Some idea taken from Warhammer Online

Since iam a War Online player i found the concept of the Sigmar Priest or uh whats the Destruction sides counterpart? Kinda intresting and tryed to find a way to add it into wc3.
But till now i failed and maybe i should share these thoughts with some people that could use it and also help me finding a good solution.

First off i try to explain it:

The class is a hybrid, it can heal,buff and do melee and range magic damage.
The Heal spells need "Mana" but the only way to get "Mana" is by using his damage abilities, or an ability that allows him to gain "Mana" by channeling.
Or when hes outside of combat.

So i got 3 concepts by now:

1. The hero got as innate the channel spell that allows him to build mana over time. Then he got several spells, some will damage and build up "mana" and some will heal and take "mana".
Problem with this is ofcourse the amounts of skills an hero can have.

2. This works without the innate. The hero got spells that work in 2 ways.
The one way is the offensive one that builds up "mana". It works by clicking on the enemy unit and damaging it.
On the other hand you can click an ally and buff it or heal it which takes mana. The problem here are severals, the "mana" cost need to be in the tooltip. Then without some triggering you cant have a skill with 2 different cast ranges. Then its only click a unit spell, though it could also work as aoe indicator but that could cause more trouble.
But you probably see what kind of problem this would give.

3. Or something different, you make all abilities autocast and each time you click the autocast (right click) the ability will switch. So you get either the "mana" ability or the the ability to build up "mana".

Well ya hope you understand what i mean because my english isnt the best.

why does your damn nick and those damn suggestions sound so damn familiar to me, can you tell me? :P

Well I definitely like the idea, now the question is, if you want the hero, I guess it would be for an AoS, to be more focussed on damage or on heal.
In the case of heal, I'd actually put in 2 heal/buff spells, that use mana, and 1 damage spell that uses life and gives back mana, and for the ulti, mhh, I guess I'd go with something passive that removes some sideeffects of the other spells, or atleast makes them smaller.
In the case of damage, I'd then go with 2 damage spells and 1 heal(also self) spell, the damage spells using life, giving mana, and the heal spell using mana giving life. Ulti would be the same, I guess.

Oh yeah, with innate I think you mean a spell the hero has from the beginning, which has not to be skilled, like, the 'A'-spell of Greel in AotZ.

Why youre browsing in the forum and why youre not in irc then :P

Ya the innate is the skill you got right off from start.

Well that method is the most simple of all. But the problem here if we take the map type aos its that the hero doesnt have much spells to work with. And he would be forced to take that skill. Not a pretty good idea.

On the other hand the heroes in the map could have all ability from lvl 1 except the ultimate. And they just need to level them.

But no its not just for aos its for all map types in general.