Ohh really? Hmm. there goes my vision of constantly spamming PWS lol. If i'm mainly interested in healing eventually (and leveling for right now of course) makes me wonder if i shouldnt rethink things and go holy. Ill have to think on it some

 

Oh fuck no do not level as Holy.

The thing that burned me off of WoW was trying to level in Cataclysm as a Holy Paladin. I could not die because my weakest heal would heal me to near full, but killing things took forever. You'll want to kill yourself before long if you try to solo level a healer.

 

As a general rule, for leveling you want to go a damage spec, and then switch over to a healing spec or whatever you wanted to really focus on when you get to max level.

It's not a bad idea to level disc, this allows you to heal dungeons as you level (which makes it much easier to find a group than trying to DPS, especially as a priest), and you have enough damage that you won't everything by the time you're done.

 

^

Unless you and your friend are literally going to play 100% together to 60, don't level as holy. Even then it's probably a bad idea. You need to be able to quest and kill shit, and holy is pretty bad at that. You really just don't need the extra sustain that holy gives you until you start healing the endgame dungeons and raids.

You can heal any dungeon pre-50 as shadow with no issues.

 

You can heal dungeons as shadow spec without too much difficulty. Once you hit the 50s or so you will run into issues. PWS is the thing that disc is known for the most throughout the rest of the expansions. You just can't spam them in classic like you can in later dungeons.

No matter what spec you are though, the majority of your damage is going to come from your wand. Always do what you can to upgrade it. If you have free time, look for what quest chains will end with a new wand. I know enchanting gives a decent one you don't need to level very far to reach. Sidenote is don't level enchanting while leveling your character. You will never get your mount.

I haven't played vanilla in a while, but I think mind blasting, throwing a dot on an enemy, and wanding will pretty much give you unlimited uptime.


Read this guide, it will give you a basic rundown. It should tell you what spells you don't need to buy in order to save money.

https://classic.wowhead.com/guides/priest-leveling-classic-wow

 

No you can't. In theory you should be able to heal as shadow, but very, very few people tank as prot with a shield, or tank smartly. You'll constantly be out of mana. Assume all PUGs are awful, and given that assumption, you're just making it harder for yourself if you go in as Shadow to heal, for little benefit.

Disc is the best levelling spec, I'd argue even better than shadow for kill speed and efficiency until you can get shadow form. I personally stayed disc until 55, then did the last 5 as Holy and just chained BRD until 60.

 

I know its super expensive to switch trees? whats it cost exactly though? is it like "you never want to do this" or could you level was one and then switch when you hit 60?

 

You can switch fairly easily. It's a bit pricey to reset your talents eventually, but as long as you do it sparingly, you'll be just fine. The exact pricing breaks down like this:

1) Your first talent reset is 1g
2) Your second talent reset is 5g
3) Every subsequent talent reset is 5g more than the previous (third is 10g, fourth is 15g, etc)
4) The price of a talent reset is capped at 50g
5) Every month, the price is reduced by 5g, to a minimum of 15g

So basically, if you level up disc and then switch to holy at max level, or whatever, you'd spend a grand total of 1 gold on respec'ing. And that's basically nothing; you can make that much in 10 minutes of running laps killing satyrs in Azshara IIRC. It definitely gets pricier the more you do it though, so it's not something you should be doing every day.

 

You can't have possibly played Disc priest and think this, so it has to be speaking from ignorance...

 

Or maybe you could respond to his actual point?

 

I will amend my statement. Level as janky hybrid, then swap to shadow at 40.

 

lmao did he delete the post? We really gotta disable that... Edit it out if you want, but full on delete is dumb.

 

He did. It was immortalised by my quote though.

I found the feature really useful yesterday though... wrote a quick reply and then realised I’d misread the post I’d quoted and was trying to figure out how to make myself not look like an idiot when I found the delete button.

 

Eh, that's what the edit button is for imo.

Good to know that was the full post though, can see why he wanted to delete lol

 

Yes, I had no desire to argue over it.

 

hol the fuck up when the fuck did we start allowing people to delete posts?

 

So any of you guys still playing and keeping track of the game?

And if you are, have you seen the class/spec changes that are proposed in the alpha? What do you guys think about that?

I mean, I play DH for lore and just all around activity, so I'm not generally influenced by most class changes. But even I was hoping they would do away with the GCD bullshit when I switch to my fury warrior...(which sadly doesn't seem to be happening)...

But, having said that, there do seem to be certain basic changes taking place to a lot of classes...
And absolutely no titanforging. With a slew of other changes in the alpha...

So what do you guys think?

 

On the whole, Shadowlands is looking pretty great. They're ditching pretty much all of the bullshit (read: the post-loot nonsense) and focusing back on proper class design, which is great. I main an elemental shaman, and pretty much everything about that in Shadowlands looks fantastic. There's a few things I'd like to see that they haven't mentioned, but even if those never happen, I'm very happy with what has been said.

As for the GCD stuff, I actually like cooldowns being on the GCD in principle, so I've got no philosophical issue with them continuing to maintain that. The problem with it is purely when multiple cooldowns need to be pressed in the same window, because that then means you're spending 2-4 GCDs not attacking, and that's severely disruptive to the flow of gameplay. One GCD for a cooldown is fine, 3+ is not.

Really, what they need to do to fix it is to either a) divide cooldowns into "primary" (read: on GCD) and "secondary" (read: off GCD), and make it so every class only has one or two primary cooldowns, or b) do away with the idea of cooldown-driven burst windows that they've been fellating for years and make sure every class has only one cooldown.

Ultimately, the GCD thing is a class design problem, not a fundamental mechanics problem, and it's eminently solvable. I'm unclear if they will or not, but they can.

 

Surrender to Madness changes might actually be enough to bring me back. One of the most triggering things about being an Spriest is not having burst cooldown, so you feel useless on add fights, or fights with low health enemies.

S2M and PI hopefully changes that.

What covenant y'all looking at. I don't think I'd ever join BlUther's boys (they're so lame). And Maldraxxas... just seems uninspired? I really wish they'd just redesign that whole zone/faction.

Ven'thyr seems the 'coolest,' but I feel like everyone and their edgy goth mums will go there so I might just pick Ardenweild...

If the data-mining 5head deductions seem accurate and we unlock an allied race from each covenant, that'd be cool too. Unfortunately, I think it'll be those ugly looking tree people rather than tiny fae...

 

I'm currently eying the Ven'thyr for my covenant (largely because their generic ability is a blink/leap and that's something I desperately need as an ele shaman [gust of wind back when blizz?]), but I'm not sold on any of them. I'm mostly waiting on the rest of the aesthetics and narrative/lore details to be revealed before I make a final decision.