One thing that hasn't been mentioned in all this talk of whether to bring 5 healers or 10 is that the fact that not all healers are created equally. Different healers go about the same job in different ways, and while one fight might lend itself to an army of shamans, another might favor the druids healing. Most guilds can sub in "healers" for different fights, but not all have the option to sub in all the druids when it suits them, or all the priests when it works better that way. Each guild does the best healing job with the healers they are accustomed to working with and if 5 of your healers can do the job of 10 then you are probably better off.

The Darkener had either Psychic Blow knockback or Shadowstep, which was more deadly.
Sanguinar was the same, Astromancer had either Conflag and Firebolts or Voidzones and Shadowbolts, making it alot of fun to find out on the first attempt in a week!
The Engineer had either the Remote Toy or he had a debuff he puts on his main target, silencing anyone that healed him for 5? sec.
They still had the rest of the abilities and they kept their changing abilities for one week.

Phase 2 was the same i think, phase 3 started earlier, something in the area of 45sec meaning you had at least 3-4 weapons still up when the advisors respawned, even with the best kind of potting.

The really fucked up thing was that the Engineer had tons of initial aggro on the furthest away from him when he respawned, i dont think alot of guilds who tried Kael figured that out. It still meant he was most likely running into a part of the raid and bomb some people.

Kael himself was doing the same, our guess in the beginning was that we had to offtank the advisors while killing Kael, because it seemed way too hard to kill them all in time even with dps stacking and the old kind of potting.

Im also not sure if they changed any of the mobs hp, but what they really changed was the amount of time you have per phase and the Chromaggus style randomness per week. The Cosmic Infuser has also the 50% less damage effect on shadow spells, which was for Voidzone Astromancer, if anyone wondered about that.

I would guess the fight in its old form wouldve been just impossible for 50% of the guilds who did him now and weeks if not months of delay for the rest.

As an extension to this, Pacifism (Vek'nilash, EU) have this video up of one of their earlier attempts before he was buffed. It doesn't show a great deal of the older abilities but it does show Thaladrad with Shadowstep which, for some reason, amuses me greatly.

Had our first dance with Gurtogg tonight and its the first boss where we've been forced to stack the raid in BT. We've done all the other bosses up to and including Teron with 6 or 7 healers. Really annoying.

As time goes on the bosses will require less stacking. The passage of time simply makes bosses easier - through gearup, knowledge, and generally nerfs. I know how this statement is going to be received, but its pretty much how it is.

We've seen ourselves forced to recruit more healers since we cant really get away with having only 8ish active healers anymore. We did Naj'entus with 6 healers last night because a couple couldnt come to the raid and let me tell you, Naj'entus with 6 healers is brutal. At least we get to do TK again for more vials, for some reason everyone loves doing Kael'thas now.

You could also consider only taking 6 or 7 healers as "stacking dps". Considering the number of healers you probably want for the later stages of BT, maybe this was the first raid that you didn't stack.

The only fight in the latter half of BT you wouldn't want to 'stack' healers would probably be Reliquary... anything else gets easier with 8-ish.

Even Azgalor and Archimonde are less acidic with a comfortable amount of healing.

I wouldnt exactly call it stacking when we only have 6 healers logging on total. We've done Naj'entus to Teron with 6 healers this reset and its not been very enjoyable. We've also gone from needing plenty of tanks to 1 or 2 per fight. Dumb.

It's not dumb, that's just how it goes. T5 you 'stack dps' and run with 6 healers. T6 you will do a lot better with a balanced raid / healing heavy, light tank raid.

I know that as the raid leader I get a lot of flak from the DPS I sit so that we can meet healing requirements (and by reqs I mean that will make the bosses nearly a guaranteed kill) for Mother -> Illidan.

The problem is not having people sit out, its having the requirements change from heavy tanking to heavy healing and having to shuffle the guild around to make it work. Oh well, we're recruiting more healers now. I guess we'll just make sure we have more than enough of everything for Sunwell.

The average healer load for a lot of guilds in pre-TBC raiding was ~15 in a given 40-man raid. Obviously it varied between guilds and often fight-to-fight, but 15-16 healers was totally fine for anything in Naxx outside of Loatheb (fewer) or Sapphiron (more). If you adjust down to a 25-man raid, that's...9 healers? Something like that. Yet many people consider that "stacking." It's really not...as Melador pointed out, you're just so used to stacking DPS in T4/T5 that you lose perspective on what a balanced raid really is.

