Which 5x Healer team has the most offense?

[Ualaa]

I'm looking to mess around with a team for the role of support in battlegrounds.
I doubt this team would participate in arena or rated battlegrounds, as a team.
Probably run them 1-boxed for conquest points, each week.

From the point of view of normal battlegrounds.
Primarily the larger battlegrounds like: AV, IoC or SotA.

In your opinion, which set of 5x Healers would have the most effective offensive pressure?
I'm fairly sure, playing support and sticking with the largest group of players, any set of 5x Healers can heal reasonably well.
For simplicity, I'd be sticking with five of the same class.

a) Disc Priest
b) Holy Priest
c) Resto Druid
d) Shockadin Pally
e) Resto Shaman

[Scelesti]

Shockadin Pally does some serious damage, but their lack of AoE heals is unfortunate. Although I guess with 5 healers it wouldn't matter.

5 healers on one target seems like overkill.

I dunno. I'd reevaluate this idea.

[katsurahama]

Werent you going to try a shockadin group? That would be my guess.

If youre planning on only healing, I also think holy priests would also be difficilt to kill since youd have 5x prayer of mending, circle of healing, prayer of healing, and lightwell. Disc priests would have pain suppression and penance but would be missing circle of healing and lightwell. You might miss a pally bubble but it will probably be dispelled anyway.

When i get all my priests up, i plan to do this same thing.

[Ualaa]

I've got Shockadins at 56th or 57th.
And Priests at 75th, which could go Holy or Disc.
Shammies and Druids are 80th and 85th, respectively.

Really, not that hard to get any of them to 85th and start the Honor Grind.
The Honor Grind is twice as long, as going from 1st to 85th.
But if they've got decent offense and decent healing, it might not be too bad of a process.



Not overly happy with the changes to Feral Druids.
At the moment, any AoE fear or root screws the class over.
They can trinket once, and then have no cooldowns against any CC effect.
Plus they're vulnerable to two extra CC's in Feral.
One Rogue could already be a royal pain in the ass; add a lot of single classes to that list.

Basically, they're not fun to play; hopefully Blizzard reverts a change or throws them another bone.
In the meantime...

Going Boomkin is an option, or even a mix of Resto + Boomkin, but I'm looking at healers as a drastically different approach to the game.

Trying to find a composition that is fun to play, to see if there is a point in renewing the accounts mid-March.



In a typical battleground, there is a disproportionate number of DPS and a lack of healers.
Playing support, in the larger BG's will probably be larger influence on the result than playing DPS.
Not sure if it will be overly fun or not.

Their healing ability, is a consideration too.
A lack of AoE healing is a strike against Shockadins.
But I like a plate healer, with a shield, divine protection and bubble; survivability is a big plus for them too.

I'd like the DPS (of 5x Healers) to be able to kill 4-5 players (or at least be a threat to do so) who arrive to contest Gold Mine at the start of an AB.
Chances are 5x Healers, will be rather hard to kill.



Resto Shaman: Shocks, Lightning Bolt, Fire Elementals.
Resto Druid: Wrath/Starfire, Insect Swarm, Moonfire.
Holy Pally: Holy Shock, Exorcism, Divine Favor.
Disc Priest: Smite, Penance, Mindblast, Devouring Plague, SW: Pain, SW: Death.
Holy Priest: Same as Disc, but no Penance and more AoE heals.

[Littleburst]

I'd go with druids, since they're the most effective healers to have 5 from imo. Priests will rely heavily on their Power Word: Shield, which has no use to have 5 priests for. Shaman is second for me.

[katsurahama]

I did the vanilla honor grind as a holy priest and loved it. People are generally very appreciative of healers in pvp. Like you said, there is an abundance of dpsers. Healers are able to make a huge impact in bgs because nobody there wants to heal.

I dont know what kind of dps priests do at 85. You forgot to mention they have fear ward. I cant remember the cooldown but it cant be more than 3 minutes. Your leader could be unfearable with that on round robin. I think you also forgot binding heal. With A targeting B targeting C, etc thats a very fast heal. Its better than penance with no CD. Also, priests have so many aoe heals you would be unkillable except by a coordinated team using vent. Theyd have to cc your entire team. I think in bgs, aoe heals outweigh a dispellable bubble. Theyre also less situational. Can they dps like a shockadin? No, but they sure can heal and thats whatbyou want to do. And if you want to cap objectives, nobody can stop you. You can kill a few people with priests but your obvious strength will be healing.

I think of it this way: is a bubble going to save me from a situation where 5 of the best healing class in the game cant keep me alive? Probably not.

