pally + 4 SP for pve?

I have just gotten into multiboxing and am doing 2 frost mages which i find really fun. Then i saw some vids of people doing full instances with shamans. I decided to try a different approach, 4 shadow priest with a prot pally for the tank. I rolled them all as human for when WOTLK comes out i can make use of all the spirit based things such as the increase to shadow damage based on a percent of your spirit. I was hoping that the pally would be able to keep aggro well while the SP where able to keep him up with Vamp Embrace.

The question i have is should i level all together, or powerlevel the 4 priest with RAF instance grinding and promote up the pally? I have gotten the priests to 20 and promoted up the pally to 29 so i can pvp with a friend's twink to get marks and some honor so i can grab the season 2 damage mace when i hit 70. I have played both classes to 70 as horde and my BE pally is well geared badge/T5 gear, so the basics to how to play the class spec is already know. Just might be kinda hard to get macros and what nots down after 60.

All development and patchnotes and betablogs of WotLK points to a change in mechanics regarding stacking - which means vampiric embrace most likely will not stack in WotLk.

It will instead proc a "mana-regen" buff on the 10 lowest mana raidmembers, called "Replenishment" - which gives you something like 0.5% of your manaregen being active, for a duration. It will no longer be scaling according to damage, but according to your own manaregenvalue ie spirit.

Hunters with hunting party and paladins will also get this ability.

In general, it seems that almost everything will become raidwide, however similar effects will simply not stack.

Unless specifically stated ofc.

:( <3 stacking. The 4 SP 1 Pally thing would have been sweet. Threat wouldn't have been a problem since VE (and hopefull VT :P) would have kept your pally in mana, thus increasing his threat output.

Mickse and myself run this setup, but we're not sure to what extent the Replenishment/vampiric touch-change will actually mean to us.
It's a blast up to level 60 atleast, i've done several instances and as the more talents you get, the more fun it is.
Tanking multiple targets can be a bit stressing, as you need a little time to ramp up the VE heals and stuff, and using shield reduce all tanking except form concencrate, so a lot
of the time I had 1 priest out of shadowform to help a bit on the healing.
As you can see from my signature, I've switched a priest to healing and subbed 1 spriest for an ele shammy for totempower, I haven't started playing this conig yet, but most likely I will start tonight. I won't spec healing until I'm going into instance tho (Ramparts) after I've geared up from the Hellfire quests.
Summary: for bossfights, 4 shadowpriests are more than enough healing, with multiple trash, you might get troubles.

I remember reading the posts about they were changing stacking effects that way everyone can contribute in a raid settings, but if you have multple spriests it seems as though that would be defeating the purpose since only 1 of them would be contributing the extra mana and health, meaning a raid would only need 1 spriest. It makes me wonder if spriests would be exempt from the new mechanics.

From the way that i read the talent calc, it says that it puts a debuff on the target that heals all party members for 15% of the shadow damage that you do. My idea for the group design would be a pally that is constantly being healed from all SPs and getting mana back form one of the priest with VT. I'd have no trouble stacking 4 VE on a target. Or if it's easy trash then maybe just 2 and have my disc/shadow priest off heal. I was going to have one of the SP go into disc enough to get the imp spirit so that all of my party gets the extra 6% of their spirit in spell damage. The way that i see it, it would be a great pve group. But as you guys also pointed out, they are not done with the what spell stacks/effects the raid.

I'll keep plugging away at leveling the priests after i get payed and upgrade the 3 trials. I'll also keep up the research at wotlk wiki site. If any of you guys find a post before me pls shoot me a PM. And thank you guys for the feed back. Wasn't thinking about the changes to party/raid spell effects stacking.

I rolled an 80 priest on the new beta server and was pvp'ing in Winterspring last night. The VE mechanic was really kinda meh. It seemed nowhere near as strong as the current implementation, and what I really disliked was that *I* might not even receive the buff if there are 10 other people in my raid who are lower mana than I am. The casting priest should always be one of the 10 (or the 11th).

Overall, I think SPs are in a pretty good place though. I don't have a lot of experience with them, and I was holding my own pretty good. imp shadowform rocks. :)

[align=left]To the one above me, do not confuse VE and VT.
So, it's been confirmed, you can only benefit from 1 Replenish at the time, so only 1 spriest for manareturn, but the healing is still viable in many cases with VE.
If you have a survivalhunter tho, he/she can return 2% instead ofr the 0.5%, and since the best buff takes precedense, you could have 1 spriest for constant, and then the hunter for a little spikey mana every now and then.
This is a big hit for me, but luckily I traded a priest for a shaman, so I get mana spring if nothing else.[/align]

VE will still stack. VT won't.
If somebody finds any hints that VE won't "stack" anymore, please provide a link.