Wow, Priest is amazing.Follow

I just started a shot while back, originally as an Undead Warlock, but had to try other classes. I ended up as a Blood Elf Paladin. I liked it, a lot. The ability to crowd control 4-5mobs and win was a lot of fun. The problem was, it got a little stale. There was either no risk, or it was too hard to kill. Very little middle ground.
So after 23 levels, I took a small break and made a BE Priest(BE are sexy, and I love Arcane Torrent!) redid alllllllll the quests my Paladin did. I have to say, it's not as fun the second time. However, Power Word: Shield made the game pretty crazy! I took 1-2 hits of damage per fight max, never used a drink or food or potion all the way to 21! Now I'm 24 and enjoying Holy Fire assaulting things for incredible damage and still taking maybe 1-2 hits per fight.

What brought me to writing this, was at 24, I took on a lvl27 demon warlock with it's shadow pet, as well as a 28 demon"trickster"(no idea on class) and didn't even break half HP... And that's with Power Word:Pain and Devouring Plague have no effect. Simply smashing with Holy Fire and wand shots. Priest is tons of fun PVE :)

My only concern is I know nothing of Disc so have only gone Shadow. Is Shadow survivable in higher levels or will I be stuck respeccing?

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Edited, Oct 20th 2008 7:37am by dadanox

I've been questioning my decision to level Shadow lately. Holy Fire does obscene damage, crits often, and has a TINY mana cost. It's the only spell I use aside Plague and PW:P. Do any of the Shadow spells ever catch up? or does Holy Fire dwindle? or is it really that good?

Holy Fire, meet Mind Flay.

I highly, HIGHLY recommend leveling shadow. I was a spriest from 1-70, and raid as shadow. If you want to, you can easily heal any non-70 instance, especially with the recent change to spellpower. Once you hit 70 (or 80, if the x-pack hits first) you can decide if you want to remain shadow and dps or go holy, or possibly discipline, and heal.

I'm a BElf shadow priest, and even with no rotation, I have no mana issues. I have 5, count 'em, 5, mana abilities without potting. Between Dispersion, Improved Shadowfiend, the buffed Arcane Torrent, Hymn of Hope, and Vampiric Touch, I really can't run out of mana.

I'm not sure how holy dps is. I know Blizz buffed it, especially with the changes to Holy Fire, but I still don't know how it would perform in a raid environment. However, holy mana regeneration, between meditation and Holy Concentration and with oodles of spirit on the gear is just plain obscene.

tl;dr version: Pick whatever tree you want *cough*shadow*cough*, either way, I think priests are in a pretty good position post-3.0.

Depending on what you are planning on doing when you reach level 80 is how I would determine what spec to level as. I leveled my priest holy from level 1-65 and then disc/holy from level 65-70, granted it took a bit longer, but I believe it has made me a much better healer in PVP and PVE, as I have had many compliments on my healing. However, after the recent patch I decided I would give the shadow spec a shot. I have to say I maybe should have tried shadow a bit earlier because then I would have known better what to use as a casting sequence, but I am learning. Shadow is incredibley fun and you can do mass damage but on the other hand I don't notice that at 70 I kill stuff any faster than when I was disc. I like the idea of disc/holy more so than haveing a majority of the points in holy you can still be an excellent healer with disc and quest solo without struggling. If you are planning on being a dpser in groups and raids I would go shadow though most people see you out of shadow form and make you an instant healer, if you like to heal this is great, but if you are determined to dps then shadow is the road I would take.
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I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. D.H. Lawrence

Edited, Oct 30th 2008 9:29am by ravenjm

This. If you can pull off healing with only Twin Disciplines and Meditation to assist you, you'll become an incredible healer when specced properly. You are forced to pay more attention, you have less room for mistakes, you make faster decisions as to what heals to use or who you can afford to save. And you level faster.

I actually dissagree. I lvled as holy, and did dungeons as holy, and now raid and do heroics as holy. Because I was holy the whole time, I learned my spells and the most efficient way to use them. I have raided with a lot of shadow/disc priests gone holy, and I have to say, I beat them all out. They usually just dont compair. While it is useful to have the bonus of having to learn to pay attention, I found as holy, I never had that issue.. I allways payed attention. However, I would not want to switch my holy priest over to shadow at this point, because I dont believe I would know the spells well enough. But, I am currently lvling a shadow priest for another guild ;D

Well i was a priest i levled shadow from 1-60 then went holy at 60 for those harder instances and was able to learn quick enough to beable to start offhealing on raids, then i got enough money to respec shadow for pvp then respec again for my weekend raids....

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.