2 Paladins 3 Mages

[Dreadone]

Two paladins don't really do much for mages. All you need is salvation. Kings is a minimal DPS increase of perhaps 1-2% crit if you have enough intellect on your gear. Wisdom is negligible past level 20-30 since your pulls will last ~30 seconds and you'll drink after every pull with a paladin tank anyway. Wisdom is 39ish mana per 5 when talented, which means on an average trash pull of around 30 seconds you'll gain ~230 mana from wisdom. That's not even one arcane explosion. Wisdom is great in longer fights (raids) but it doesn't do a lot for you in short fights. Especially when you have free water from mages to drink between every pull.

One paladin gives you either kings/sanctuary on your tank, wisdom on your healer and salvation on your DPS. That's all you need. Likewise, I always use retribution aura on my tank. Devotion aura isn't bad but it's nowhere near as strong as priests inspiration which is straight 25% armor increase on your tank for 15 seconds every time a heal crits. Inspiration is huge.

Priest is just a stronger dungeon healer overall. You get a HoT, shield, party-wide heals, shackle, fear and an offensive dispel to remove annoying buffs like the fire aura on Scarlet Wizards.

If you plan on PvPing a lot I'd choose paladin because they're much tankier when you get jumped by rogues or warriors. In PvE priest is the superior choice by a fair margin IF you already have one paladin in your party for salvation.

Ok many of your points absolutely make sense.

But this is just a 5man dungeon farming team built around the protpaladin. My endgame with this team will be stratholme i guess

The Priest :

The castable shield:
I want my paladintank to get hit. This is what its all about.To reflect damage. Its the same with that shield on warrior = no rage. So the castable absorb shield isnt something i benefit of. Maybe when a mage gets aggro what most of the time should not happen. Or am i wrong with that?

Inspiration:
A low level/fresh lvl60 priests and crits . I dont want to rely on some random crit to boost my armor. Thats why i prefer improved devo aura since its always up.

Shackle & Fear:
Great tools. But not needed with this group. exorcism and holy wrath anyone?

So with switching my holypaladin for a priest i get:

- Aoe heals which are situational and most of the time not needed
- A hot which is only nice to have
- A 10% stambuff

but i loose :

- An armoraura which is up all the time
- More stats on all of my chars with result in more avoid+mana+dps with kings
- A buff which reduces the aoe aggro of my dps and mp5 for my healer
- Manareg or heals for my team since the holypaladin can judge light or wisdom on the boss.
- And when im about to wipe one of the paladins can sacrifice himself so we can rezz back up (DI)

A priest is a great healer or maybe the best one in classic!

But like i said it wont benefit the group i planned. Maybe im wrong and a priest would be better. I
have to try it first But on paper at least the holypaladin wins in a mile. Im going to test a priest later for sure.
We got enough time to really test everything.