Smart Priest Levelling

It's like theorycrafting, only for lower levels!

It doesn't currently look like we're bathing in priests. However, both of the 2 priests I encountered online (no names mentioned) were using suboptimal specs for levelling. Reason? Stereotypes.

I'm not a fan of typing the same and same things many times all over again, so I'll only say this:

- If you are levelling a Priest and want the fastest and smoothest experience, you can read my guide at the Wowhead forums: http://www.wowhead.com/?forums&topic=101234 .

I'll update it for 3.3 today, to reflect the new possibilities provided with the Dungeon Finder. The other aspects of priestly gameplay were largely left untouched.

While I have only an l19 priest I found your guide quite helpful. Shame on me, but it's the first time I heard that one can have two discerning eye of the beasts.

However I disagree with one thing: the lack of improved renew on lower levels. You wrote that on low levels wands are overpowered. So why bother casting or shielding. Pull with SW:P, and wand them down, using renew if your HP is below 90%.

It is your right to disagree.

But as for me, I can't see a single case where your technique would be optimal.
1) If you have mana, then doing what you suggest basically means you choose to NOT use your mana AND consciously use a really goddamn slow way to damage the mob (SW:P is inefficient - it becomes mana efficient only when you pick up the higher-tier Shadow talents AND when the mob lives long enough, and it never becomes time-efficient on single mob pulls. You can do the maths yourself).
2) If you are already nearly OOM and have mana for only one spell, then I concede that, in most cases, the best spell would be Renew which could let you survive the mob's attacks while wanding it down. But that means one of two things: a) you went OOM in the process of a fight so the mob is already low, or b) you are stupid enough to pull a fresh mob when you're OOM.

TL;DR: Don't use SW:P on normal mobs during low levels.
Can you do it? - Yes. - Is it efficient? - Methinks not.

Oops, forgot to mention the core thing: I pull 2-3 mobs at the same time. All of them gets SW:P, glyphed, talented renew keeps me up and I wand the nastiest down.

However my point is not the damage. I wanted to say that renew is much better than shielding in terms of HpM, so I kept shield for emergency. Just let the monster hit me, outhealed him and damaged him down. The means of damage at this point is irrelevant.

Ah, so you're doing what higher-level Shadow priests do. I did that in Northrend, when I bought dualspec and decided to learn proper shadow priesting.

At the lower levels, fun as it is, it's still slower than nuking the hell out of single mobs. On the higher levels, you have multiple DOTs and far better survivability & mana regen. As for now, chainpulling is more efficient because you get your Spirit Tap proc as soon as you kill your first mob. Then, you get insane regen, and just strive to maximize Spirit Tap uptime on you by killing more mobs.

I think an important factor is that your priest is still level 19. C'mon, get that one more level and feel da powah of inscription-powered moron-smiting!

P.S. Ah, I saw the update you wrote while I was writing my reply. On pure HpM, renew does beat PW:S. But PW:S comes with a big DPS increase while casting, due to removal of pushback.

Another issue to consider when not using PW:S, especially when fighting multiple mobs is Inner Fire. Having to recast it all the time can add up, and fighting several mobs without it while wearing your bathrobe can be painful.

Tal wrote:Another issue to consider when not using PW:S, especially when fighting multiple mobs is Inner Fire. Having to recast it all the time can add up, and fighting several mobs without it while wearing your bathrobe can be painful.

PW:S also has the benefit of 'never' being an overheal, the mobs will usually knock if off before the fight is over.. with Renew, you either pre-cast it and lose a tick at full health, or cast it too late and end up with ticks after the fight is over. If you manage to get it to tick just right, you wasted a GCD during the fight that could have been used to cast another damage spell . I prefer to cast PW:S, SW:P to start it out. When they get next to you ,psychic scream is worth using .

From my experiance at leveling priests the easiest route until you reach a high level is to use a smite build including 3 points in spirit tap, once you have the spirit tap points in you can work your way up the smite talents such as Holy Specialisation, Divine Fury and Searing Light.

If you intend to mostly solo then it is definately worth putting points into defensive talents as filler material; Soul Warding is perfect to help against caster mobs and Blessed Recovery will help against melee.

Against normal mobs you can completely ignore using SW:P as they will go down too fast for it, in full heirloom gear I can take mobs down in 3 smites quite easily, against elites or groups it will be a good idea to pre-shield and use both DoTs as it will be hard to zerg them as a priest, groups in preticular can have DoTs put on the targets you intend to leave until last.

A Good rotation for leveling is to open with holy fire (lvl 20 spell) and then smite them down the glyph of smite actively encourages you to use such a rotation and can make a sizeable damage buff.

It's usualy a good idea to bring something to drink with you while leveling as even with spirit tap you will find yourself running low at times especialy against groups and elites, it will also help you to have some avaliable for dungeon running.

At level 50 you can start thinking of switching to shadow for an easier time leveling, Vampiric touch is a powerful DoT to have and replinishment should help to counter the higher costs of using SW:P more regularly.
Devouring Plague is very expensive and should still only be used on elites but the other shadow spells can be used more liberally.

The biggest differance when changeing to shadow is the problem of healing dropping shadow form, putting it simply if your needing to drop shadow form to heal then you've pulled more then you can handle Vampiric Embrace and PW:S should be enouth to cover you against everything except perticularly tough elites.

The final piece of advice i can give to new priests is to not be put off by the low levels of the priest class as they get easier to level progressively.