Which is better provided all the players are really good? for 8 man

1 sorc 1 operative

All of the current HM content can be done with any combination of healing classes, so it's hard to tell which combination is better than another.

 

Personally, I prefer 2 operative healers because then you can have your players spread out (with a sorc healer, you always need to stack to be able to use the AoE heals). For a lot of bosses, it is easier to have the group spread so that only one player has to move when an AoE void appears. For a DPS, any kind of movement immediately takes a hit on his DPS, so you generally want your DPS standing still as much as possible whenever you are hitting enrage on the boss.

 

However, in nightmare mode you sometimes get so much raid damage taken that a sorc healer is the best choice for quickly topping off the whole raid. Also, when you know that a non-tank player will receive a large hit (+30k), you can mitigate part of the damage with the sorc bubble even if that player does not have much HP, while with op healers you need to make sure that the player has 100% hp before the hit and immediately gets two 10k heals afterwards.

 

So to sum it up, it is a really close call, and totally depends on which boss it is and where the strengths/weaknesses of your raid group are. I prefer 2 op healers myself, but 1 sorc 1 op is just as good of a combination.

Edited January 2, 2014 by Jerba

Personally I find that while two operatives are an extremely strong combination, an excellent sorcerer healer is very potent and useful in ways a second operative isn't. For instance, as others have mentioned, fighting NiM Kephess or Titan with 72 gear really makes bubble useful in a way you don't see anymore with 78 gear, since we all have enough health to survive the huge hits on those NiM fights. I'd probably take operative + sorcerer over any other combination at the moment.

2 of any same healing AC, while viable, will always be less ideal than 2 players of equal skill playing different ACs. Our group runs sorc + op and has cleared everything but Hateful. I have also switched out my sorc for my merc and had no trouble.

 

Operative heals are probably the least "penalized" for stacking 2 of the same heal AC because they have no resource issues and are fully mobile. However, you will miss out on an armor buff (resurgence from a sorc, reactive armor from merc) and a way to place ranged AoE heals (revivification, kolto missile).

 

Having different heal classes always complements each other (e.g., healing buff from merc kolto residue). If you are running content at the highest level, I would recommend 2 different healing ACs unless you're dead set on bringing the same.

scoundrel + sage is best combo in my opinion.

 

We have run commando + sage before and had to three heal some fights. Since our commando leveled scoundrel and she is now healing on scoundrel we two heal all fights. She still learns how to best heal so there is even bigger potential there but last boss on DF what she can do in laser phase and fingers+hands phase is much more then she was able to do as a commando and she is very good healer.

 

I am sure double scoundrel is very strong combo. Having your raid 4 stacks of slow release medicine (around 4k heal on average every 3 seconds) is very very strong AoE heal. They can single target heal very well when necessary and only thing they are missing is quick LARGE emergency heal (and good thing they do because if they would have it there would be no point in using any other healer). But as mentioned before, Sage have such a nice tools, very strong AoE and some good single target heals.