Woot, NorthrendFollow

I'm an alt-o-holic.

My latest is my totally awesome troll priest, and the best thing about northrend so far is good looking gear (that, and practically doubling my stats within 2 hours of questing).

One question, I've been leveling shadow except for a few brief times where I went holy to heal BRD in my 50s. My gear isn't very good (at all), in fact it's pretty bad. I'll be aiming for loremaster of northrend, so that means finishing every quest in each zone, but I'd like to run dungeons along the way too for nicer gear. Now I'd much rather DPS these dungeons, but I've been around the block before and I know at least 75% of these runs I'll be asked to heal, because it will be impossible to find actual healers. Most of the tanks will probably be feral druids in DPS kitty specs, or death knights in +strength/crit plate popping frost presence. It's almost as rare to find a defensively geared + spec'd leveling tank, as it is to find a 73 resto druid.

So assuming the average group is a random death knight tank with little to no defense gear, how painful will it be to heal these dungeons as shadow? I really want to save every penny I earn on the way to 80 for epic flying, cold weather, dual spec and full frostsavage gear right off the bat. Maybe some enchants, gems and hodir rep tokens to go with it as well. Spending 100g to hop back and forth between specs everytime I want to do a Nexus run isn't really in my budget right now.

Remember too, this is a fresh alt who blasted through Outlands with the insane XP it now gives, I came into Northrend at 68, so I have absolutely no epics left over from level 70 unlike my other characters. I don't particularly want to spend any gold on the auction house, so I'd just be jumping in with whatever quest gear I have.


I think I'll try to heal them a little above the recommended level, maybe that will help a bit. Like UK at 71, Nexus at 72-73, Azjol Nerub at 74-75, etc..

Has anyone healed the leveling instances in normal, unenchanted quest gear as a shadow priest?

Well, I guess I am one of the few then since I leveled my DK as a frost tank through Northrend and made gathering of tanking gear my first priority as I went.

This allowed for a Shadow Priest to heal our group in Gundrak, but I am honestly not sure how good that would have worked if I hadn't paid that much attention to tanking spec and gear.

This instance is a breaking point, though. It's the last pre-heroic instance you can reliably find groups for. Everything after that requires you to have a whole lot of patience. Most people apparently prefer to just level through to 80 and immediately jump into heroics to get them badges and epix.

I leveled my priest as Disc through Northrend. This allows for plenty of healing for all the instances along the way, and excellent solo play as long as you make sure to keep Spirit Tap and Reflective Shield.

If you want to dps and level as shadow, your best choice is probably to just focus on your chosen spec and limit your instance trips to those where you're not expected to heal.

I'm leveling a Moonkin (77) right now, and I haven't had any problems yet to get into a dungeon group for quests and achievements - without being healer. It's on a packed server, though, and your mileage might vary there. I don't think I could have done that on the server my priest and DK are on.



Let me give you an example. Like I said above, I tried to keep my tanking gear current, kept stacking defense and stamina as much as I could. Despite all efforts, though, I didn't reach crit-immunity until level 78. The Gargoyle rune didn't appear in game until I was almost 80. I did ALL instances the moment I was high enough in level for the loot.

At level 73 I found myself in Ahn'Kahet (Old Kingdom). I had 15K health, which compared to the other DKs running around at that level seemed HUGE. I took 4 crits during that run, the most memorable one (and the reason why I remember all the details) being from one of the giants right before the Prince: a whopping 5.5K - a third of my health bar.

Now imagine the tank having barely anything but dps gear, eating significantly more crits, and the rest of the group taking damage as well. Could you keep up with that as a shadow priest?

It was difficult enough to keep up with healing with a healing spec at times, I can tell you that much.

Edited, Mar 10th 2009 3:23pm by Kanngarnix

While leveling (and since), I've healed almost every northrend 5-man as Shadow. The only one's I've not healed as Shadow are OK (haven't run it at all), HoS (only a partial run to get to the Elder for the Elder's of Dungeons achievement) and HoL. I've RUN HoL (and healed it, but I respec'd for it). It's not hard. It takes a little better understanding of the tools you do have and what to use, when. You don't have all the extra tricks that a Holy or Disc Priest would bring, but you don't really need them. You don't have the boosts to crits or healing done due to talents.

In my gear (high Heroic/crafted blues/purples, ~1500 SP unbuffed as Shadow), I lose about 200 spellpower when I go from Holy back to Shadow due to the loss of Spiritual Guidance. All it does is make my heals hit for slightly less. I compensate by paying a little closer attention and dropping heals a little earlier than I might be tempted to if I had the extras from Disc/Holy. The only thing I miss while healing as Shadow is the 0.5 reduction to the cast time of Greater Heal. The difference between 3.0 and 2.5 can be deadly, sometimes.