Oh, I don't..Again, I think priests are great healers, in fact, we too, run with two priests. The fact is though, that on most fights, I can interchange them, or sub in other classes, I can't do that, with, lets say, a paladin..(I could, but it would be many times more difficult then with the priest, for obvious reasons.)

BT may be different, I would have to defer to you on that.

The basic argument here seems to be that given comparable healing abilities, the buffs of the paladin are preferable to those of the priest.

Priests potentially have 3 buffs they can cast: Fortitude, Spirit and Shadow Protection. Paladins have 5 or 6. The big difference? Each paladin can only cast 1 blessing per player. No problem in a 40 person raid, where a "balanced" raid would probably have 5 paladins. But in the expansion, the number of available raid slots has shrunk but the blessing system remains the same.

The simplest solution to the raid balancing issue would be to allow paladins to cast two different blessing on any given player. Then even the most diligent min/maxing guilds could get all the buffs they wanted from two or three paladins, and could choose the rest of the healing rotation based on other criteria.

Horrible idea and this topic kinda runs into a wrong direction.

The problem isn't buff stacking or priests lacking paladin-like buffs. The core of the problem is, that healing classes in general lack the synergy of DPS classes. That's why we now focus on the buff arguments but this is wrong. Healing needs DPS like synergy, so you do not have to focus on buffstacking. If your priest-paladin combo puts out more effective healing than paladin-paladin you will not only focus on wich combo brings more buffs.

Retribution now has an aura that buffs DPS, why isn't there such a counterpart for healing, wich would penalty a second paladin over a second priest, if we look at more than the usual micro bonuses, cause the original +3% healing aura for healing recieved rather than healing done, was useless.

There are solutions to penalty paladin stacking and make priest more effective, besides the usual focus on wich buffs a single player can push out. But to be realistic i do not think we will see healing synergy any time soon, when you have developers argument with one classes nerfs as buffs for others, hence the dev-chat concerning the illumination nerf.

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I think most complaints come from priests who did want to heal and that's all they wanted to do. There are also lots of priests who are happy they have a great excuse to go shadow now.

If you're in the former category, I'm guessing you don't care about how many talent trees are viable as much as you care that your old role has been diminished.

I've had fun going shadow with my priest but I can see where the dedicated healers aren't as happy anymore. It's always tough when class roles and strengths change after you made a decision on what you wanted to do.

The best thing to do for raid healing/support balance would be to put a group mana regen buff comparable to Vampiric Touch somewhere in the Holy or Disc trees. Most guilds seem to run somewhere between 2 1/2 to 3 mana groups, and I know my old guild certainly tried to have three shadow priests as often as possible. If mana regen weren't exclusive to Shadow you could balance your priest make-up on the basis of your guild population, and having the option to stack holy priests would allow for more off-specs from the other healing classes. There would still be a point to bringing Shadow Priests given Misery and Shadow Weaving; you just wouldn't see more of them than the entire priest "allotment" of 25/9.