(if you don't want to know why I come up with this skip the Basics. It explains why I believe this is a feasible idea).

Basics:
I've led a bunch of Karazhan raids. Most of my new groups kill prince the very first night in regardless of group type (geared + exp, or no gear just skills..) My raiders' skills are there and they're super responsive and attentive to what I say. So organization, leadership and skills are assumed.

Fewest healers I've done kara with was 2 paladins who had none but 1-2 raid epics. We 9man Aran and also 9man Prince (both 1-shotting) with these 2 paladins healing. That was 2 months ago.

Recently I pug an abandoned Kara ID for the prince. We went in with only 2 paladins and it was flawless, 2nd attempt. First attempt I had to move prince several times, including a major move across the room through infernals due to being boxed in. We lived, and THEN later on we were boxed in again, wiped at 4%. We killed him next try. ALso it didn't matter much cause the run went really fast. No OT for the trash makes it seems more efficient (I don't have to wait for the raid to finish the OT's mob before I can pull next group etc..) and perhaps healing only 1 target is easier.

The 2 paladins who healed:
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...galor&n=Balkis
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...galor&n=Kronek
(as you can see the holy paladin didn't have gear. The other is Retribution)
So apparently 1.5 healer worked!

The challenge
With a super geared paladin assuming as skilled, can he handle Karazhan minus Nightbane and netherspite? How about with 2 shadow priests with 1K+ shadow dmg to help healing through their damage? I'm planning to go in with 8 geared dps people so the duration he has to heal will be significantly shorter.

Has anyone (healing paladins) done something close to being the only healer in Karazhan?

Also with this 1healer setup will you (the only healer) prefer having no OT to one? (Healing 1 target who takes all damage as opposed to 2). Assuming the mt tank is well geared.

This is the tank I'll be running with (it's me lol)
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...zgalor&n=Cauch

Obviously if you're close to doing this you wouldn't be needing (much) gear from Karazhan. So no need to tell me not to bother If someone get close to seriously try this please let me know your thoughts, what I failed to consider... such and such.

I didn't know guildless Murlocs ran Karazhan (hint update your profile, it's in the rules for a reason)

Being able to do Prince with two healers (both of those paladins have acceptable healing gear for KZ, despite your claim) does not equate to being able to clear the rest of Karazhan (or kill Prince as well) with one healer, even if s/he has twice the healing and regen of the ret paladin you linked there. The reasons for this should be obvious (multi-target management, fighting your global cooldowns, response time, etc).

Karazhan is pretty easy these days, but I'm curious as to how you'd get past even a large majority of the trash without an OT and another healer. Why don't you try actually doing this first and come back with the grand tale of your experience?

People do new and challenging things in WoW all the time. It makes the game fun to try out a crazy idea and have it work. I'm not sure how much discussion this warrants though. Just go try it out.

There's not exactly the need for an OT because most of the pulls are just double pulls. I'm not just talking btw.

For the multiple mobs Prince trash (the 4 pulls shades and double alien looking thigies..) I did solo tank them all and people who never ran with me (it was a pug) were dumfounded when we were done. Warrior are also better tanks (because we're better overall -ooh but this would be for another thread) for those thieves who "drop aggro." I tanked 2 at a time to make it go faster.

As far as I can see an extra OT doesn't do much in term of "tanking." He's basically just spreading the healing out. Good chance my OT will take more damage than I do on the same mob. So if I tank both (or all of the mobs) the raid as a whole will need to heal less. The question of which is easier, healing 1 or 2 targets, was proposed in the original post for the healers.

The only problem of missing an OT would be Julianne and Romulo.

You know that druids can simply unequip their weapon, and there's no deaggro done at all, right?

Having 1 tank do the job of 2 significantly ups the threat of spike damage killing the tank before a healer can do anything about it.

Do it and FRAPs it please.

Warrior with weapon chain or immune to disarm gauntlets or the Arms talent making them immune to disarm are all immune to the deagro as well.

I can see prince being done with 1 healer, as the fight is really dependant on the tanks gear when it comes to healing the first 70% of it.

The real issue is the other fights in kara. For instance, would it be possible to do aran with 1 healer? I find this doubtful, as the entire fight is about DPS+Healing, and the tanks relative level of gear won't matter at all. Because of this, you'd either need a heavily stacked raid(4 rogues and 2 warriors, or the like) to consistently lock aran down and prevent him from casting, ever, or I would fear that the DPS to the raid is simply too much for the paladin to handle, because the normal mitigation to make healing easier, such as increased tank gear, isn't prevalent in aran.

With enough mana regen and hps, any healer should be able to heal up a raid. But there are several problems, that may occur:

- healing aggro, solo tanking 3-4 mobs can be tough
- massive aoe, paladin suck at this (imps)
- annoying crowd controls
bossissues
- healing through several dots of moroes and a lot of targets
- illhoof, bad shackle twice and it's over
- wolf, who heals him while running around like a chicken for the second time

- what's about burst damage, there's no instant you can use often, no pws/hots to assist expect vampiric embrace

even a tier 5/6/++ geared paladin can only dip out a maximum amount of hps, that isn't 150% higher than from a tier 4 geared one. I think, with a bunch of luck and heavy crowd control by yourself, you can do it with some concentration and planning. But you might get screwed up on several trashcamps. There won't be needed flasks and so one, just anyone be aware of doing messy things.

if you're looking for a single healer with large HPS, and assume he won't have mana issues due to high dps and spriests, why pick a paladin? aren't other classes better at raw hps than paladins, who have traditionally been the kings of longevity and single-target healing?

