Leveling problemsFollow

My suggestion would have been to level as shadow - I'm flying through the 30s at the moment. However, you have indicated you don't want to go shadow. Do you mind if I ask why?

If you want to stay holy, I'd start spamming the LFG channel looking for groups for Scarlet Monastery. I know on my server that I could level all the way to 70 without ever doing anything other than healing instances. Yes you will get some bad groups. However, you will get the experience, and some good loot as well. SM is full of good priest gear.

As a healer you can probably do instances 2-3 levels above your level, provided the group knows what it is doing and you don't draw agro.

Anyway, I hope it works out.

I have had the same problem as you, but I respecced deep disc. It worked out fine for me, the playstyle doesnt differ much from holy, and I was still able to heal perfectly and solo-ing wasn't a nightmare anymore, it was actually pretty fun.

I'm going to refer you to my post below:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/class.html?wclass=3;mid=1209562666312129231;num=11;page=1

This was about three weeks ago. I was pretty ticked that nobody supported my idea of going holy all the way up. But I decided to listen to everyone since I'm no expert and I went shadow. It's been a breeze. I can still heal just fine. I've been using a lot of gear that gives bonuses to both healing and damage. Nobody's died on my watch yet and I dinged 41 on Sunday. At the very least give it a try. Respeccing should still be moderately cheap and if you still hate it then go shammy.

Careful though. You might get addicted to the face-melting. :)


By the way, thanks ya'll for that advice. I'm glad I listened. :-*

Edited, May 20th 2008 12:45pm by Trichechus

Leveling as a Shadow Priest is awesome, but at level 60 when you enter Outland and start getting spell damage on your gear, it's downright embarrassingly awesome. It's like I'm an Affliction Warlock with healing capabilities. Once you get Vampiric Touch and Embrace, plus Meditation from the Discipline talent tree, your mana and health pools will never run low, unless you pull more than intended.

I'm up to pulling mobs in packs of three now, because watching my mana pool go from 100% to 90% to 100% on single pulls is plain boring. I slap all my DoTs on three mobs, using Vampiric Embrace whenever it's up, plus Inner Focus and my trinkets, I'm at ~80% health and 50% mana when the first one drops. With some clever focus fire, I can down the second mob just as Spirit Tap from the first one wears off, etc. Meaning I'm back at around 90% mana and 100% health at the end of the fight. Running to the next pack of mobs takes care of the rest.

Edited, May 21st 2008 10:03pm by Mazra

I'm an old Warlock player and it's in my blood to cast as many DoTs as possible while letting the 5-second rule do its thing. Vampiric Touch costs 400 mana, but 5% of all shadow damage done while the debuff is up is returned to you as mana as well.

Vampiric Touch at level 64 with 311 spell damage, Misery (+5%), Shadowform (+15%) and two stacked Shadow Weaving (Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain - 4%), does 1258 damage.

5% of that is 62.9 mana returned.

Shadow Word: Pain at level 64 with the same damage enhancing factors, does 2198 damage.

5% of that is 109.9 mana returned.

After letting the DoTs do their thing (but before Shadow Weaving fades), I almost always finish the fight with Mind Blast followed by Shadow Word: Death. Normally the mob would have more than two Shadow Weavings on the final spell, but I'll roll with two because I'm lazy.

Mind Blast will hit for an average of 958 and crit for an average of 1467 damage.

5% of that is 47.9 or 73.4 mana returned.

Shadow Word: Death will hit for an average of 855 and crit for an average of 1293 damage with all those debuffs on.

5% of that is 42.8 or 64.7 mana returned.

So by casting a spell that costs 400 mana, I get another 1258 damage done and 314.5 health returned through Vampiric Embrace. And since the mana return total is 263.5, the actual cost of Vampiric Touch is only 136.5 mana.

136.5 mana and 1258 damage done gives it a DPM ratio of 9.2. In comparison, Mind Flay, which is the most damage to mana efficient spell we have, has 4.8 with the same debuffs applied.

And you get 314.5 health from it as well, which puts the HPM ratio around 2.3, while Flash Heal at that same level with 350 healing has a ratio of 3.

Holy crap, that's a lot of numbers. I hope I got everything right. Of course, numbers may vary due to resists and crits. Usually either Mind Blast or Death will crit, making the mana and health return even greater. I also use Inner Focus to make Pain or Touch free of charge every 3 minutes. Plus I was lucky and got Auslese's Light Channeler one night. By rotating between Inner Focus and the trinket every 1.5 minut, the mana saved is amazing. Plus I use the Vengeance of the Illidari every few pulls to shorten the fight and increase all values returned through the spells.

If you're wondering how I found my averages and all that jazz, I'm using DrDamage, an addon which puts a lot of useful (and useless) crap in the tooltip when you hover a spell. And it updates directly, so if you hover Mind Blast and the target is affected by Shadow Weaving, the tooltip will update to show the math with those extra 2% added. Very handy.

Edit: teacake, I think I'd get Meditation before Vampiric Touch pre-60, though. Meditation is 30% mana regen during combat. And the lost damage via Vampiric Touch can be made up for by going Wand Specialization. Hehe. Okay, maybe not. But still, at lower levels I found myself wanding a lot while letting Pain and Vampiric Embrace adding to the survivability. Make sure you replace your Psychic Scream on your actionbar with the first rank. While leveling you rarely need to fear more than two targets anyway. Any higher rank is just a waste of mana.

Meh, it's been a while since I was leveling in Azeroth.

