3 priests 2 paladins

[Dlgoth]

Well, it's been a long time since I have last 5-boxed, but I thought it might be time to start playing my old characters on mag-horde. Previously I was running a prot pally and 4 shadow priests, I ended up getting them to 60, then ran out of steam when i hit Outlands(go figure, mobs hit harder as you lvl up). This time I decided to swap out one of the shadow priests for a lvl 70(green geared) prot pally from another server, and switch my current prot pally to holy. My rationale for this set up is that holy pallys make excellent single target healers, so it would make keeping my prot pally alot easier when aoe tanking.

I'm mainly setting this team up for experimentation in WOTLK. Although i'm losing my mana battery stack(the replenishment change), shadow priests are gaining a targetted aoe, which should be wonderful. As far as I know, VE still stacks, and heals based off of damage(correct me if i'm wrong), so the 3 shadow priests damage should supply enough healing to keep them alive through gimmicky boss fight aoe. Give me a way to aoe cast VE on all mobs, and I love you long time.

It's hard to say how viable this set up is atm, because of the lvl 70 tanking the instances(even with crappy gear its still a breeze to tank BF), but i'll update it as I get towards the lvl 70 mark.

[Boylston]

Good luck and keep us posted!

[Ziran]

I currently use holydin, tankadin and 3 mages. I thought about switching to 3 shadow priests as DPS to brush up on AoE healing, but the main problem as I see it is lack of range. There are many fights that are dramatically harder if you cannot keep the bulk of your party 36yrds away. 41yrd is just icing on the cake but less then 30yrs is a really big problem.

Ziran

[accretion]

I've toyed with a 65 Pally + 4 60 Holy Priests and, believe it or not, they tore stuff up in HFRamps with awful gear. I specced the Pally to get +Holy dmg aura and the Priests were doing pretty decent dps while providing PLENTY of healing for the Pally. The problems arose on the second boss, who basically Dotted my priests to death before I could do any significant damage. However, I'd really like to come back to that group once 3.0 comes out because it has a lot of potential.

Anyway, all that is to say I like your idea and think it might be viable, depending on the mechanics of your targeted AoE spell.

[Dlgoth]

Well the new aoe shadow priests get is a channeled spell that does damage every second, think mind flay but aoe and slightly longer. I played a little beta with a different lvl 70 shadow priest I have, and their damage is very impressive now, and their mana seems to last alot longer while soloing, and the range on their spells *seems* longer now, I think it was the talent that increases the range on shadow spells, its like 20% now instead of a set number of yards. Oh and did I mention mind flay will be able to crit :)

The main thing that sucks is the range on mind flay, and on silence. Sometimes its not pratical to LoS pull mobs, so i have to run up with the priests to silence. Again WOTLK *may* fix this, but only because i'm an all blood elf team. I believe they combined the 2 blood elf racial abilities into one, that leaches mana and silences the mob at the same time. The determining factor would be if it has the range of the original mana tap, or its just the area around the blood elf.