a few questions for those running 5 different class setups in heroics

Hi! To those that are currently running multi-class setups and currently farming heroics, I am hoping to benefit from your experience.

1) How viable is a hunter tenacity pet for tanking? for heroic trash? for bosses? Is it even possible? For one of my teams I am using hunter pets to tank, but not at heroic yet so just wanting to know if I should even bother continuing with gearing up the hunter for that aspect of the game.

2) In order to maximize being able to use gear drops, I am theorycrafting using a dk to tank, with a pally healer so that neither melee or casting plate goes to waste. has anyone ever run a mixed group setup with a pally as the main healer?

follow up - I did a quick search and found an old thread stating that it is not possible to trigger healbot on a follower from the main tank's screen. are there any addons out there that can give a graphical method for controlling healing on an alt? Or is macroing the only way to go?

Thanks in advance for any advice and feedback. Have a great day!

Just going to throw my two cents out there:

Hunter pets should be "ok" for tanking some instances but I can't imagine them being capable of heroic content. I wouldn't doubt you could get throught most (if not all) the regular dungeons with a hunter pet.

I was going to have a paladin healer myself, but read that since they don't have any kind of group heal they can require a lot more of your attention during encounters where everyone takes damage. I decided to play it safe and left my paladin at 70.

My pally healer was a lot of work so I ditched him :/

Level an enchanter, then you waste no drops :)

Thanks for the feedback :) Good to know ahead of time to save myself some headaches and disappointments.

Based on the feedback, what do you think about the viability of this group?

DK-Tank (frost/unholy dual spec'ed)
Ret Pally (Holy/Ret dual spec'ed)
Resto Druid (Boomkin/Resto dual spec'ed)
DPS Mage (Arcane/Frost dual spec'ed)
Ele Shammy (Elemental/undecided dual spec'ed)

Currently, I'm thinking unholy dk, ret pally, frost mage, ele shammy, resto druid for the group? Unless anyone has a better combination that they can cook up within the confines of my dual specs?

Most of them are in rep blues/purples and quested blues with the average +spell power at the +1250 - +1400 range. DK tank is only at 21k hp and 22k ac in frost presence. Is this enough to begin attempting heroics? and if so, which is the easiest to farm with this setup?

Thanks again in advance for any help rendered. :)

thats a great team combo. A priest or hunter instead of the ret pally might be slightly better, but only marginally so. The better geared your tank is the easier time you will have in heroics, if you can farm a few k gold over a few days you can buy all the tempered titansteel and a few BoE epics and easily push 25k hp in frost. Farm gundrak/draktharon first, they are the easiest. signet of the accord is a great tanking ring that will last you a long time, tempered titansteel helm also lasts a very long time (my DK is in full naxx25/ulduar gear and still has it... bad rolls on kt helm qq)

The trickiest thing for you will be the bosses that do AOE team damage, you will need to write macros for your druid that can individually heal any party member quickly, another that can group heal, and of course another that heals just the tank with big heals. for example F1-F5 to heal party1-party5, F6 to heal tank, and F7 to throw a group wild growth. Those keys should do nothing on the rest of your team, they are just your heal keys (can use numpad, shift-keys, whatever)

BIG thanks to you puppychow! I really appreciate the specific and detailed instructions you gave. Unfortunately my hunter team is only 74 atm; but once I get them to 80 I will swap them with the ret pally per your suggestion to see how that goes. :)

Quick followup question though:
I have one team that is slightly different from what I've listed above. It has a Druid feral tank and a priest healer. Any recommendations on what BoE epics I can buy to boost the feral tank's hp? Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but fully feral spec'ed and in mostly quested blues and the odd rep purple gear, she only has around 17k hp? Is this right? I havent played a feral tank in a long while, but from I recall they were supposed to have high ac and high HP to offset their lack of parry and block, right? Do feral tanks do ok in heroic? I noticed almost everyone that I see is running a plate wearing main tank for their heroics group, so maybe that's a clue?

Thanks for your effort and time in your reply, it's much appreciate :)

I can also support Puppychow's suggestions. Holy paladin is tricky healer for a boxer because it's hard to be efficient with all your abilities. Priest has been great for me because group heals have been lifesavers when things get wild and I can't stop to worry about efficiency. Druid healers are great too, especially for wild growth. Ranged Hunter instead of paladin would make a lot of things much easier (and less healing intensive).

Ditto on starting on Drak'Tharon and Gundrak (last boss can be a pain at first). Also, Utgarde Keep is pretty simple too, as long as you skip Prince Keleseth (first boss). Just sneak around him on the right side and continue on, after killing the guys sitting at the table in his room (does not aggro the boss).

