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Hi all, I have a warrior, and a mage, and now im moving into 5 boxing next week. I plan to level 2 more mages and a healer, but which healer should I go with, resto shaman, druid, or priest? Im keeping it simple with the dps, 3 mages, and a prot warrior of course. Im considering shaman due to the ankh, but any advice would be great. Thanks
I am a huge proponent of Circle of Healing spam
You will find that the priest will have the most supportive tools along with healing, and the most straight forward healing apart from a pally.
Priest's heals are basically 2 AoE heals, a HoT, and several types of straight heals that will heal for certain amounts. has a shield that will help absorb damage, and can heal after death (but you have to be controlling to priest to actaully get this to work, unless im doing this wrong). there's also lightwell, i believe, that allows you to place a thing somewhere and people have to click on it to heal (i personally think its useless).
Druid heals are a bit more complex. There is one Hot, one that starts as a HoT but ends with a burst heal (lifebloom - and can be postponed indefinitely by renewing the spell before it ends), a heal that starts off as a straight heal but also adds a HOT after the heal (regrowth). There is an AoE heal called tranquility. tree of life form rocks. lower mana pool than a priest, though has and Evocate-lke spell which i forgot the name to. Last thing that would have me going for druid is the OOC rez and the In-combat rez. wonderful just in case the tank dies. dont forget you'll last a lot longer when you draw aggro by turning into a bear. i like druids more. but you might enjoy the tools you get as a priest as well as a shammy.
For the Shammy, i'll let the many shammys in this forum tackle that. =]
edit: one other thing i might wanna mention is that if you can balance out the spec's right, you can do both dps and healing from certain classes. 4 boomkins +heals, or 4 shammy dps +heals will also work and can greatly simplify your spell rotations and also helps to distribute threat to every shammy/druid.
Back before I found the joys of shared keypresses I used to two-box (manually - 1 keyboard/mouse for each client) a mage and priest in my raiding guild. I found that the priest which was my main at the time, was very very easy to heal with to the point that I rolled the mage to have something else to do.
Since then I've found that for single target healing a holy specced paladin is surprisingly easy and very resilliant, for 1-key group heals the priest is great but squishy if you over-aggro.
I've played a priest healer as a raid character since ZG and well... I vote priest! ;)
Also go Disc spec. Holy isn't that good anymore in my opinion. A full disc spec'd priest with plenty of spellpower and crit is in my opinion the strongest single target healer available and has the option to sit back and spam AOE heals if stuff goes bad. Also PoM is awesome for a non pally tank because it causes AoE threat for the tank. makes multi tanking on my druid much easier.'
Edit: Oh and also priests healing/shields are proactive instead of reactive allowing you to technically give whoever your healing the largest effective health pool compared to any other healer.
While considering healing abilities should be first on your list dont forget extra utility / buffs that each class brings that can be huge.
I think Im going to go with a resto shaman as a healer, with a shadow priest in the group as dps and backup heals. If the resto shaman doesnt work like I want it to, I will switch him to elemental and then run the priest for heals. Thats the plan so far!