When To Make the Switch?Follow

Okay, so I'm merrily leveling up my shadow priest, but I fully intend to switch to some blend of holy/discipline later. My question is, when should this nebulous 'later' be? At 70 after getting something of a healing set? 60ish and healing early Outlands instances? Obviously, there's no one right way of doing things, but I'd like to get some sort of consensus going. My baby priest is only level 36 just yet, so I've a ways to go, but I'd just like to get an idea of what to expect. Is it viable to level primarily grouping post-60 as holy or discipline, or would I be better off just staying with the dark side until 70?

My thanks in advance for your opinions! If this is a stupid question, I apologize; there's reasons I tend to lurk rather than speaking out.

I've been wondering this myself. I like running instances, but am shadow spec for soloing. When does healing instances as a shadow priest become too hard?

I guess I should say, I WANT to be an endgame healer with this character. But it seems that as long as I maintain separate DPS (for soloing) and healing (for instances) gear, I should be able to level as shadow and heal in instances, sounds good to me.

Again, I have to disagree. A Priest whose main decision making is "cast Flash Heal when he needs health fast, cast Greater Heal when he needs a whole lotta health" is basically a gimped Paladin. Paladin healing is simple and effective. Ours is either simple or effective. No one will care how we heal so long as the mobs go down, but unless we're healing at top efficiency, we could be the weak link in a failed run. None of use have every boss in the game on farm, after all; there are fights that challenge all of us to use our abilities to the upmost.

Prayer of Mending goes on the tank, no brains required, sure. You can learn tricks with it like the SWD bounce and saving it for phase changes, but it's so good that it's hard to use it badly.

Renew goes on the tank, no brains required, sure. Except that you don't want it to tick before there's aggro on all the mobs, so that it's generally best to wait to cast it until you see PoM bounce. Not tricky.

Greater Healing downranking and cancel-casting require experience. You have to know how fast your tank's health is likely to drop to know what to queue up, and you have to know how the 5-second rule works to benefit from cancel-casting, and you have to keep an eye out for Holy Concentration procs during those long fights so you can follow it with Inner Focus and get yourself a ton of mana. Cancel-casting is what lets you rely on the power and efficiency of Greater Heal instead of wasting mana on the inefficient, lower heal-per-second Flash Heal.

Speaking of mana--mana potion? Or Shadowfiend? You have to know the fight and you have to know the 5-second rule. When do you pop your trinkets? When should you use your DoTs? When should you let the DPS die?

Prayer of Healing is awesome for AOE damage in 5-mans, but you can't just cast it every time the party takes a hit or you'll be out of mana in no time. You have to know when to cast it and when to rely on your PoM bounces and Renews. If you're specced for Circle of Healing, you have to know when the 5-second rule makes Prayer of Healing a better alternative.

Then there are your panic buttons, Flash Heal and Power Word: Shield. When do you use which? Think fast, because you're needed on dispel duty. Who do you dispel first, or do you need to lay down Mass Dispel? Or maybe you should land a heal on the tank before you start dispelling. Or maybe you're on Shackle duty this fight. Or maybe you're healing with a Mind Controlled mob's spells.

Binding Heal. Such a wonderful spell, if you're fast on the button. Actually quite useful even if you haven't taken damage at phase switches if you have the mana, since it's so low threat. Fade's great too, if you're aware enough to use it before you get aggro and have a plan to get your threat right before it wears off.

None of this is brain surgery, but it's substantially harder than Shadow DPS, where you're basically watching Omen and your mana and following a rotation as well as the mechanics of the fight permit. That's what most DPS is, that and keeping up your CC and your buffs/debuffs. Healing and tanking are both tougher than DPS, though I'd say tanking's marginally harder than healing. And despite the added complications of judgements and totems and forms, Priest healing is more complex than Paladin or Shaman or Druid healing when you're trying your hardest.

Fyi - there is no rotation. It's a matter of juggling 2 DoT's, 2 cooldowns, your own health, the damage the raid takes, your threat, your haste and it's effects on your rotation, and 2-3 mana cooldowns, which is harder than a lot of people think. Just look at the number of parses where a shadow priest actually maintains >90% DoT uptime and still uses Blast/Death on cooldown. The thing about DPS is that you can be sub-par and you don't wipe (well, at least until Brut); the thing about spriest DPS is that it's already expected that you'll be on bottom so it's even easier. Similar can be said about hand-woven 1.5:1 hunter rotations, Mutilate cycles for stubborn rogues, and the Malediction *****.

Getting back to the original question here, I think you have to judge for yourself when healing as shadow becomes too hard. The Outland instances are a step up from the Azeroth ones, and I think for many grouping in PuGs this is the point where it becomes too difficult. Soloing as holy is at times painful, you can do it, but it will be slower, grouping up with others worked well for me! Finding groups to heal while levelling as holy is relatively easy if healers are in demand as they often are, and you can level by mostly doing instances if thats what you'd prefer to do.

I'd agree with those who say that healing as a priest isn't easy, we have so many choices with healing spells and you do learn as you go along until what heal to use when becomes instinctive.