Halls of Lightning might be worth learning too, your group composition should make a lot of it pretty easy. Only tricky spots are your strategy on Ionar (discussed in multiple threads already on the forum), and Loken if you keep the paladin healer. Loken, with nature resist totem down, will require about 12k-ish hps healed back to each toon every 20-30sec or so after his AoE attack, but otherwise mostly a DPS race with some healing on the tank.

Much thanks to you Tal for your tips and feedback :)

Will spend today and tomorrow after work setting up the team's macro and actionbars per the suggestions in this thread, then this weekend will be time to dip my toes into the pool.

I'm sure I will wipe a lot at first while I'm learning, but that's just part of learning. Thanks to all who offered the detailed feedback letting me pick your brain. :)

My druid on her tanking spec had ~23k hp when I started dual spec'ing her that way (I had collected a lot of blue from running instances as a healer when nobody needed the feral gear but nothing great) - maybe you meant 17k when not in bear form - otherwise that sounds very low

I'd go prot/ret on the paladin and Tank/DPS(both unholy) on the death knight. This lets you switch tanks for when one would be better than the other while still having the utility of an unholy death knight. You can always respec the old fashioned way if you want to go holy for a while, but when you have a druid and shaman available I don't think that will be often. This also gives you the option of having two tanks which may prove useful at times, although it isn't necessary. For the shaman make your second spec resto, then you can choose on an encounter by encounter basis which char between your druid and shaman should heal and which should dps.

Druid tanks should have more HP than other tanks while in bear form. If that 17k hp is in bear form something is wrong.

There are a lot of BoE epics you can get, just browse the auction house. The crafted ones are generally good starter ones for heroics but you want to replace them with either heroic epics or early raids. If you're lacking defense or EH the titansteel pieces(and blue BS stuff as well) generally comes with a ton of stamina and defense, as well as probably having more armor than what you have due to being a higher ilvl. I'm not sure specifically what to get for feral tanks, but I'm sure there are some leatherworking craftables and probably some boe raid drops that are good for you. I know there is a good druid cloak but I forget what it's called.

I started heroics with my DK(playing solo) at around the stats you have now, maybe alittle less. Granted DKs have been nerfed since then, but worst case you just need to buy a couple boe epics and you'll be good.

I would think long and hard about a mixed DPS group (melee/ranged) if its your first multi-class team or first team at all.

My setup allows me to generally pre-place my DPS/healer and only worry about moving my tank. I'd hate to momentarily lose DPS from the ret pally if my tank got smacked by a rhino on the last Gundrak boss (for example). Or, having to worry about getting the pally out of the way of a cleave or dark smash.

Three ranged DPS seems much simpler.

building a mixed group atm

DK - tank
Ele sham - DPs and aoe heal when needed.
Mage - DPS
Boomkin - DPS
Holy pali - Main healer

Though Im not 5 boxing strickly as the Gf is running the DK leaving me using the pali as main with rest assisting nuke on tank. also lvling up a priest of my own so i can duel spec pali prot and solo when GF is busy.

havnt had much experiance of heavily mixed groups tbh Ive ran pali+4xsham at 70 for ages and tried a pali priest 3xlock which was ungodly at aoe! this ones more centered around doing harder heroics those i found impossible with CC on shaman at 70

My long term master plan is:

Port Pally / Resto Shaman / Mage / Boomkin Druid / Hunter

Group benefits would be:
3 that can heal
3 that can rez
2 that can tank
1 battle rez
Blessings
Intel Buff
Gift of the Wild
Ports
Mage table
Moonkin aura
AoE
No gear would go to waste

The hunter doesn't really add much to the group but I really enjoy having him. I could sub him out for an elemental shaman and get some good benefit out of that or maybe a priest for fort but I'm not real big on shadow priests; just a personal preference. I think Pally / Shaman / Mage / Druid / Priest would just about cover all the major buffs and group benefits.

Maybe I'll make a priest I can keep outside just to buff Fort on my group ha!

Woah, thanks for all the helpful comments :)

but yeah, I must have done something wrong with the feral druid. Maybe I was just tired and wasnt paying attention. I'll go back and recheck her gears and spec, as I thought 17k was rather low also, given that she was in mostly blue feral gear.

And as for the concerns about the ret pally as dps. I'm also a bit concerned about movement intensive fights. only thing I can think of is to create a separate follow macro and bind it only to the pally (so "1" for all follow and assist focus, and maybe something like alt + 1 for only pally follow and assist/attack focus target?) not sure how practical that will be, but as those are the only level 80 characters available to me atm, I will just have to make do until i get my hunters up to 80. :/

But thank you for the advice on respeccing zaelar! I didnt really think about dual specing them to be able to reassign roles per the demands of specific encounters. thank you for that to think about.

Anywho, back to work. But thanks to all for your helpful comments and advice! Have a great day :D