I've solo healed plenty of heroics as a paladin. I just finished a group with a fury war tanking, me healing, and an elemental shaman dps'ing. The other two were a mage and rogue and thats the issue -- hybrids can't CC well at all and CC is integral to heroics.

The biggest difference I've noticed between paladin and warrior/druid tanks is the lack of demo shout/roar which has been pretty huge. Dealable, but huge. Also, heavy CC groups can be a pain since the paladin has to keep moving the mobs around to avoid consecrate breaking sheep/trap.

The Inciter in SL is pretty harsh on paladin tanks as well. Drains pretty much all mana and seriously hampers agro gain after every charm especially since he may very well have blow holy shock/judgement/etc... right before charm breaks so you can't get agro back quite so easily. Intercept/feral charge are very nice for that fight.

I just wish they would get rid of the "no avoidance when casting" rule. Having your dodge/block/parry artificially set to 0 kinda defeats one of the few advantages of having a paladin tank. "Okay to offset the lack of demo shout, a couple thousand hp and no real 'oh shit' tools....you can heal yourself! But when healing yourself, every attack will land. enjoy!"

I agree with the healer+hybrid sentiment in this thread; the trend of taking two pure healers just seems completely suboptimal, any pull or boss you need two healers for, your feral or enhance or shadow priest can just healbot for.

Earthbind totem is totally underrated in heroics, too. The power of kiting can completely trivialize a lot of stuff, in Slave Pens we'd have a bad pull where the tank died, but the rest of us would survive with heavy kiting.

Tell your friend he's an idiot... cause I just completed a heroic shatter halls with one of my best mates tanking... Conners, pally superstar and yours truely healing. We had a mage, lock, and a rogue helping out.

Peace

Edit: Betcha 5 bucks that 5 druids could pretty much do anything. Just my humble opinion.

I bet five paladins could do anything, too. It would just be slow.

Dont Paladins have some form of natural Shield Wall when below 20% HP however as an 'oh shit' function?

5 Druids could not do anything, however having 4 caster form Druids chain-cycloning would be some pretty mean CC if it manages to surpass the diminishing returns.

Done a rather large number of heroics with druid solohealers, and we have a protection paladin who does the heroics a fair bit as well, tough rarely in the same group as me since stacking tanks is not a good idea for most of them (tough it can work)
For a depressingly large number of fights druid solohealing is made much more viable by bringing a felhound along to deal with magical debuffs of death. Oh, and a Warlock to summon it >.-)

Paladin/Mage/Lock/Druid/Shadowpriest (optional, occasionally a 2nd mage or other dps).

My gear (http://www.ctprofiles.net/30606). Others are a mix of Kara and T3 gear (or crafted equivalents). Druid was quite well geared from Kara, having soaked up all the leather. While some heroic bosses hit pretty hard, I haven't encountered anything that really seems out of bounds for a paladin tank (I've tanked fairly far into Kara as well, but that seems increasingly common). To be fair, I have not tried heroic Morass or Arcatraz, so those may hold challenges I'm not yet capable of.

My only complaint is mobs with Fear. I can break 1 with PvP trinket (sacrificing an avoidance trinket), 1 with DS (this can be fairly sketchy), and I guess the blacksmithing trinket, though I haven't broken that thing out in awhile. After that, I'm out of options. This can get pretty frustrating, especially as its a pretty standard mechanic for a warrior tank. It also puts some bosses firmly out of reach for paladin tanks (Nightbane) without Fear ward, which obviously isn't available uniformly. Given how widespread the fear mechanic is, some repeatable method of fear breaking or prevention would be nice. I realize thats a pipe dream, just a pet peeve of mine.

My typical groups have so far been:

Myself(35/23/3 Arms/Fury PvP Warrior)
Paladin(Holy/Prot)
Warlock
Mage
Rogue

Myself(see above)
Paladin
Priest
Mage
Rogue

Myself
Paladin
Priest
Warlock
Rogue

Myself
Paladin
Priest
Rogue
Rogue

I've run almost all of the heroics with a combo of the above make-ups. I think the most painful one might be the double Rogue we try to get away with. But all of them are doable.

Bah, people stress out too much about specs and class comps. Out of the people I frequently run heroics with, rarely do we have a cookie cutter group. With a lack of mages it's usually a rogue plus a hunter or warlock for CC. Solo healing as an elemental shaman was (respecced once again) definitely manageable in the easy to mid difficulty heroics. Hell, one of the best tanks we play with is a Tree of Life. Composition I'd rank a distant fourth behind skill, knowledge, and gear. As long as you nail the roles to be fulfilled, you can be successful with a ton of group compositions.

Going back to the original question of a prot paladin and a resto druid... can't say I've ever been there. But if a resto druid tanking and an elemental shaman healing can do heroics fine, surely you'd be in an even better situation.

I'd be more interested to hear people's experiences running heroics with warriors that have a hybrid dps/prot spec. I'm 42/5/14 and just getting around to being revered with a few factions, but I often get tells from random people on the server asking me if I'm prot and if i want t go to some heroic. I really don't like the pigeon holing this represents, so I wonder that if a prot paladin can tank a heroic, can a 'hybrid' warrior, too?

