Actually, when I read the headline of the article I thought it was a slightly different, and more fun, topic.

My buddy played resto/enhance shaman and I played a prot/ret pally tank during all of patch 3.2 (prior to the LFD) and we chain ran heroics just about every night for two months on a LAN setup, sitting in the same room.

At the beginning of every run (we would pug random dps from trade chat), we'd decide whether I was going to tank in prot gear (way over the soft defense cap) with my ret talents and a two hander or if he was going to heal as enhance with his maelstrom procs and earthliving on his offhand. That way we pretty much had 4 dpsers every run, which drops the incoming damage a heck of a lot, so the gimped healing/tanking still worked out really well. We did this in H VH even when we were mostly sporting ilvl 200 gear (it really helps to have a tank and healer in the same room).

He has since abandoned the game, so I haven't tried talking a random healer into having me tank with ret talents, defense equipment, and a twohander yet, but I'm sure it can easily be done.

I was expecting something similar to Jafari. As a resto main/elemental offspec, when I run with friends, I frequently come as "the healer" but just dps elemental and heal people up between fights. I've only done it a handful of times with strangers when we were in one of the original wrath heroics, and the tank was clearly competent and geared enough to run the show under those conditions.

I've never had someone die doing it, and would immediately switch back to resto if I had.