Can a paly be a good healer?

[Quark]

I dont expect to match a healing focused priest, but can a paly heal as well as a druid if you build for it?

If you focus on Holy talents and gear that will help you heal can a paly be a primary healer for 5 man groups?
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Weakly-educated guess:

Aggro would not be a problem. Not only would you not care as much, pally heals don't get nearly as much aggro as druid/priest heals.

The later you get into the game, the problem changes from "Healing enough" to "Healing quickly enough". With no talents, a priest's last Flash Heal is 812 to 958 for 1.5 second cast time. A paladin's last Flash of Light is 343 to 383. Maybe if you constantly spammed Flash of Light it would work. Certain groups did this in MC with the lowest rank Flash of Light, before the talents were changed. However, that leads to the next problem.

Your mana pool is much, much smaller than a druid/priest. That will come back to bite you every time, probably.

In the end, it would probably be like everything else in the game. You can start off doing it fine, but as you progress in levels the game becomes less lenient to variation. Rogues don't have to care about aggro until about level 40, when every other melee class jumps in armor. Hunters can melee until late in the game (I've seen it). One of the great things about this game is how the difficulty ramps up so it allows for poor play early on (when you're clueless), but slowly forces you to learn the tricks of the trade. People who zerg instances obviously miss out on this (and you can tell who these people are when they hit 60 ... ugh). The consequence is that non-intended roles are that much harder to fill.