin like 2100 mana to battle res counting the shifting in and out so when he had to Brez that was pretty much the end of his hopes to last the fight. SPriest has solved both those problems pretty well.

If you have to drain life as a destruction lock you might aswell respec because you just gave back every advantage of being destruction. I've near heard of a warlock with 6k raid buffed mana. A warlock goes through mana way faster than a single shadow priest would replenish it (although they can easily heal all the lifetaps)