[Feedback Requested] Paladin Healer/Tank, 4x DPS

Hey, folks,

First, an introduction. I've only been 5-boxing for a couple of weeks; my main group is level 27, and they're a setup I've never heard of anyone using (though it's possible that it's not unique): a night-elf balance druid (future boomkin tank), two human warlocks, a draenei frost mage, and a holy night-elf priest. I want them all to ride Nightsabers one day, so I'm going and doing virtually every significant Darnassus-reputation quest that's available; they're about 15% of the way through Revered at the moment (no cloth turn-ins). They each provide utility and nuking (it's really nice to have Mark of the Wild, Arcane Intellect, and Arcane Fortitude- makes up for some laughable gear).

The problem is, my mage is out-nuking everyone. And when I take a second look at the talents, it's not hard to see why.

So I think I'd like to try another setup (that may or may not be viable, and may or may not be unique). And I'd like some feedback on it (feel free to provide feedback on my original team, too! They're on the Armory on Twisted Nether: Alkanai, Alkaki, Alkacsi, Alkarbi, Alkafri).

Side note: it seems like my original team will lose a lot of its sparkle with Blizzard's recent trend towards making classes less unique and more interchangeable (buffs not stacking, etc.).

My idea is to have one Holy/Protection Paladin tank, and four frost mages.

The frost mages seem like a good choice because of Winter's Chill and Shatter (if a target is frozen, everybody gets +50% crit chance), among other things. (Those with mage teams: is 4x polymorph not super broken?) With this, I expect to get a lot of crits, and insane DPM. One of my mages will have improved chill to slow targets down.

That's all pretty straightforward (until such times as I have to fight water-immune bosses- ugh). But the tricky part is the tanking. Basically, my idea for tanking is to have the paladin tank with Holy Shield and heal himself every 6 seconds with Holy Shock. Will it be enough? Holy Shock will help him keep aggro with Righteous Fury, and once every 2 minutes it'll be a guaranteed crit. He won't lose melee time because Holy Shock is instant cast. He'll get a steady stream of mana from blocking and parrying, and some health from Judgement of Light (though I haven't tested this; I may need Wisdom for the mana). Mostly, though, my plan relies on the fact that my frost mages are going to pound everything into the ground in record time, so that he doesn't NEED much survivability.

Do you think it'll work? Here are some sample WOTLK talent specs (since, again, I'm partially doing this in response to sweeping WOTLK changes):

Paladin:
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sVN0gMzhVzbZ0xVA0uxtZx

Mage (non-Chill):
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=of0MZZVAIcofthfdgbst
(Note: I'm interpreting the badly worded Arcane Focus tooltip to mean that it will increase to-hit for frost spells also.)

What do you think? Are there talents that I should cut out, that won't be useful? Is the paladin going to be capable of his dual role?

Greetings,

I've looked over your setup (yep, even ran the numbers), and it seems viable. What I would do is use a program like Keyclone to set the polymorph to a key on round-robin, that way all of your mages won't cast polymorph at once, on the same target. Since you have 4 polymorphs available, you should be able to effectively counter most onslaughts. The only forseeable issue I can see is that when you get into higher level instances, a) you're going to run into lots of characters that are immune to polymorph, b) there's a lot of melee group boss fights; if you can't polymorph creatures quick enough, you're going to get squashed, and c) your paladin may not be able to keep the agro...

That leads to the big question: Can you effecitvely manage the agro with your paladin? Youre going to have enough sustained DPS (should be around 8-10k+ base at 80, with pvp gear), to take enemies down, but will that DPS override what the paladin is doing?

In PvP, this setup seems fine; as you should be able to avoid most incoming damage. If you don't care about PvE, then by all means, this should work. If you're more interested in mixing it up, you may want to consider something less squishy or something with a bit more healage :thumbsup: