Disc for soloing?Follow

A month or so ago I started a priest. He is now level 20, and the moer I look at it, the better Discipline is sounding to me for soloing.

Now I HAVE in fact read the forums/sticky, and I know that shadow is the best spec for leveling. But to me, aren't talents like wand specialization, imp. PW:S, and others (which I seem to be forgetting now) great for soloing? I know I could still spec full shadow and still pick up these talents, but at a lower level I need to choose where to put my talents differently.

So basically what I'm wondering is: why isn't disc just as viable for soloing as shadow? I don't want to come off as sounding like a noob here. I originally planned to go shadow. But I thought I'd pick up 5 points in wand specialization, and then imp. PW:S was looking good too (this is all after gettig spirit tap, which is a given).

Is the deal that shadow=damage, and disc=survivability? Or am I wrong?

Thanks for any help :)


Also...could someone link a place to download Grid (or is it Grid2 now?) to help with healing? I hear it is a huge help in healing, but I am having trouble finding a place to download it for some strange reason.

Edited, Jun 14th 2008 1:04am by Hralien

I leveled from 1 to 70 as discipline, eventually branching into shadow and holy after getting the enlightenment talent. I did find leveling and soloing to be easy, as discipline adds mana efficiency (reducing or eliminating uptime between fights) and survivability (helps to solo difficult quests, like elites). Also I stacked +spirit like nothing else.

I can't really say from experience what the downtime between fights for leveling shadow is, as by the time I was needed to turn to the darkside I already had a fairly decent gear set, including some t4/5 content drops. But I sometimes see less-geared shadowpriests running around farming mobs, using a decent enough rotation and killing fast enough, but actually having to drink between fights, something I never had to do as holy or disc.

Overall the solo damage difference between discipline and shadow isn't incredibly huge. Most people will put out more damage in groups/raids thanks to synergies and buffs/debuffs and such, but shadow priests in particular rely on having 2 dots constantly ticking and mind blast (and possibly shadow word: death) on cooldown. This is usually overkill on non-elites, even on your own, so the solo dps isn't nearly as high.

Personally, if I ever had to AoE farm mobs for an extended period of time and not have to raid, i'd respec to a disc/shadow hybrid of some strange description and use a good deal of my healing gear. My damage per mob would be less of course, but having a mana regen worth noting and being able to keep myself at full health would be worth it, at least for my play style.

However, as they say: "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."
Shadow ftw imho :P

I have been leveling as disc pretty much all of the time to 70, and I just loved it. I went deep disc with 5/5 spirit tap, and since then all bar keepers in Stormwind and surroundings went bankrupt, because they had lost their best customer.