Looking to field a traditional holy trinity 5 man group

[Zub]

given your class limitations, i would suggest
1 Protection paladin
1 Holy priest
1 balance druid
1 mage
1 elemental shaman

you get all the buffs - Fort/Spi, Paw, Brains, blessings and totems.
You have 3 easy casters which can reasonably do well with a 1-3 spell rotation and have no real timer to check (not too many dots for example).
You get 2 possible extra healers in the lazerchicken and the shaman, which can heal reasonably well while in their dps spec/gear (not like a paladin for example) - for example if your priest gets one-shotted.
You get an easy tank and healer to play, some crowd control (sheep, hex, roots, shackle, cyclone..), 4 rezers, 1 brez, 1 ankh, and portals / free food.

finaly, you dont have too many gear problems, as only the melee drops wil be wasted. all classes have different armor levels (2xcloth, 1xleather, 1xmail, 1xplate, and the 2 clothies will be after different gearsets)

And best of all, if you dont like the playstyle of one of the classes, you can swap your toons around for tanking, healing or dpsing as you have 2 tanking classes and all 4 healing classes

my 2coppers
-Zub

[Owltoid]

Though I'm really burned out on WoW, I'm happy with my decision to go 5x druid. Dual spec has opened a lot of options... here's a few fun things about the class when multiplied by 5:

5x moonkins in PvP would allow some nice graveyard wipes when you bust out the 5x typhoon on rezzers followed by starfalls (if needed)
5x tree healers in battlegrounds would be supremely annoying for the opposition... you may not kill much (though 10 DoTs would take some down), but you could annoy the crap out of the other team (which in some fashion is winning)
1x tank, 1x healer, 3x DPS for PvE
15x treants
5x tranquility always turns heads and it's fun to see some crazy numbers
2138910918 HoTs to put on a random guy running around Dalaran guaranteeing a WTF moment
Stealth class is always fun
Many forms of dancing (bear, cat, moonkin, travel form, elf/tauren) for your own party

[Greythan]

You'll see my group make-up/specs in my sig. I like my specs for ease of use. May not be the best for individual use (mage would be arcane or fire, lock would have more points in destro if not full destro), but the rotation is easy: sick pets on target (felguard, water elemental) spam frostbolt/shadowbolt and pick your favorite spammable elemental shaman rotation. Priest single target heals tank and if things get hairy just spams the heck out of AE heals. Not as synergized as the tank/shamanx4 but not far off.

I've enjoyed the team for PvE. I really don't use targeted AE's and don't feel like I've missed out because of it. There is some gear competition between my three cloth classes and the Shaman ends up competiting for caster cloth gear sometimes as well. That said, the group is very fun/powerful/flexible. Can't imagine not have totems, portals, healthstones, summons, soulstones, food/water, nearly every buff, AE healing, .....

Also, it does allow for a fair bit of mix/match if you are in a guild. My guild is sort of imploding atm so that benefit isn't doing much for me right now.

[Redbeard]

Im kind of interested in shadow priests for some reason.

For those of you running shadow priests... how potent is the group healing from vampiric embrace? If i did pally + 4 shadow do you think that would be instance viable or would you need to leave 1 priest for pure healing?

Thanks.

[aboron]

The VE healing back in BC days was awesome and I could instance heal the tank... Now it's sometimes enough to take care of the priests' own splash damage, it's higher return on themselves, but nothing to write home about, and the healing it can do to other has been marginalized. That's why i like to have holy nova as a backup, and put in a /cast [nostance] shadowform at the head of my dps buttons to recover from whenever i have to use it.

Edit: also my pally healer is almost always in range of one or more of the priests, so I didn't have to waste effort going all the way up to get beacon of light in the holy tree and ended up taking some extra crit talents instead.

[hibiki]

Agreed with Aboron. VE heals the priest for 15% of their damage and everyone else for 3% of their damage. I have a shadow priest(with 1800 sp and crappy rotation) in my group and I see +40 to +50 hp ticks from VE. I just started boxing instances with a few shamans that have 1140 sp and get +100 to +130 ticks from healing totem. Neither one of those are good for heroics, however I can forget about healing in regular level 80 instances trash with the 4 shamans. I don't think the 4 spriests will keep me alive on 4 pulls.

I would suggest setting up one priest as disc if you're going with 4 priests. You could checkout my disc priest. I have a /castrandom [no channeling] Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Mending, Penance macro bound to my dps and tank spam key and I heal just fine. 80% overhealing and I don't run out of mana on trash or boss fights, I do use shadowfiend when i hit 50% on bosses though. Anytime anyone other than the tank takes damage, holy nova or prayer of healing. I don't bother with single target healing on my dps or healer anymore.

[Redbeard]

Wow great responses, thanks guys.

The mage has a few targeted AOEs and the boomkin has a couple as well. Are we still SOL as far as an effective click passing method? Keyclone has one but if i recall it was moving super slowly.

Edit: Ive been trying to study up on priests, never played one. Looks like a lot of people are saying for pve that holy is better for mass / group healing and disc is better for single target / tank healing. Do you think it would be worthwhile to consider making the priest disc instead of holy for a 5 man group? Hrm.

[hibiki]

I would take a disc priest over a holy priest anyday and I have both. The way I see it is "Will CoH prevent your group from wiping?". I spend most of my time healing my tank. The dps takes splash damage, random charges, even some chain lightning when I forget to turn the mobs away from my group in heroics, but nothing that will one-shot them. Penance(51st talent in the disc tree) is the main heal that you would be using if you're disc. It heals your target 3 times while channeling for 2 seconds and the first heal is instant. All three of those heals can proc Divine Aegis(Should spec for it) when you crit on your heals, which absorbs more damage. Grace is a buff that your targets get when you heal them with Flash Heal, Greater Heal and Penance, that increases your priests heal on target by 3% and stacks 3 times. Each tick of Penance applies the buff, so one uninterrupted penance and you're at the full stack. Renewed Hope is another goodie, extra 4% chance to crit on FH, GH, and Penance on targets affected by weakened soul which is a debuff from Power Word: Shield. 2/2 in Renewed Hope also reduces damage to the party/raid by 3% for 20 seconds when you cast PW: S. The weakened soul debuff is 15 seconds, so you could have 100% uptime on the 3% reduced damage and 4% extra crit heals on your tank. The down side is your priest absolute sucks on the healing meters, the upside is you don't take alot of spike damage.

I have healed while I multiboxed and single box on a holy priest, it required more attention than while I'm healing on my disc priest. My holy priest is in Naxx 10 gear and my disc priest is in heroics, emblem, T7 chest/gloves and a Naxx 10 ring. Another thing I like about disc is if you get a big enough mana pull, you don't worry about mana anymore. When PW: S is completely absorbed, you get 2.5%(3/3 in rapture) of your total mana back. For my disc priest, my total mana is 19,423. It's about 769 mana each PW: S, 10% reduction in mana cost from Mental agility, and 15% from Soul Warding. Rapture returns 485 mana when PW: S is comsumed. With a holy priest, I'd have to watch for procs on flash heal, stay out of the 5 second rule, and keep holy consentration up for mana regen. Give it a try, you might like it.