If you cant tell, i like priests. :D

[katsurahama]

As for pwshield, wouldnt it be more mana efficient to just heal through the dmg. With five who cares about pushback. Holy priests have so many heals it wouldnt it be easier to just heal through the damage?

I just reread your initial post, Ualaa. You said you wanted offensive capability. Holy priests are probably only offensive in the sense that you can keep dpsers alive through just about anything. If you want to be able to attack groups i guess you have to take he shockadin. If you want to primarily heal, id pick the priests. They dont have plate or a shield but who can lock down all five simultaneously while theyre spamming aoe heals in an emergency.

Paladins are probably more versatile than priests because you can tank in av or switch to ret for more dps. But if healing is your goal i would do the priests.

I would not do druids simply because you already have them and it seems like you want to do something different. Switching specs might not be different enougn for you. If it was, you probably would have done that already.

[Ualaa]

Ultimately, it is a combination of these three factors:
- How much DPS can you put out, because sometimes there will be no one else supporting.
- How strong are your single target heals, your raid/aoe healing and the buffs you have available.
- How resistant to being killed are your toons, in a 5x same class environment.



Druids have the advantage of already being 85th.
Some of their Feral Honor gear can be used as Resto, but most of it will likely be worse than a few hours of quest green gear in Twilight Highlands (have not done any quests there with the Druids).
Could possibly spare two talent points for Cat Speed + 4x Feral PvP bonus (Cat/Bear/Travel +Speed); and stealth can be good at times.



Priests can glyph Fear Ward, making it one minute duration, one minute cooldown.
And then mass dispel any aoe fear.
I have had marginal success with that; making them stronger vs AoE fear than Pallies/Druids but weaker then Shammies.
I really liked the Cata changes to Disc Priests, during the 68-75 level up process.



Pallies so far have nothing for AoE heals, except perhaps their Cone heal (last point in Holy).
Everything I've read suggests it is fairly useless.
I already have the Pallies set to heal their Focus if they have a Focus, and can independently set their focuses; so while there isn't the AoE heals, they can single-target heal five different toons in a mass melee.
And receive fairly decent self heals in the process.
One school of magic for all offense/defense is a detraction; the lack of Holy Resist is a huge plus.



Anyone know if the Tremor Totem is party-wide or raid-wide?
I don't like the general lack of mobility, and the need to be a turret.
But Tremor (if it is raid wide) is near fear immunity.
Grounding on round-robin is spell protection.
Fire Elementals every 5 minutes has always rocked in battlegrounds.

[ockhamsrazor]

Really, not that hard to get any of them to 85th and start the Honor Grind.
The Honor Grind is twice as long, as going from 1st to 85th.


OMG, really? You just killed my motivation to get to 85

[Ualaa]

Not sure if it is exactly twice as long, but it feels like it.

A lot of that is sitting around waiting for a queue to pop.
Which could be spent farming herbs/ore/skins or questing or doing dailies.

[ockhamsrazor]

Why wait on a queue? Aren't you a 5 boxer :-)

[Ualaa]

If I wanted to do an instance, there is no queue.
But there is a queue to get into battlegrounds, which is what I was referring to.

[zenga]

Fire Elementals every 5 minutes has always rocked in battlegrounds.

Don't forget that now you can pop 5x earth ánd 5x fire elemental at the same time. It's pretty mayhem in combination with fire nova & chain lightning (as ele). For 'lols' I've off specced my 5x shaman resto, and did a couple of AV's with them. Round robin healing from the main with an assist macro. It was big fun, but saying i'd want to run all the time in this spec .. no way.

[Ualaa]

I've got a PvE composition that I could level too.

Usually use one team for one aspect of the game.
And another team for a different aspect.

Not sure I'd want to play an all healer spec, as the primary team.
But they would be a diversion, or something to do once in a while.
Plus a fair bit of time to gear them up.

Not happy with the Feral changes.
And am hoping something is reverted or more likely a defensive cooldown or two are added.
And play something in the mean time.
Boomkin was fun in the past, but not sure I want to do that now.
But a healer composition is the change of pace, and likely will be fun for a while and then periodically down the road.

[Lyonheart]

You can pop earth Elementals at the same time as fire? Since when? wow!

[katsurahama]

Whatever you choose, keep us updated. I play a lot when i can and the key for me to keep it interesting is having various teams that play very differently.

[Littleburst]

You can pop earth Elementals at the same time as fire? Since when? wow!

It indeed works LOL :D

Just maybe defending Galv is an option again.....

