WoW IRC Dev Chat

[Kevin]

/nod

The mana pool is gonna be the tough thing.  You aren't leaving yourself much room for error, especially on the boss fights.  I did it, but I'm blue/purp and was working with a good and geared tank, usually our guilds #2 tank.  The rest of the players were more average.  The Cannoner was close, and we wiped on Balnazzar when he Mc'ed the tank twice.  The second time I don't know if he bugged or people just resisted (come to think of it, my standard gear has a lot of shadow resist) but nobody got mind controlled.
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OK what I didn't say was that the shaman and the paladin both need to to be heal spec'd and wearing the gear for healing. You should easily be able to crack 5K mana if you are willing to wear gear for healing from just blues and greens at L60. That puts both the shaman and paladin in cloth, leather, and mail unless you are lucky on some drops. If you aren't wearing healing gear then no you can't do it. My paladins healing rig didn't have any plate in it for some time. I still, even with some of my purples use some greens and blues because they have higher int on them. Spi doesn't help the paladin as much.

My paladins mana pool in blues and greens was just as big as my druids in blues and greens at the same level. Treesh's shaman had more mana than either of them at the same stage of the game.

The cannoneer is rough for a druid or priest in blues and greens too, so is Balnazzar. I don't see your point on that. I've seen level appropriate groups wipe to Balnazzar with priests around too. Of course those fights are hard for a blue/green geared group, they are supposed to be. But they can be done, you did them. They are stressful for any healer in the gearing you would have at that stage.

The overall HP/s and HP/MP for all the healers aren't that different.

Having healed this stuff with a druid and with a paladin I can tell you at times it is easier with the paladin because of the speed of the cast. I also don't have the pressure of if someone dies it might as well be a wipe because I can't rez them with that 30 minute timer and the respawns aren't letthing them back in. Yes the paladin needs to have holy light on the target for flash of light to do anything and so you put that on the tank but having the option of a 1.5 sec cast over the horribly mana inefficient 2 sec cast of a druid is huge. You don't need to CC everything. The warrior was tanking 2 or 3 mobs on several pulls. I didn't drink a mana potion (I pretty much never drink mana potions). I did drink water after many pulls, but I did that on my druid too and I watch priests have to as well. And so what? You are drinking while they are pulling the next group and you keep drinking until you need to heal, it doesn't really slow you down that much.

The paladin has the advantage of blessing of protection or blessing of sacrifice to help with AoE at times. Shaman can use earth bind and the AoE'r can kite to mitigate damage. Druids have to hope their HoT's balance things out enough for a 3.5 second cast heal (I did it on my druid before 1.9 so I couldn't knock it down to 3.0 sec) to land. It took me a few deaths to figure out how to keep a warlock alive with a druid.

And actually when I'm healing as a paladin or druid, I want the damage split onto a couple of people because I need to use slower heals to save mana and if all the damage is focused on one target I can't always do that.

So yeah you don't have a lot of room for error but neither does a solo priest. Since you can wear the exact same gear a priest does plus have options for other stuff, it should actually be easier for a shaman or paladin to have a larger mana pool, if they plan on getting gear to heal in. If you are the only healer in an instance you shouldn't be thinking about damage at all, all your gear should focus on healing.