Well, pre-2.0 when you brought a druid/paladin/priest/shaman every one of them was going to be healing. Now though you're looking at something like 1/3 to 1/2 of those will be filling some other role like DPS or tanking. So essentially you have to bring a lot more "healers" to have enough healing.

If you want to min max anything you should be ready to bring any class comp to a raid to get it done. We came into BC with 8-10 Warriors due to Naxx, we now have like 3. We slimmed down on healing for T5 as well, but now have to bring 7+ healers to some fights in BT / Hyjal. That's how it goes if you want to mix max.

People did T5 with the same comps they do with T6.

When at the start of the Burning Crusade, we had to make a decision about the generic raid setup and ended up with assigning 8 slots to healers, 8 to melee and 8 to ranged with a 25th slot kept unassigned to tweak with. Mostly, that has worked out pretty well for us. I'm sure less healers and more DPS would have been better in the T5 content. But now, at the start of the T6 content, I'm happy we didn't do that.

My main gripes are actually with two fights in specific. Vashj is so heavily in favour of ranged DPS that it isn't really funny, and very tank-unfriendly. And the Kael'Thas fight is just screaming to cut down to 6 healers. Now, had these two fights not had anything to do with attuning people I wouldn't mind at all, but Kael'Thas has proven a big bottleneck for our healers in particular. Where we have almost everyone else attuned by now, we still need 2 kills to get all healers past this step.

For more generic fights, it's usually not a big deal to swap a few people around, that's easily done during the trash clear and doesn't cause complaints. We often swap a healer out for an extra AoE damage dealer on Solarian, to name an example. But this sort of thing shouldn't be part of the fights required for attunements.

We never ever modified our lineup for Vashj or Kael... Kael with 8 healers is not a problem, and it was not even 3 months ago. So is vashj with 4 rogues.
Many people seems to scream "unbalanced" for every fight nowadays, I don't really know why. Just do the fights with your usual lineups and you'll see they aren't THAT unbalanced.
The only fights I would recommend raid stacking for learning in game right now are Archimonde (obviously, bring more shamans, and decursers), EoS (1 tank only, more melee dps), Gurtogg (9 healers = free kill) and Shahraz (healers / melee dps). Everything else in the game is killable by a "standard" raid with 8 healers, a few tanks, and balanced ranged/melee dps.

I LOVE that fight... Well once P2 starts at least. Easily one of the most fun fights in the game IMO.

Just curious what other fights you would say strongly favor Shaman stacking? I mean, on Vashj, having 2 for the MT group is very useful and I suppose Bloodlust for phase 3 is generally beneficial for dps but I don't know that we've seen any significant difference between doing the fight with a few or five Shaman... Bloodlust might be good in Phase 3, but I can't see that doing -too- much more than making up for the drop in totem utility in Phase 2.

I'm hoping to take 5 shaman to Archimonde and I can see that making a big difference, and we're never sad to have our shaman, but Archimonde's the first fight we've gotten to where I've said to myself "we should stack shaman here." Maybe I'm missing something?

Bloodlust is always good, but chain heal is amazing for RoS, Shahraz, and Illidan in particular.

We normally do everything with 8 healers. We usually bring two tanks and let a dps warrior or holy paladin tank when needed (this works very well on anything other than bosses). An elemental shaman can be put on healing when the need is there.
With that setup and some role switching you can pretty much do anything.

Indeed shamans seem to be the key class for everything now. They have so many assets that just loading up your raid with one for each group grants dramatic returns. Totems, bloodlust, chain heal and pretty impressive single target healing when needed.
It's also pretty neat to see 5 fire elementals up while AOE'ing weapons, they add a ton of damage there as well.

Ah, okay. Haven't quite made it to those yet so that would explain my confusion.

The biggest indicator to me for stacking shamans is that we have 3 distinct and perfectly raid viable specs. Druids and Paladins each have 3 different roles, but only 2 of the 3 are currently even considered. The difficulties in making appropriate groups and drop off in blessing return make bringing ret paladins currently sub-par, making holy the defacto paladin spec. Elemental and Enhancement shamans buffs are so powerful for their groups that you can't help build party composition around them.