No. Holy Light is a 2.0 second cast, provided that the Light's Grace is up (with downranking, it's downright trivial to keep it up all day) that can crit for over 6k with "okay" gear. It's hard to match, let alone to beat.

As mentioned, Aran would pose serious problems for a Paladin - any uninterrupted fireball/frost bolt is hard to deal with alone, and even the arcane missiles get to be a PITA when you basically have to react when they're cast. Not impossible, by any means, if you're willing to put an enormous strain on the guy and feed him mana potions. (And, obviously, not nearly as hard hard if you have multiple Shadow Priests...not sure it even counts as "single healer Karazhan" at all then. )

Honestly, though, I don't see the point of this topic. Is it theoretically possible? Probably. Short of literally theorycrafting out max damage output by X mob on Z targets and max HPS by Y person on Z targets, it's hard to say anything more definite than that. Is it recommended? No. It is going to be hard? Almost certainly.

In the end, though, this is like doing Hakkar with all of the priests up, though less extreme - you're going to have to figure it out for yourselves. No one else really knows, either.

Biggest concern personally if attempting with a single really well geared healer (all other points of discussion as to practicality of this, reason to etc aside) would simply be those times he/she is incapacitated or otherwise unable to heal. If they're having to move out of a Blizzard, silenced by an unlucky Aran movement, marked with the Red Riding Hood, feared by the Wolf, having to move to avoid an infernal/Oz cyclone or any other number of factors which remove a player from being able to stand and cast for a while it doesn't matter how much healing they can put out or if they'll never run out of mana meaning that unless your tank can simply take all the damage until they're back into play it's going to be pretty risky/frustrating.

Could get around this by having a hybrid or two simply pick up the healing briefly if you've got a well co-ordinated group, does then break the solo healer concept though of course.

Especially Aran is not a problem for only 1 healer, but see:

instead of having only 5 dps spots (+3 healer, 2 tanks), you get 8. EIGHT full dps spots. Rogues, Shamans, Mages, Warrior and so on are all able to interrupt him while casting. A common way of handling aran is, burn him and let him only casts his arcane missles while stop him from casting fireballs and frostbolts. That should not be a problem, maybe 1 out of 10 frost/firespells should hit the raid. This is easily healable. Why don't interrupt AM? Because, he has allready spend his mana and you don't want him to sit down and sheep+pyro the raid, but dps shouldn't be a problem with 2 more full dps (and maybe interrupts).
So you can also interrupt him from casting AM, what kind of damage should hit the raid that isn't able to healed with simply first aid, healthstones or a pot? With enough dps, you can kill him with 10 dps, assuming 2-3 wls for the adds and without evena ve heal. But for this 1 healer strat, just banish one, fear another and tank two of them off, bring aran down to nothing in no time.

And his aoe is avoidable, only your 500ms lagging mate with cast-details "0" should be hit by a blizzard, noone ever by flame wreath or arcane explosion.

Counterspell is only on melee range to ~ 20y...

If you're trying to do it just to show that it can be done - sure I'd say it probably could be done. If you're trying to do it though to stack DPS and theoretically make things faster, I think you'll fail. Plus the Pally will likely have a nervous breakdown due to stress.

There's so many different variables there's no real point in me thinking about how / why its possible. Basically if you outgear the instance enough and you're prepared to wipe enough getting the hang of things and you're not so bored of karazhan that you just want to get your t4 pieces and leave asap - I'm sure it could be done.. ... in theory ... maybe..

Good luck, though

My raid uses a Feral Druid MT and a Fury Warrior OT (funky hybrid spec with 15 points in Prot). So on Aran, we already run 7 DPS, and 8 if you include our Resto Shaman who Earth Shocks and DPSes til 40%. I can't imagine most raids bring 2 Protection Warriors, and so I believe you're over-emphasizing the difference in how the encounter would play out.

if you are locking down all his schools he will start meleeing, and he melees almost harder then he casts.

The whole idea of having 1 healer in kara is entirely possible, but they would have to be 100% on the ball for the entire 4 hour run. Pre healing burst damage and solo healing an entire kara run would just get plain annoying, but is entirely feasible

Not just the healer either; the whole raid would have to be very attentive about minimizing damage taken. No being lazy about chaining flare damge on Curator for example.

He melees pretty weak, I remember someting like 2-2.5k on cloth.

You would probably have issues with sheer throughput on a number of other boss fights, though. Romulo and Juliette comes to mind. Curator I guess you might manage provided DPS wears resist gear, but that's also a terrible one to have a paladin handling- a shaman with access to earth shield and chain heal would be better. Aran I doubt. Even with two warlocks to handle the adds. Illhoof and Netherspite obviously no. I think you'd be in trouble even on Prince, but with an overgeared tank and double mana battery you could get lucky. And nightbane no.

Why not Netherspite? Shadowpriests in the Blue Beam basically heal their own group, and it's not necessary to rotate 2 healers through the Green Beam. We've had kills where the majority of the green beams were taken by tanks.

Netherspite strikes me as one of the easier fights to do this on.

What's wrong with R&J? If you got 7 dps 2 tanks and 1 healer, compared to usual 5 dps, you can burn them down very quick. Same for Aran, stack 4 rogues and he goes down in no time. Prince is for ranged stacking.