Leveling your priest: How to.

I'm hoping to make our guild forum a little bit more robust so I figured I'd start with my class forum and branch out from there. This is the first of several priest-related tutorials that I plan to write whenever I'm bored enough to do so. Be on the look out for a thread about talent specs, pvp, healing, dps rotations, gearing up for raids, and other non-sense. My intention is for when new priests join the guild our officers can confidently say, "Oh yea go check out the priest forum and check the priest gearing/healing/dps guide before the raid on Friday"

Intro: So you've decided to level a priest eh? Well good luck with that. You'll have fun leveling on a pvp server I'm sure. No, I'm serious! Priest pvp is only in the toilet right now at level 80. Running around in STV you'll be a force to be contended with what-with the melting of faces and a near impenetrable power word: shield.

This thread will breifly outline the core spells in the priest arsenal, stats to focus on at lower levels, talent specs for leveling, healing/dpsing lowbie instances, and other general advice and info that most seasoned priests take for granted.

Races: There was a time that your race as a priest was up for debate. Humans had thier 10% spirit boost which was amazing for Holy priests, but Drenai had a very strong PvE racial with Hymn of Hope. Dwarves had very good PvP racial abilities with Stone Form and Chastise, but Perception insta-gibbed stealth teams in arena at the same time allowing for some debate there. Night Elves...well...they do flips and look pretty. Ok so Night Elves always made bad priests. Drinking while Shadow Melded was neat and all, but if you SERIOUSLY think that's better than Stone Form you have problems that I can't begin to know how to solve.

But things have changed. The Human spirit boost went from 10% down to 5% and Perception got the heave-ho from too much rogue crying on the forums. Humans picked up Every Man for Himself which does the same thing as a PvP trinket, which would be amazing if it didn't also trigger the 2 minute cooldown on your actualy PvP trinket. Basicly it frees up a trinket slot which is neat and all, but doesn't even begin to hold a candle to Stoneform for PvP. So for PvP, its go Dwarve or go home.

Let me just go into a little bit more detail on just how good Stoneform is for priests and why you should roll dwarve if you ever plan to step into the arena ever ever ever. Priests are the only healer in the game that can't remove poisons. When LK came out, rogue's wound poison was changed so that it is applied in its full effect with only 1 application as opposed to stacking 5 times to acheive the same result. A rogue speced for Deadly Brew can apply crippling, wound, and mind numbing without spending a single global cooldown. Other classes have the ability to mimic these effects, but no class can do all of them at once and no class can do them all that fast. With wound poison on you, you're going to die because your heals don't heal for anything anymore. With crippling poison you will never get out of melee range without a peel from a teammate. With mind numbing poisons you have zero chance of using anything with a cast time. Even a poorly geared rogue wouldn't have too much trouble dropping a priest in far supperior gear once these debuffs are applied. Stoneform is the ONLY way for a priest to remove them. Sucks doesn't it? Even better is that Stoneform not only removes poisons but also makes you IMMUNE to them for 8 seconds. Its pretty nice. Also removes diseases which is fun for Death Knights.

Drenai really got the short-end of the stick in terms of racials when LK came out. They lost Chastise which was a 2 second stun on a cooldown. Any CC for priests is outstanding in PvP. They also lost Hymn of Hope which was an amazing mana-regen tool in PvE. Fortunately, Drenai females are still considered to be pretty hot by a lot of players (I don't see it personally) so there's always that, I guess.

So with Drenai getting left out in the cold with their loss of Hymn of Hope, Humans really stand out as the best priest to raid with. Their spirit boost isn't as good as it used to be, but its still very good. Since it's a % increase, that means that it will only get better and better as you get better gear.

Shadowmeld was changed when LK came out too. While you can no longer drink while invisible, you can save a wipe by melding after the tank dies or something. This is handy I guess, but I would rather just not wipe at all and have 5% extra spirit at the end of the day.

So to reveiw, thats Dwarf for PvP, Human for PvE, and either Drenai or Night Elf for looking cute. Honestly though, if you're going to make a female priest I feel it would be irresponsible of me to not mention how awesome the female dwarf casting animation is if you give them long hair. This game needs more female dwarves anyway.


Talents: A lot of people will tell you the same thing when you ask them how you should level your priest "Dude go shadow! Holy will make you want to rip your hair out it takes forever! Shadow dps is like OMG pewpewpew you'll never run out of mana and you'll one shot every mob with mind blast crits! Woo shadow!"

These people are stupid.

Shadow dps is total garbage until you have Shadow Form at level 40 and its mana regen is just as bad until you get Vampiric Touch at level 50. Spamming Smite and Holy Fire (after you get it at level 20) will do better damage than Mind Flay by a long shot at lower levels. Sure at level 80 Mind Flay is great but that's only because there are about 20 talents that dramaticly increase your shadow damage once you get farther into the tree. The ONE TALENT that shadow has early on that kicks leveling's ass is Spirit Tap.

For those who are uninitiated, Spirit Tap is a tier 1 shadow talent that give you a massive mana regen boost for a few seconds after scoring a killing blow against a mob. It requires 3 talent points to max out. And its in the 1st tier. Obviously you need to be full shadow to utilize this amirite?

