5x hunters will allow you to spam keys, since we cant delete keys anymore, you'll find yourself doing lots of crap keys to get one to push... so i would favor the extra speed of 5x hunts.

4x hunts seems a bit busy, resto shammys are a good, but mainly to heal on bosses. trash healing should be mainly from leech cleave, eventually trash will deal insane damage, if you rely on healers pets will die. and having a tank will screw up pet agro, resulting in the tank taking too much damage to solo. (not mentioning losing the 5th mail drop). if you need the healing on bosses, you are not killing fast enough to ignore mechanics. (maybe a 5th hunter will help )

the key is ilvl... its critical to get your pets enough stamina to survive more than a few hits on bosses, and initially with sub 100k pets, it seems impossible. but in time they will get far stronger. keep in mind that the stam budget on items gets WAY higher on high ilvl pieces, and azerite gear has an extra stam budget.

so you'll find that a 5x hunt with 380ivl will destroy m+ up to +5ish (non tyranical), but past that point bosses will down your pets too often, and since they drop off the agro table on death, having more than 5x pet deaths on a boss fight will have you ressing pets, trying to drop aggro, kiting AND trying to DPS... at that point your are better off FDing and resetting.

point is, as someone said already, 5xhunts will turn into a grind for ilvl. its a good grind, since you'll be getting upgrades on every chest (due to trading and warforging mainly). if you can deal with the chore, then 5x hunts is fast, reliable and the ilvl will steadily climb, expect +5 group ilvl increase per week, slowly declining, peaking at 400ish. from that point onward things get a lil weird. pet HP literally explodes and im guessing pet tanking gets a lot easier. this is due to the massive stam on all gear, specially azerite pieces. you can exploit this even further using Magthar. (+10% pet hp) next m+ season with 430ilvl as base will be pretty broken for hunter teams.


as far as pet issues, i haven't sen any problem with pathing outside of boralus and tomb... those places are dead keys anyways.

and the healing from leech works fine, and its there mainly to replace fighter chow and allow faster trash cleanup. don't expect to be able to reset an encounter or do the absurd healing prot palas can do.

the idea is to have a constant healing influx to offset debuffs, dots, and random damage. otherwise you have to stop and eat all the time.