You are talking about using a tripod to do panos with a moderately heavy camera body. What lens are you planning to use?
I highly recommend the Really Right Stuff Pano equipment. I use it extensively. For lightweight applications, I use the Nodal Ninja. It is excellent for a digicam or light DSLR setup.
When I first got started, I used what would be called a cylindrical setup mounted on top of a ballhead. It consisted of a RRS panning clamp and a nodal slide with clamp for the 'L' bracket on the camera. This works well as long as you want to shoot level with the horizon. There are everyday scenarios that DON'T work with this setup. The most common would be standing at the edge of a cliff or overlook and trying to take a panoramic looking down. You would think that you could simply tilt the ballhead downward and use your cylindrical setup. NOPE. If you do that, your images will be arranged in an arc, like the shape of a rainbow. It will be nearly impossible to get a decent, wide stitch out of it.
For this reason, I always take a spherical setup. Really Right Stuff has an excellent one that allows you to make multi-row mosaic panoramas as well as upward or downward looking single-row panoramas. The Nodal Ninja is also a spherical setup, but I wouldn't recommend it with a 5D and most lenses.
I consider the ability to do panoramics/mosaics like having another lens. The widest lens I carry is a 24-70, but with panormaics on a calibrated head, I can take any wide angle I want with minimal distortion. To do this, I need the calibrated spherical head. If you are content to take occasional panoramics out in the distance, level, towards the horizon, your equipment needs can become very modest. Then, I would recommend a panning clamp, bubble level, and 'L' bracket. I would even dispense with the nodal slide. As a matter of fact, if you are willing to mess around with your tripod legs to get the tripod level, then you can even use the yaw rotational control on your ballhead to pan the camera around, but you need to make sure that your ballhead has separate tightening knobs for rotation and the ballhead itself. This approach would be the closest thing to handheld but on a tripod.