Tank-Healing

I did a quick search through the forums and didn't see anything like this so I thought I'd post my idea.

Would it be possible to give yourself a hybrid prot/holy spec and tank and heal yourself at the same time? Both threat and healing mechanics would have to work out here for this to be semi-viable.

I'm a pretty well geared pally tank having OT'ed half of ZA and have all epic gear except for my shoulders and trinkets. I have a couple DPS IRL friends who are mostly in blues with a couple crafted epics but who generally don't raid or do heroics. It's usually pretty hard to find healers and I hate asking the well geared healers in my guild to heal for regular instances.

My armory profile is http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Zul%27jin&n=Gottverdamnt.
Of course at the time of posting I am in my pvp gear so that doesn't give you a great idea.

This is the way I look at it: Paladins excel at AoE tanking, and what better AoE threat generating "attack" than a big fat heal? It's range extends to every mob engaged in combat.

With Holy talents I can avoid spell pushback and mitigate the length of interrupts. I realize I can't block or parry while heal-tanking but I can still dodge, and I can still be missed (a la Bookin tanking). With my current 24% dodge and 11% chance to miss that some decent avoidance.

With improved Righteous Fury a 2k heal adds 1k threat to all mobs (I hear that the 90% threat gets added to healing). Add a little consecration and maybe a JoR to open and you have some decent threat; enough to keep your lesser geared friends at bay (they do only about 300-350 dps at this point). With them having Salv, that means they only put out about 240 TPS, meaning a Rank 3 Cons and some holy lights could keep me afloat while I melee (potentially with Seal of Wisdom or Light) to keep my mana up.

Obviously mana would be the biggest issue, and interrupts and stuns could be a killer, but I could see doing 2-3 mobs at a time.

My sample talent build is this, though there is huge room for talent/gear tweaks: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sVxubxzGhoZV0tIgczM

I don't expect to heal-tank heroics but I could almost see lvl 70 regulars being doable.

And also, keep in mind I am trying this more than anything to keep the game interesting until WotLK comes out.

There could be a whole discussion of the proper talenting and gearing, but I think the instant heal here is really important, and I am assuming I won't be blocking and Concentration Aura will be used all the time.

My gear will be halfway between 108% avoidance/mitigation 450 spell dmg and 1200 healing 80mp5s (without BoW). Maybe shooting for 50 mp5s, lots of armor and dodge rating will work well.

There are 4 good options for blessings: BoSanct for less dmg (though not really threat gen since I don't expect to block much), BoL for bigger heals(more threat), BoW to keep my mana up, and BoK to do a little of everything (1% dodge, 500 mana, 1k hp).

I gotta give this a try when I get home from work. Until then, I'm curious to hear your thoughts/advice.

P.S. It also strikes me that this might be a good setup for arena pvp too. Healing threat seems to work just as well in pvp as it does in pve :p

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T.T
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5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK, 4/5 Hyjal

Funstrider, Vashjina and Archilol can go diaf

You wouldn't have the mana to keep it up long on any real fight
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Keondra/68/NE/Rogue/Caelestrasz

Plus, exactly because of people like you, blizz made pally heals super low-threat. A salved priest with maxed Silent Resolve generates more threat than a non salved, non RFed paladin. Even after improved RF, our heals dont generate more than 0,6 threat per healed point.


SO
You go oom: no outgoing heals
You will take a fuckton of damage: You can't dodge while casting.
Your dpsers won't dps: no real threat.
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Spankadin in development.
.'>';

You can't dodge while casting either, as far as I know. In anything above regular 70 instances, you'll be taking more damage to heal through than just not casting and dodge/parry/blocking a lot of hits.
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Stormreaver US

Modus | Governor

Terrible idea.
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No Avengers Shield....


/starts to to twitch
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The only useful talents you could pick up are:
-Imp RF
-Toughness
-Anticipation (%miss only)
-Imp Conc Aura

Everything else would be rather useless, since they're all inactive while healing. (fairly sure that you can't dodge while casting either, but Meh - hardly helps if you can). Hell, you can't even use Devo since your heals would take 5+ seconds to cast if you didn't use Imp Conc.


Next problem is your understanding of threat via healing.

First, imp RF basically only counteracts the pally specific healing threat mod. So you're looking at ~1 threat per 2 healing.

Second, healing threat is SPLIT between active targets. This means that the 1k threat from your 2k self heal is actually worth 250 threat each on 4 targets (fairly standard pull size) - amounting to ~125 TPS per target (less if more targets)

Compare this to consecrate - which can ticks every second for more than 200 threat (unaffected by pullsize).




honestly, you'd be better off pugging a healer or 2boxing one (I brought along my wife's L65 feral druid to HoT me when I couldn't find a healer for a similar situation)...It's just not a viable concept.
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Kellann - Uther

From what I hear heals yield 1/2 threat for each 1 point of dmg, however pallys have an additional 20% threat reduction which either brings it to .3 or .4 threat per point of healing depending on order of operations.

Even at .3 threat x 1.9 = .57 threat per point of healing.

Indeed mana will be the bigger problem but could be helped immensely by a shadow priest or shammy mana spring totem. I could also ask the feral druid (one of the two dps friends I was talking about) to toss me a heal every now and then.

The dodge while casting thing I had taken from the glut of Panzerkin (Moonkin tanking) guides when that build first came to exist. After more research you can "dodge" during the cast animation but it's looking like the dodges that you see while casting are probably due to latency and are really occurring right before or after a cast. That is a big chunk of mitigation loss.

And yeah I'm not try to do anything more than regular lvl 70s. If I could do that I would be happy.

Has anyone that is shooting this down actually tried it? I'm definitely giving it a try. I'll report my findings.

Can't dodge, can't parry, can't block. You get hit for 6k, heal yourself for 4k.

It's not viable by any stretch of the imagination.
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I can keep rhythm with no metronome.

A Holy/Prot hybrid build is a viable build for tanking in 5 mans (including some heroics with a good healer) and in an OT role in a raid envrionment. I ran with such a build for a long time while progressing through Karazhan. There are actually some very nice tanking abilities deep in the holy tree and you don't need much out of the prot tree to make this work. It's been a while, but I'd think a build along these lines would work well still;

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sVxubxzGeshx0thx

That being said, with this type of build you are either tanking or healing, but not both. Each role is very gear dependant and I found myself constantly swapping gear, sometimes from one pull to another pull.

PvP healing gear, especially on trash pulls, can be extremely useful as you can eliminate crits making you a very resilient healer with a taunt. On many occasions I was able to taunt a mob that had been pulled off the tank and continue healing while the mob brought back under control by the MT.
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If you want to spec and gear just for tanking the murlocs on Tidewalker, well, there you go. Also, healing threat is divided between all mobs in range, not given to each of them, so your 2k heal on 5 mobs ends up with about 200 threat on each.
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Nottebella - 70 - Argent Dawn

If you're going to do this, just spec standard pvp healing. I can grind 10-15 lvl 70 trash mobs doing this just fine with imp consentration aura and spamming greater heals on myself. The mobs die a lot faster too b/c heal gear gives 1/3 to spell damage now. Consecrate is most of your aoe damage anyway.
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First of all, as has been mentioned by others you're not going to get much threat from the heals. That said, if you go with something like the Baelor Special you'll be able to heal reasonably well while you tank. I used a similar spec in my early 60's (13/41+) and I could tank and heal in old world instances. Nothing even remotely interesting and I think everything we fought was gray but it's content my guild couldn't have done otherwise since I was the only tank AND the only healer.
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Imba - Armory

I heard something about Consecration having a heal effect in the new patch notes...
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