As a Paladin, as well as tanking everything up to Curator, I've thus far tanked heroic:

Slave Pens
Underbog
Steamvault
Ramparts
Blood Furnace

(Still working on my Revered rep for Lower City/Sha'Tar)

...and not once felt gimped by my paladin-ness. In fact, the group I regularly run with are non-guildies who seek me out (rather than any warrior) because they see me as a "good tank". My mitigation is fine, I'm uncrittable, nearly uncrushable with Holy Shield up, sitting on almost 12k unbuffed HP, and the frontloaded threat I can put out is wonderful, plus the massive healing needed to keep tanks up on the really tough stuff on heroics means I'm never short of mana.

On the subject of the added value bought by hybrids: I can do stuff like spam heals on people if there's a moment in the fight where there's no mob on me, save the healer from double mindflays on Skyriss. Plus self-healing, even if you are being hit, results in better mitigation than NOT healing, in the event a healer goes down early... I've saved a fair few would-be wipes when a healer dies early. And the ability to bubble to clear any debuff is great on some bosses... that hydra in Underbog f'rinstance.

This has been more my feeling, although I haven't done all of the heroics yet. I (and much of my guild) believe that bringing 1.5 tanks and 1.5 healers to heroics makes life a lot easier. Since we have a lot of druids lately, and our paladins are on a lot, so far I've always had one available to shift roles as needed. My groups loved having the extra utility, especially during very large trash pulls, and bosses who damage all group members in some fashion.

Not to mention most of my Cenarion rep runs in Steamvault were in a group with 3 druids...

Well we didn't do Bog last night, but we hit up heroic Blood Furnace.

http://home.comcast.net/~yarrr/furnace.jpg

Holy Pally, Prot Pally, Shadow Priest, pvp spec MS/Deathwish warrior, Rogue. It was a lot of fun running Furnace with limited CC, coming up with weird strategies to handle the various pulls was great. I didn't run into any problems keeping our prot pally MT up until the felguards near the end. Normal crushing attack + the uppercut or whatever it is they do at the same time is brutal.

I'm a bit tired atm so I didn't read through the post, nor am I a druid/paladin/shaman/x.

But, a few guildies of mine completed heroic steamvaults today with a group of:

Priest
Paladin
Druid
Druid
Shaman

I have no idea of their specs and that kind of thing, all I know is that all of them got Kalithresh's trident. I should also add it took a few hours and probably quite a few wipes to do it ^^

and.. today before going in and finally defeating the high king. (2nd raid night on him)
a very silly setup went into ramparts and crypts with the aim of laying paws on some plate that doesnt have "sucky" all over it..- Bear, Arms/fury, Full resto, Holy/Disc, hunter.

Somewhat more expensive than the usual heroic group in terms of repairs. but we won

Have only done 3 heroics so far, but my first 2 runs were pretty smooth - Prot paladin tank, Ret paladin healer (me), double shadow priest and frost mage. We did Auchenai Crypts and Sethekk Halls with this group, and the deathrate was pretty low.
(Better than some normal instance runs I've done)


Gear wise, I'm in mostly 70 blues, with quite a few pieces of L65~ pieces I haven't been able to replace yet. I was pretty happy that I was capable of keeping up with the healing requirements, though the shadow priests contributed quite a bit. (VE healing complements paladin single target healing, VE and VT make a huge impact on the longevity of a paladin without Illumination)


From that experience, I'd say that the specific class used doesn't matter too much - it's more the capabilities of the overall group. (Humanoid/Demon/Undead CC, Combat rezzes, stuns/fears, single target/AoE DPS, back up tank/healer, etc)

I'm not sure why anyone would doubt the ability of a restoration druid to heal a heroic. Druids do have the second largest toolset of heals available in the game, as well as two types of (albeit limited) crowd control

The problem with a Restoration druid healing a heroic is that you might as well be a Balance druid healing a Heroic, for all the good your HoTs do you.

Say that again to the healer in my usual group (holy/prot paladin) in heroic Mechanaar at the second boss, when he's getting at least one of the fire elementals for the 25th time.

While we're at it, that encounter is fucking bullshit.

To the poster asking about non-prot tanks in heroics, that's primarily what I've been running with. I believe he's MS/DW. As long as your healers are on the ball it's relatively easy to keep him up. Boglord giants can 1 round him for (what seems like) 80% of his health or so, but any other mobs he's able to not appear too squishy.

The most difficult part of non prot warriors tanking (me speaking as a DPS class) is their reduced aggro generation. The difference between our prot tank and our MS/DW tank's hate gen boils down to I end up wearing some of my pvp pure stam gear (from pve pure dmg gear), and ease up from my near immediate nuking to waiting 15 or so seconds. God help me if I get 2 crits in a row. Basically as a warlock with not even good gear my soul shatter is nearly always on cooldown.

So, yes, it's feasible for DPS warriors to tank stuff, however it's your DPS that pays for it - in the form of repair bills and wasted time b/c you can't do any form of respectable DPS.

We still prefer druids be feral cause they can tank, heal, and dps; regardless of how gimped they think they are as a feral druid healing. In that case, a warrior dpsing is a better option. Tanking a heroic without protection is not comfortable.

It might be just us, but I dont fancy going to heroics with 2 pure healers either. Many combats are just extremely hard with 2 pure healers. Mekgineer/kargath/calculator/whole black morass, doesnt even need to be heroic/kalithresh/nexus prince/vorpil, and some others that dont come into mind right away, are exponentially harder with less dps.