[Noids]

If you've got the druids at 85 and have some honour gear then just use them I reckon mate.

I can understand you are feeling a bit disheartened at the moment, but not sure that levelling a new team for a niche role like this is really worth the time. As you mentioned, the druids will heal as well as any of the others (and probably better x5) fulfilling their main role. I guess you can spec them for the free wraths for cheap albeit soft dps and the dots would be annoying I imagine.

As a node defense team you would probably be unbeatable.

I can't imagine you retrieving many flags but good luck trying to kill a druid FC with 4 supporting druid healers :P

Probably the only time you would struggle is in Strand where you woudn't be able to kill the tanks and unfortunately you can't heal them. Saying that, I can't really imagine 5 shockadins being a hell of a lot better here.

If you do want some PvP fun though and you are set on levelling a new group you could always go the FotM DKs ;) They truly are awesomely fun to play.

[Fat Tire]

Not sure if it is exactly twice as long, but it feels like it.

A lot of that is sitting around waiting for a queue to pop.
Which could be spent farming herbs/ore/skins or questing or doing dailies.


I get instant queues since the patch using the trick.

Works for arena too.

[Lyonheart]

I get instant queues since the patch using the trick.

Works for arena too.

what trick?

[Fat Tire]

what trick?

lol. I guess I asked for that with my teaser.

You queue up and leave queue until you get instant pops. Usually only takes 2-3 times and you get instant pops ymmv as last night it took 5 queue drops to get instant queue pops. However, dropping queue a few times only takes 15-20 seconds max

No idea if/ when it will be hot fixed, but I am enjoying it.

[valle2000]

Holy radiance is a very nice pally aoe-heal, but you won't get until 83 or 84. Five pallys using these would make them fantastic aoe-healers, but the ability has a cooldown though.

[deadguyfred]

I have a 5x boomkin team, It was easily overrun by melees due to lack of heals, you could consider a mixed resto/boomkin team... 3 boomkins + 2 restos or vice versa, 3 restos + 2 boomkins for dps. Iv been playing my 4x ele shamins + boomkin lead on tol barad ect and have great survivability. Also tremor totem is raid wide and pulses for 6 secs w/ a 1 min cooldown.

Deadguy

[Ualaa]

Leaning towards going Boomkin on the Druids.
Possibly a mix of Boomkin/Resto, have thought of that too.
Chances are, full honor geared Ferals will gain honor faster than zero resilience casters.
But the Druids aren't that fun with the nerfs, so haven't done a lot of BG's with them post 4.0.6
Hopefully some of the nerfs are undone, but Blizzard seems to hate the idea of Ferals being competitive; 8 out 300 players were Ferals for the top 100 3v3's teams, obviously too strong...

For the healer team.
Thinking of going Resto Shammies.
The Tremor, on round-robin, as a raid-wide 30 yard Fear break... doesn't matter which group they end up in.
Healing Stream is party only, I believe, but they can each go with Earth Shield.
Grounding is still decent against casters.
For offense, Lightning Bolt is basically mana free, they have Flame/Frost Shock, Lavaburst etc.
And five minute Fire Elementals (plus 10-min Earth Elementals).

Also thinking of leveling the Pallies (Exorcism/HolyShock) to 74th.
To run them in the 70-74 bracket, as there are a ton of 70 twinks.
This has the advantage of 2k honor for a full set of pvp gear, that once earnt will never need an upgrade.
No need to arena for superior gear than BG's, as honor already buys the best they'll ever get.
Not a lot of AoE healing, but still have Focus for single target heals.. with five pallies, could easily keep five singles up, in mass melee.
Plus they have strong passive self heals, via Beacon and Protector of the Innocent.
Plus the plate + shields + bubble + divine protection etc.
This is an experimentation at the 70-74 bracket; see how it goes.

[wakasm]

I obviously have little pvp multi-boxing experience - but wouldn't running 5x healer open up some out of the box thinking as far as your Macro/ISBoxer set-up in ways you wouldn't normally do things?

For instance, is it possible to round-robin on a click region? (not sure if there is a way to do this...). If yes, I could see setting up like a quick main heal (like Flash heal or renew) on round robin and spaming it all over the raid for maxium support. Or even in groups or 2 o 3 for mana efficiency. I would imagine it would be like having a flash heal with no cooldown since you have 5 toons. Kind of like a rapid fire heal machine gun.

Sure 5x heals on a single target would heal them, but if you could macro 2 renews on one click then 2 more renews with 2 different toons on another click and have it round robin, you could be a lot more efficient on all your heals without requiring it to come from All toons or just one you can spread the love a lot more efficiently without the need of AOEs, thus making any set-up flexible?

