Prot pally + 4 shadow priests?

[Dlgoth]

Hiya everyone, i've been visiting these boards for the past few weeks and am seriously considering 5 boxing. There are tons of posts about 5 shaman or the priest + 4 lock builds, but has anyone considered a prot pally and 4 shadow priests?

The pally would obviously lead while the priests followed, and would use his AoE aggro lovin to keep all the mobs on him, but do you think that the healing from the priests damage will be enough to keep the pally alive on those big 5+ pulls? after searching the net for anyone who has done this, i've only managed to find a video of an ST run with that set up, but it wasn't a 5 boxer.

I'm just curious what some of the experienced boxers think about the build, i would love to just try it out on the PTR, but naturally i cant get any premades working, and i also dont have all the accounts made yet.

[Zaelar]

I was thinking about that group too. Some of my concerns were threat on single pulls since all of VT gets put onto one mob instead of spreading it out, and you can't just wait for a while since thats your source of healing. Taking one priest out of shadowform for some pulls could get around that.

[Dlgoth]

I'm not quite sure i understand the concern, i believe(not positive) that the VE debuff stacks for each priest, so the healing aggro is spread out for each priest, the same would go for VT i suppose(i'm not sure if the mana regen generates aggro, i would assume it doesn't). So the exra aggro from healing *shoudnt* be any different from any other instance run with a single shadow priest.

[unit187]

well I think it will be annoying since you will always draw aggro with mindblasts and pala has weird taunt... I would take druid or warrior instead

[Zaelar]

Healing threat(including VE) is spread out among all pulled mobs(not technically but close enough). When you only have one mob, all the healing threat from VE is going towards that one mob. If your priests take damage(like with swd or some aoe) that can mean an extra 50% threat to that one mob. Since you're using VE to heal, you can't just have your priests stop attacking. You'd have to take one out of shadowform and use standard healing.

Paladin taunt is fine, it just needs a macro. You just don't have an aoe taunt so if you get mobs targetting different party members you're in trouble, but with 4 shadow priests running VE they might be able to tank one trash/add each if needed.

[unit187]

I mean paladin taunt sucks in case of using it. When warrior needs to target mob and cast taunt, pala needs to target a person the mob running to and then cast taunt. It can be easier if you can assist a mob, dont sure about that.

[Zaelar]

copy/paste from wowwiki

Basically the first one makes it act like a warrior/druid taunt if you are targetting an enemy, and the second one adds some mouseover functionality.


Righteous Defense

Casts Righteous Defense on your current target if they are friendly and on your target's target if your current target is not friendly.

#showtooltip
/cast [help,nodead][target=targettarget,help,nodead] Righteous Defense;

This one will activate the Righteous Defense in three cases:

1/ When the mouse is over a living friendly target -> Righteous Defense on the mouse indicated target

2/ When your selected target is a living friendly -> Righteous Defense on your selected target

3/ When your target is unfriendly -> Righteous Defense on the target's target if it is living and friendly

#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][target=targettarget,help,nodead] Righteous Defense;

[Steph]

I have been dabbling in pally tanking for a bit now after playing a protection warrior as raid tank for ages. Playing a protection paladin feels like cheating when you come from a warrior. You toss your avengers shield, duck behind a corner to break line of sight, hit consecration and the whole group of mobs is beating on the paladin.

Once they start beating on the paladin, it is rather hard to take aggro away from him. The paladin will have two passive, always-on features running that by themselves are good enough to keep mobs against healing aggro. Toss in a consecration and holy shield now and then and you have considerable damage, threat on every mob and basically no attention required. The last bit is the absolute plus of the pally tank. You can look somewhere else while you press two buttons every now and then. You could make a castsequence with a 10 second reset and include the key binding in your spam button. Its ridiculously easy and low maintainance.

As for healing, the paladin will need a bit of burst healing with group pulls. But, there is an easy work around for that. Wait until the paladins HP have been dropped below half or so, which by the time expired gives the paladin solid amounts of threat on each mob. Then use AoE fear, nail down a mob or two, use the next AoE fear until the incomming damage is lower than the group healing.

[cepheus]

I startet levling just as you descripe, a prot pally and 4 shadowpriests right after TBC released.

This groupsetup works extremly well. You will almost never be out of mana, and the healing generated is mostly sufficiant for you to aoe tank mobs. I 'soloed' many instances this way.

However when you get to outlands mobs begin to hit harder, and I usually used one of the priests as a healer, and the rest as dps. This is hard at the beginning, but quite possible with some practice.

I have also played with some other specs with this group. AoE grinding with 1 prot paladin and 4 holy-nuke specced priests is insane. You can pull allmost any number of mobs and get away with it. I have done alot of grinding in the path of conquest in shadowmoon this way and pulled 30-40 mobs, including some of the elite giants, and killed them all.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I didn't 5-box this, but I did roll 4-box shadow priests with my buddy as a protection pally up to 70. I have some vids that might shed some light on how this works. Armory link for my priest build: http://wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Turalyon&n=Dondiego

Here's a couple movies of some stuff we did with that group.

http://files.filefront.com/Ghazan2avi/;8392320;/fileinfo.html
http://files.filefront.com/Hungarfenavi/;8392289;/fileinfo.html

If you visit the link in my sig, I've got a bunch of 4-box vids of some of the stuff I did with just the shadow priests.


That aside, generally, you will be fine in shadow with VE+VT+SW:P+flay keeping the tank alive. In fact, I did not do SW:P in most fights because it sucks mana and just wasn't needed except for larger pulls or bosses. The only time you should have to shift out is when you are pulling bosses, really tough elites or large (4 or more) elite pulls. In those cases, I generally just stayed out of shadow and kept 4x renew up on him. With that plus the pally talent that returns mana to him on heals plus VT x4, he basically could hardly run out of mana in all but the most extreme/long fights.