My warlock alt will love S-priests for all time with that buff to shadow damage.
Wish my Raid had a warlock like that...But nooo... "All Priests are healers. Respec!"
Heh thought it might be a link to a healing guide with a page saying lol jk preists don't shadow in vanillaJoking aside, I am hoping people are more open to the niche specs in Vanilla. I didn't play on private realms so whilst I assume they're tried, they weren't 100% right. By this I mean SP, feral dps, the specs that were really overlooked because they weren't the best at the time and we didn't have the resources we have now to try new things. Simcraft, the forums etc, hell, personal PC's and internet connections are a lot better too, which may make them viable. Kind of relies on people not going "SP was #$%^ in Vanilla, so it's !@#$ in classic, don't change things, reeee".
As for threat goes there are at least some things that can be done by the group overall to help; which is something Warlocks especially can benefit greatly from. Mentioning here primarily because of the shadow weaving buff synergy giving Warlocks higher threat. Alliance obviously have it easier here with Blessing of Salvation . But if you're arranging your groups right Horde side your casters will likely have Tranquil Air Totem placed in your group. Neither of these entirely solve the problem of increased threat but they can help with giving just a little more leeway on threat management. Unfortunately on Horde it pretty much only applies to caster groups thanks to Windfury being needed for melee, though that also helps caster's with threat if a warrior is tanking with the windfury buff since they will be generating extra threat. But since I'm focusing on the priest/lock combo atm that should be fine.
The people claiming that Shadow priests are "viable in raids" are filling you with bull.The only reason you bring a single Shadow Priest to a raid is to maintain the shadow weave debuff to increase shadow damage from the warlocks in the raid.Shadow isn't viable simply because of the 16 debuff slot limit - if you cannot use Shadow word: Pain, your damage is severely gimped. There is no way to spec a priest into not relying on Shadow Word: Pain for dps, and therefor it is way worse than other specs.
Do people not realize that shadow weaving 5/5 is not that far down into the shadow tree? You can pick up shadow weaving without wasting too many talents and still be a viable healer.