For maximum mana regen while leveling I recommend grabbing 3/3 Spirit Tap first and then going into Discipline for 3/3 Meditation which allows 30% of your mana regen to continue while casting. Stack spirit and spell power and marvel at how little you ever need to drink while questing. After that you can spend your points pretty much however you want. Quests and dungeons at low levels are NOT NEARLY hard enough to warrent having a spec dedicated to healing or dps. Anyone that tells you "Sorry you can't heal ZF we need a full Holy priest" is terrible.

That's not to say that Shadow is a bad tree for leveling. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. Shadow is good, but it certainly is not the be-all-end-all for leveling your priest. Especially if you plan to be a healer at max level like I did when I rolled my priest a few years ago.

Personally, if I had to level a priest all over again I'd start with Spirit Tap and Meditation and then make a B-line straight for Surge of Light in the holy tree. Surge of Light gives you a 50% chance to make your next Smite or Flash Heal an instant cast after scoring a critical hit with any holy spell or heal. I used a spec that utilized those talents over anything else while leveling from 60-70 and again from 70-80. If you can manage to get your crit even to 10 or 15% you will blow most mobs up before they can reach you. I finished every pull at full health and regained all the mana I had lost from smiting before the next pull thanks for Spirit Tap. The damage is good enough for 5 mans (did better damage than shadow pre-LK) and you end up with enough points in holy to heal any 5 man too.

While leveling from 70-80 I once had 3rd on damage in a regular Gun'drak run while running as the healer. The warlock I beat on damage was really bad, but it still made me laugh a bit.

Stats to Focus on: In old school WoW (pre level 60) there used to be huge debate over whether casters should stack Spell Power or Intellect for raids (for some stupid reason most gear would have only 1 of those stats in any large quantity). The leason you can learn from this little tid-bit of wow-history is that not having any Spell Power is a legitamate option at low levels. No boss at low levels hits nearly hard enough to warrent a healer thats actually speced for healing, let along one with the gear to throw out some big-fat heal crits.

Unless your leveling build includes Meditation, I recommend just stacking a ton of intellect. More int = more mana = more time between drink breaks = faster leveling and shorter instances.

Spell power is, of course, a wonderful stat to have a lot of. If you want to go dps in intance, this is the stat to have to top meters and show off infront of all your level 35 friends.

If your build DOES include Meditation, obviously, stack spirit and intellect in a bit of a balance. You'll find a little bit of mp5 goes a long long way at these lower gear levels.

Instances: If you're looking to blitz your way to 80 as fast as possible, instances are no where near the fastest way to get there. Maybe run each instance once and do every quest that you can get your hands in them, but don't sit at level 40 for a week because you can't get Whitemane's Chapeou to drop from SM Cath.

If you're more like me and you like to take your time and enjoy yourself while leveling an alt or if you just like being well geared at all stages of the game, then here's some preistly advice for you as you wander into VC for the first time.

Don't be an asshole and insist on DPSing all the time. This is obnoxious. There is no reason why a shadow priest can't heal any 5 man instance at any stage of the game. I heal heroics when I'm shadow. ESPECIALLY now that there is no more +healing or +shadow damage stat in the game, so its not like you won't be able to roll need on gear for your spec.

The same goes for any of the hybrid classes out there. I've seen enhancment shaman and ret palis with 0 peices of caster gear heal arms warrior tanks through every pre-BC instance short of BRD. Anyone that says "I can't heal SFK I'm not speced Resto" is either a tool or just really stuborn.

At the same time, just because you've decided to level with a healer spec does not mean that you can't dps most lowbie instances. Once you get to outland, I wouldn't recommend it anymore though, but before then feel free to tag along as dps to any instance you want.

Professions: There is no more "Must have" profession for priests anymore. During BC if you weren't a tailor you were doing it wrong because Frozen Shadow Weave and Primal Moon Cloth were sersiously THAT GOOD, but right now nothing really stands out as that amazing. Nothing in tailoring is BoP anyway so even if there was a really good crafted peice you wanted you could just buy it off the AH or farm mats and have someone else make it for you. Hell, you could make your priest a leather worker if you wanted to (self only wrist enchants yay) it really wouldn't make that big of a difference.

I leveled alchemy and herbalism when I first made my priest. I dropped herbalism for tailoring to get the Primal Moon Clothh set at 70. Right now I'm considering dropping Alchemy for Engineering because Helicopters are cool. That's about it.

If you want to make money with a profession, just double-up on gathering professions.

Conclusion: That's about all I got on leveling priests. I may at some point edit this if I think of anything I left out. Have fun leveling.

Nice, post, as a person who has never leveled a priest higher than mid 30s, i found it insightful.

Leveling Priests straight up blows... nuff said.

haha i agree...my first character was a priest...haha

I rolled priest first, stopped playing for a bit and when I came back they had revamped talents. Respec'd holy (free spec ftw!) and rocked that shit to 60. Couple of months later they released TBC.

Note, I've been playing since like '05.