Even a round robin on Power Word Shield, you could get 5 shields out in 5 clicks rapidly, regardless if they were in your team or not while spreading the mana use around your characters efficiently.

The idea sounds exciting to me at least. Not sure how possible it is or if there are better methods of doing these things, but it would be like raid healing, but having 5 time the mana resources. However, the DPS part may lack, but surely you could keep yourself alive a lot longer for sure.

[Ualaa]

A very easy way to do this, would be using a repeater region but to only use that for the targeting.
Give everyone the same alphabetical listing, so any given frame within the grid is the same target for each of your toons.

Then use mapped keys to cast whatever, at your current target.
The mapped key could easily round-robin with steps, something like:
1: Toon A, Toon B
2: Toon C, Toon D
3: Toon E, Toon A
4: Toon B, Toon C
5: Toon D, Toon E
That gets you two toons casting whatever you want, at the same target on a given keystroke.

Just decide how many toons you want to do a given action.
PW: Shield would be one toon casting per step.
The Renew might be two or five, or even keys for both depending on the situation.



The Pallies with Exorcism/Holy Shock, aren't lacking for DPS.
They are lacking AoE heals, but could easily be run with Focus Healing, as per Mosg2's DK Manifesto, or a system of round-robin heals.

The Shammies wouldn't have nearly as much offense.
But would AoE heal a lot easier, more toons in that regard.
And they have greater fear protection, and anti-swarming (short range AoE) tools.

[fleaplus]

Just chiming in on the paladin's here.

Even though we lack a targetable AoE heal, I think I do decently with Beaconing my own characters and then just using mostly Holy Shock and Word of Glory. The cone heal works well if we are positioned right and we also get a PBAoE HoT with about 33% uptime which can help when being pressured.

Exorcism does use a decent amount of mana at 85, even talented. I am considering reforging for spirit rather than haste (which seemed to be the recommended way to go with shockadins) as running out of mana is happening a lot for me.

[Acidburning]

<3 you Ualaa

I would think disc priests would be fun.

However, what if you went with like the old bc seasons 2 or 3, the dreamstate druid spec. A solid mix between restro and balance. Just saying, since you have druids already at 85 -- and if there was a change in feral again, you just swap back :D

just my 2cents.

[katsurahama]

I still think five priests, properly macro'd, would be unkillable without coordinated cc. Anyway, keep us updated. The idea of any bgbgroup whose primary goal is healing sounds like fun to me.

[Vociferate]

I'd also agree with priests.

I want to level 5 for a fun-based team. But really, I think they would be very strong.

5 Disc Priests:

Binding Heal:
A --> B
C --> D
D --> E
E -- >A

Prayer of Healing x 5

Prayer of Mending x 5

Penance x 5 (Offense or Defense)

Renew x 5

Mass Dispel x 5 (LOL That would be fun)


The more I talk about this, the more fun I really think the team would be. In fact, I can easily see myself playing this team for PvP.

I have a priest at 76, 60, 64, 66 already. So I think I may get them all to 70 and work on getting them to 80.

Just sounds like great fun, really.

[Vociferate]

Oh and 5 x Mana Burns seems like a great way to shut a healer/mana DPS'er down.

Sounds like too much fun, lol.

[Redbeard]

The priest stuff sounds like fun... Just wanted to point out I dont think 5x POM works, i think theyll try to bounce and if the person theyre bouncing too is already POMed it just falls off.

Other than that it should be hilarious. Not huge damage but a lot of heals.

[Ualaa]

Was planning on doing the Shammies.
But priests sound fun too.
Might do both, undecided.
Shammies are 80th, priests are 75th, so not a whole of difference there.

Also going to do the Pallies.
But will stop exp on them at 72nd (Avenging Wrath).
Which puts them in the 70-74 bracket.
Resilience isn't quite as much reduction (for the same rating) at higher levels than lower levels.
But two levels probably won't make a huge difference.
And it will increase health, stealth detection, damage dealt, etc.
Pretty sure Avenging Wrath and two extra talent points (beyond the cap talent in Holy) is worth more than the slight loss in rating to percentage mitigation.
Plus boxing gets flack anyway, so being 72 or 74, instead of 70 and irritating the 70 twink purists isn't a big deal.
70 queues are supposed to be 4-5 minutes for US servers.
I really like that a full set of the best gear is under 2k honor, and will never need to be upgraded ever; always have the best armor/weapons...