Death Knight & 4x Shadow Priests

[Slats]

So I dug out my old priests and moved them accross to the server I play on now. I already have a reasonable geared Paladin Tank, 4x Elemental Shamans, a Destro Warlock and a Resto/Balance Druid as my main team (with optional slot ins).

I'm looking at an Unholy Death Knight mainly for the AoE Tanking and Ebon Plaguebringer combined with Shadowpriest VE/VT and the Mind Sear AoE.

I've just set everything up and reached the point where I need to configure my /click macros and was curious if anybody else is playing Shadow Priests at the moment and wondering if VE will keep my tank alive with the occasional popping out of Shadowform for Renew at the start of big pulls etc.

Back in TBC the mana usage was insane, mind flay had a really short range and you had to use too many global cooldowns to actually do anything. The only real upside was you looked awesome and nobody else played them.

Any thoughts on Viability? Discuss.

[Ualaa]

Not really sure.

4x Renew and a PW: Shield is definitely a decent boost.
Popping out of shadow form for additional heals, is an option too.

You could create an action target group, for healing.
And then a mapped key, to determine if a given toon is in the heal ATG or not.
You could even go with a few such keys, so you can move multiple toons into or out of the group.
And then just hit your heal key, and each toon in the group (0 to 4) does a heal.

Really not sure if that's enough heals or not.. VE x4.
But one toon could easily go Disc, and act as a dedicated healer.
If the VE was not enough.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Any thoughts on Viability? Discuss.

It's been a while since I did tank + spriests but with a proper shield tank (pally), VE was not enough by itself to keep the tank up on more difficult encounters. Granted, I wasn't def capped back then but I didn't have purely shit gear. My biggest complaint was having to shift out of shadowform to drop renews often enough that the mana use from shifting all the time was killer. A lot has changed since then, though, so you might have better luck.

[Multibocks]

Save a lot of mana not having to put VE on everything, so this comp may actually have some use. I just refuse to level anymore groups from 60.

edit: p.s. my paladin can fully block all attacks from trash and most of the damage from bosses in heroics. So Im positive this comp would wreck most heroics. The only ones that will give you trouble are the new ones introduced in 3.3

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Save a lot of mana not having to put VE on everything, so this comp may actually have some use. I just refuse to level anymore groups from 60.

edit: p.s. my paladin can fully block all attacks from trash and most of the damage from bosses in heroics. So Im positive this comp would wreck most heroics. The only ones that will give you trouble are the new ones introduced in 3.3

I take it your pally is already geared? How would you have rated that had you had to gear him with said group.

[Ghallo]

The new LFG tool makes it nearly trivial to gear a new tank outside of a group

Queues are instant, and the runs are fast!