Edited, May 22nd 2008 12:49am by Mazra

True, but "OH [NAUGHTYWORD]" Moments still happen. So what I did was make a macro for Psychic Scream:

#showtooltip 
/cast [button:1] Psychic Scream(Rank 1) 
/cast [button:2] Psychic Scream(Rank 5) 

This way, if you left click the button, then you use Rank 1, while right-clicking will give you Rank 4, for those moments when you're running for your life. In addition, if you bind that to a key, the key will use the Rank 1 version. What I do is keep it on my 2 key (I use 3,4,5, and 6 to kast my main spells) and it's just a quick button press away when needed.

/walloftext

Edit: I haz gewd iinglish skellz.

Edited, May 22nd 2008 12:52am by IDrownFish

I noticed that once you hit about 1100 +dmg (which should happen with FSW/Spellstrike/Badge gear, once you eventually get there), mana becomes a non-issue. Between Meditation, Spirit Tap, VT, and Shadowfiend, you can pretty much grind endlessly.

I sit just below 1300dmg, and my typical rotation is VT->Blast->Flay->Death. I can kill a 6.5k health mob before they touch me, Spirit Tap is up 100% of the time, and there's times that I have to wait for SWD to come off cooldown because I'm pulling too fast.

My record is 5 hours of grinding Primal Mana in Kirin'Var village, without a single break for healing or mana, before my wrists started hurting and I was out of good movies to watch :D

I hit level 40 on my priest, got shadowform, levelled to 41 logged off made a rogue. Rogue is now 50, 5-5.5 days played and priest is still 41, any suggestions for getting back into priest? I tried logging on priest just to see if I would stay logged on and level... It didn't work

I found level 40-50 incredibly frustrating. I'd been questing my heart out to get Shadowform and when I finally got it, it was a sort of anticlimactic feeling, because I didn't exactly feel overpowered.

Come to think of it, that feeling lasted most of level 50-60 as well.

You really need Vampiric Touch and Meditation to feel the love. Shadow Word: Death, preferably. It just makes life so much easier as a Shadow Priest. Not to mention stacking spell crit and damage. You get more bang for the same mana cost.

This is pretty much how I leveled and it was near effortless. Yes, PW:S might be inefficient, but I noticed very minimal downtime, if any, and it was fun to melt through things. The wanding at the end of your, erm, "DPS cycle" is key because it gets you out of the 5 second rule allowing the maximum regeneration from Spirit tap. That was how it was explained to me, so I hope I am conveying it correctly. At any rate, I could often see my mana bar filling up while I was still wanding and by the time I looted the body I was at full mana and ready to begin again. Meditation helps with this routine also.

I have a tailoring warlock alt, so I was able to get some nice + damage gear very cheaply for my priest but I second stacking up the spirit. Of The Whale and Of The Owl worked out nicely due to a nice mix of stamina, intellect and spirit. Investing in a good wand for your level is also worthwhile.

When you level shadow, hitting 40 and getting shadowform doesn't automatically make you awesome. In fact, you won't notice much. For spriests, there is no sudden flood of awesomeness.

What we do is slowly build our awesomeness over many levels. A talent here, a cool spell there, and next thing you know, after you Shadow Word: Death that nth mob and come out of the fight with full health and mana, you'll be thinking, "Wow. My shadow priest just oozes awesome."

I hit that point at about 63, if I remember correctly.

Edited, May 30th 2008 1:29am by IDrownFish

Edited, May 31st 2008 4:26am by IDrownFish

Its funny that everyone has completely ignored that you said that you do not want to go shadow and have recomended going shadow. Coming from someone who has leveled a priest from 1-70 as holy/disc beilieve me it can be done. Yes it won't be as fast as shadow but that's not the way you level a holy priest.

As a holy priest you are almost unkillable by single mobs that are your lvl. Here is the trick. First you need 5 points in shadow for spirit tap. there is a reason why people call this one of the best talents in the game. Now since it sounds like you are having a hard time finding instance groups on your server I would start down the disc tree before going down the holy tree. The reason for this is to get Imp. fortitude and Imp power word sheild. Imp power word sheild is the meat and potatoes for leveling a holy/disc priest. With this talent you can holy fire - smite - power word pain - power word sheild - then wand to death. Then you will be back to full health and mana when spirit tap starts to tick.

By wanding at the end you also get into the 5 sec rule faster making spirit tap more efficient.

Yes, leveling a holy/disc priest is much slower than leveling a shadow priest but for those of us that forgo the darkness it is the only option we have. Plus we rock the BG's hard. Turning the tide of battle is what we do best.

Edited, Jun 3rd 2008 7:28pm by VomicatheFaithful

Well, to be fair, I don't think everyone suggested that, but shadow is a good leveling spec. This isn't meant to be a put down of the opening poster, but his/her post is rather nebulous. I think for people looking for advice, it is helpful to be very specific. For example, stating what are the problems? Mana issues, killing issues, trouble with gear or talents? Becoming a better healer? It helps to say these things. I think it is also helpful to link one's armory so people could suggest upgrades or better choices for gear as well as looking at talents. Let's face it, some talents may look good on paper but are kind of crappy in reality. Someone could suggest what talents to drop and which to max out for better efficiency but cannot do that because there is no information to go on.

Also, it would be helpful to know why the OP is against going shadow? Does he think he will not be able to heal as shadow, or is it more of a personal choice; embracing the healing aspect of the class while forgoing damage dealing? If it is the former, then leveling as shadow does not exclude healing...if the latter than I salute you and respect your choice. Still, grab up 5/5 spirit tap, it is too good to forgo for leveling.




Embrace the shadow! *grin* just kidding.