PvE healing capabilities of 4x shadow priest

I've been running a few 4 box teams up through lvl 20 to get the feel for what I can box with. I'd like to roll 5 on Mag with a team that I could eventually use end game PvE. One thought I had that I couldn't find much info on is 1xpally 4xshadow priest or perhaps 1xpally 3xshadow priest 1xlock. I guess the general theory here is that 3 or 4 shadow priests can keep up a pally's health and mana in shadow form without the need for a dedicated healer. the lock variation is obviously just to boost the shadow damage of party.

Does anyone have any experience with a setup like this or just opinions on end game viability of it?

Cool idea. Looking forward to the responses.

Boom

There has been a few that have leveled 4x Priest/ 1 Paladin , and quite a few that have done 4x Priest. In particular I love the idea of how their class works and really wish I had some lvl 70's to play around with!

For some reason I remember reading one team had switched to 4x Smite spam / Holy nova spec and Paladin and said it worked much much better.

Id ask Cepheus hes got a pally 4 pirests team.

My first team was 1 prot paladin and 4 x shadowpriests. As mentioned I changed this later on to disc/holy (holynuke) with a prot/Ret pally for sanctity aura.

As shadow you have very good longlivity and if you have fairly good gear on your paladin you could do with just the healing from the shadowpriests. In normal instances this will work on most encounters, but you should put some points in holy at one of the shadowpriests so that he could leave shadowform and throw some heals now and then. Since you get so much mana back you dont need a fully holy specced priest for this task, I think I did something like 20 holy/41 shadow on my hybrid shadow/healer.(specced imp greater heal)

As holynuke you should have a paladin with retribution aura. I think I did something like 40 prot/21 retribution for this. Together with improved judgement of the crusader the holydamage from your priests will be pretty good. In most normalinstances you can do insane pulls with this combination. (I did 15-20 elites in one pull and aoe'd them down in shattered halls with this setup)
Holy-nuke could work in heroics too if you have very good tank gear, but I didnt try this very much since I rerolled 1 priest+4warlocks to do pvp.

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Originally Posted by 'cepheus',index.php?page=Thread&postID=53676#post5 3676

My first team was 1 prot paladin and 4 x shadowpriests. As mentioned I changed this later on to disc/holy (holynuke) with a prot/Ret pally for sanctity aura.

As shadow you have very good longlivity and if you have fairly good gear on your paladin you could do with just the healing from the shadowpriests. In normal instances this will work on most encounters, but you should put some points in holy at one of the shadowpriests so that he could leave shadowform and throw some heals now and then. Since you get so much mana back you dont need a fully holy specced priest for this task, I think I did something like 20 holy/41 shadow on my hybrid shadow/healer.(specced imp greater heal)

As holynuke you should have a paladin with retribution aura. I think I did something like 40 prot/21 retribution for this. Together with improved judgement of the crusader the holydamage from your priests will be pretty good. In most normalinstances you can do insane pulls with this combination. (I did 15-20 elites in one pull and aoe'd them down in shattered halls with this setup)
Holy-nuke could work in heroics too if you have very good tank gear, but I didnt try this very much since I rerolled 1 priest+4warlocks to do pvp.

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Thank you very much for the reply. I think I might be giving it a go. Funny thing is the other team that i've been contemplating is 4lock, 1priest for pvp more than pve. I like your taste

I play a Pally and 4x Shadowpriests.



I am now continuing to gear my Pally up and just doing Dailies with the Priests. I am AoE Levelling up 4 Shaman.
I have made many posts in replies to peoples threads about Priests. They are not ideal, you will struggle at 70 to get past normal instances and into heroics. Alot of encounters that 4x Shaman blitz through Priests struggle with massively.

Mana Tombs, last boss. Have to keep switching to kill adds, Shamans chain lightning and the adds die.
Same thing in Sethek halls with elementals.
All bosses that cast nukes are irrelevant, grounding totem eats.
Priests are squishy.
Priests have no AoE
Priests have no spammable nuke except if you go holy
Priests have poor mana efficieny with no way to return it except fiend if holy
Priests have no spell pushback

etc etc etc

I wanted to try it out to be different from everyone on the Shammy-wagon but it didn't work out. In PvP they are terrible for the simple reason you dont pump out enough damage and have to use too many GCD's to get anything done. Mind Blast/SW:D will hurt well geared people pretty badly but not kill them in arena. You move in for the mindflay but its not instant damage and half your priests are getting beat on - the person gets healed to full and then you have two nukes on cooldownw and dots that can all be removed. Your ability to focus fire and only focus fire beomes your weakness. Shamans and Mages and Hunters simple overpower the oppositions ability to heal a single target and force the healers to focus on many targets (Chain Lighting, Mage AoEs, Hunter Multishot etc etc all make multiple targets hp drop quickly).

I started out as Alliance 6 months ago as Shamans, now I'm Horde and I'm going back to Shamans. Out of all my adventures, I have learnt to multibox quite well and have all the ins and outs down pat - but the Priest bandwagon was the wrong one to get on, should've stuck with Shaman before they become stupidly popular. :P



-Dan

Damn, that's exactly the response I was hoping not to get. I'm really trying to avoid shammy as I don't find totem management to be at all enjoyable. Although, I suppose the "set up camp and let them come to you" method is a bit different than dynamic solo shaman play. Thank you for the insight in priest play, you pointed out a few weaknesses that I hadn't considered yet.

I can confirm what Slats says about that group setup. My second set of 70s were 4x shadow priests that I played with a prot pally buddy of mine on a PVE server. We were fine as long as we outgeared/outleveled the instance. Once we got into spots where stuff hit harder than VE/VT could keep up, things got dicey. So, basically, what we usually did was stayed shadowform and just healed him through VT/VE/flay spam until we got to a large pull or boss mob. Then I'd switch out and drop VT/VE/SWP and keep renews going on him. That was enough to do very well through most encounters and the VT x4 spam kept him with enough mana that he could spam everything he had for aggro management. That part of things rocked. The sucky part was that if things got ugly (like trying to do bog lords in UB at 64...those hit HARD at that level) then I'd usually end up completely out of mana from trying to maintain DPS on the target AND keep him healed.

If you're really interested in still doing it, let me know and I'll go find some of the videos of us doing instances and world boss mobs like the Gorefiend's Armor dragon, Uvuros and similar.