Questions about leveling.Follow

There are two ways to solo efficiently as a priest. Some of these abilities you won't have for a bit.

1. Level shadow. Your first 3 points go into spirit tap. Stack spirit on your gear. Pull with a DoT from max range, mind flay the mob to you, mind blast if you need to, wand or shadow word:death the last bit of the mob's health.

2. Level smite. Go holy up to searing light, and after that straight up either the disc or holy trees. Disc tends to be more mana efficient and with meditation you'll have very little downtime. Shield yourself, smite the mob. When you get holy fire, open with that.

Certainly you can queue for dungeons, but there's no reason you should have to level primarily that way. Priest leveling offers quite a bit of survivability and very little down time.

Some of this will change in a week or two, when the patch hits. Then you have to pick on tree and stick with it for a long time while leveling. But either shadow or smite leveling will still work peachy. Both the holy and disc trees will have smite talents to make soloing easy for whichever you choose.

In 4.0, there is no spirit tap T_T.

(but for now, yes, you want it.)

The answers above are right for the next week. Then everything could be horribly wrong.

Except get a good wand. A good wand is always helpful.

I reckon you're either exaggerating or haven't learned the newest rank of Smite. At no point in time should you need to cast Smite so often to kill a similar-level mob that you literally empty your mana pool. On the other hand, Smite is a rather inefficient spell until you get a bunch of talent points into it - you'll want to use a DOT and Mind Blast at the lower levels.

I recommend playing with your rotation a bit. I'd get a nice crafted wand from an enchanter at your level. Off the top of my head, I'd try something like SW:Pain, PW: Shield, Mind Blast, Smite, Wand till Dead. By adding a wand to the end of your rotation, you conserve some of that mana you are burning by endlessly spamming smite.

With no spirit tap or other talents to boost your mana regen, you are going to drink, a lot. I actually put away my holy priest for about a year when he was in his teens. I'm very glad I came back and stuck it out.

It's going to get exciting in a little bit as we explore the new talent trees in the next few weeks. Hang in there. It gets better. Just carry plenty of water and don't worry about it. I've always used addons like Reagent Counter to automatically buy my drink when visiting the vendor. I still use them today.

Edited, Oct 3rd 2010 12:43am by dadanox

Anything with an animation where fire shoots out of the target's head is, by definition, awesome.

Yes, you are right. It certainly makes sense to get your long cast time out of the way before agroing the mob. I didn't give it enough thought.

I'm a healer, not a dps'er. My mage is my banker, and I do remember using an opener as you stated, but that was a very long time ago.... Thank you for the good advice.

Edited, Oct 3rd 2010 9:12pm by dadanox

A few things:

I've leveled a Mage, Paladin, Druid, and DK (In that order) and each of them was their own experience. Coming from the mage world, I was very surprised to see the durability of the cloth wearing priest. At lower levels - prior to getting some of the self healing stuff - this isn't purely true, but generally speaking, priests don't play like other cloth wearing classes. Also as a mage/paly guy, I'm very used to the "AOE Grinding" and as a priest - you have essentially zero AOE abilities, but when you get into about your 60s, you can actually Dot-Up multiple mobs, shielding youself and allowing them to hit you (in cloth!) while they slowly die. It's not like my Paly pulling 10+ level 80 (Reg) mobs and grinding them down... But at 3-4 mobs - taken at the right time/place.... You can do it...

Here's what you want to do:

Stack the hell out of spirit and INT. The first tier of the Shadow spec has an ability that increases your spirit upon killing a mob. So - your goal is to DoT, Smite, Mind Blast, or Mind Flay things to hurt them, but then, stop casting and wand them to death. You'll basically do this until you hit outlands. In your 40s (I think) you'll get Shadow Form - which will help, but that's really the leveling experience of a priest. "DoT, DoT, CAST, wand........." *I am actually surprised that Blizzard has made it this way/allows it to continue.... It's really the most boring leveling I have experienced. Mage sucked too - so perhaps it's just the life of a caster to be mana whores.... Paly was incredibly fun and Cat-form druid was cool. But priest is just "DoT DoT Cast (Conserve mana) Wand to death.

Even now - at 71, my rotation is pretty simply - Vamperic Touch, SW:P, Mind Blast, Dev. Plague - Then want till dead - Or, if I want to restart my mana regen I recast Mind Blast (You'll learn all this in time - At higher levels you get a spell called Vamperic Touch which will give you a 15 second buff to regan mana upon casting Mind Blast) I can go about 10 fights without having a drink.

Also - remember - as much a people want to tell you what they did and how great their classes are - Most people only spent a few hours of Real Life time at those levels. They quickly forget about the lack of spells/skills at that point. (For example - you don't get SW:Death until something in the 60s I think - and the spell is generally not that helpful - Even then) So - having said that - Leveling sucks. No one likes it. You're best Time per level experience will be by grinding out quests you have already done and which you quasi remember. The only thing you need to do - is do it.