ravenjm wrote:
You may be able to heal as shadow, which I have done, and it was a cakewalk but I know how to manage mana and make sure the tank doesn't go down. The person who was shadow because it was faster to level isn't going to do as good of a job without a little healing practice. As they say practice make perfect, I am by no means stateing that I am perfect, but if you leveled as healer you are certainly going to be closer to perfect than the person who does it just cause their group needs a healbot and they respec for the run or heal it without a respec.
You seem to have missed my point. Let's go over a few points when it comes to leveling:
1. Shadow is the best specc for soloing. This will increase your leveling speed and reduce downtime.
2. Until Heroics, Shadow is viable for both dps and healing in and outside of instances.
3. Healing pre-Heroics doesn't require a single point in holy/disc. Only a bit of skill.
So, if you do all the instances available to you while leveling as Shadow, you will provide a versatile character that can heal or dps to the group. If you make sure you heal in all the instances while leveling, you will be forced to learn mana efficiency, avoiding overhealing, target priority, spell priority and group management. Hell, I've even had to quickly switch roles with Balance Druids and Elemental Shamans because for some reason or other their DPS isn't cutting it and they have to heal while I pop Shadowform in the middle of encounters. This teaches versatility and improvisation.
Going with a Healing build while leveling will severely reduce your need for mana efficiency, avoiding overheals and so on. Once you get CoH and SoD, you'll find that target priorities are almost non-existent and the consequences for failure almost vanish. This isn't a learning environment at all. Yes, some people may become better healers out of it in the end. But for the most part, this won't teach them anything but leaning on their talent specc instead of their innate skill and core class.
To learn how to do something well, you need to learn to work within limitations and doing things the hard way. Doing it the easy way, well... you don't learn much from it. All you learn is how to lean on 61 Holy/Disc points. Doing it within the limitations... I've said it repeatedly before, even in this post.
Conclusion:
Never specc for healing while leveling unless you are certain you won't enjoy the game otherwise. Because you really don't need it. It's inefficient in comparison to the alternative, and won't really teach you what you need to know in the long run. For best performance, go Shadow until 80, and even then you can stay Shadow until you have to start thinking about Heroics and Raids.