Your best gear early on will be dungeon blues which are easy to get, a few tailoring items, the engineering + shadow damage goggles and any + shadow damage greens. The blue pvp set wasn’t too hard to get, and you pretty much only need the two piece set bonus.
Just find a guild with a DKP system that don’t care about min maxing and all that crap. It’s 15 year old content, casual guilds will be clearing content fine.
Shadow gear is almost all blue gear until BWL.
Kazzak legs are bis and you will never get them unless you are in the best guild that has a sentry camping his spawn 24/7 and wake up at a moments notice to kill him at 3am.
The pvp blue set is amazing, it has spell dmg and mp5. The shoulder/boot combo is great because it’s equal to the world boss azuregos bis boots/cabal mantle from bwl.
I was really impressed with some of the AQ 2.5 and even the dungeon set 2. Its gonna be awhile though before that’s even possible
Eye of divinity is not from rag
Pretty sure you don’t use bloodvine in pvp because you don’t need so much +hit in pvp.
Can’t get that until ZG anyway, which is a later patch. Since the materials come from there.
Other than World PvP, is there confirmation on any type of Battlegrounds yet?
I was going on the understanding that PvP had not been fully realised yet for Classic.
Note: Right near the bottom of the Blue Post, they mention PvP.
I have 3 characters from Vanilla that I took to Knight Captain / Legionnaire. (Alliera US, Frostmourne OCE and Aman’thul OCE) It definitely took some regular playing and with each character I ran with a regular group. Aman’thul took less playing due to the server population being smaller.
The bloodvine would only be to help him progress in PVE. Its great damage but no stamina.
Battlegrounds will come with Phase 3. Phase 3 is probably 6+ months out.
Haven’t found the official breakdown on this but it’s everywhere if you google it and go to links that are recent. This is one:
https://www.wowclassiccountdown.com/content_plan_pve_and_pvp/
Honor system and gear are phase 2, AV and WSG are phase 3, AB is phase 4.
mind control raid leader to give you all gear. Just like true shadow priest
The ranked system is a little disappointing in that regard. Then again in vanilla if you had full blues you were pretty good still.
Best way is to stack healing gear and switch specs because Shadow sucks!!!
That’s racist. Shadow Priests can do good too if it wasn’t for the ‘man’ keeping them down. But uhhh yeah you definitely want at least one shadowpriest per raid for ‘shadow weaving’. That boosts your warlock damage.
Oh yeah, I’m not doubting their effectiveness. I just never enjoyed it. Then again most casters suck in WoW, I suppose.
Casters are amazing. They just don’t get a lot of decent gear early game. Once you reach BWL era and warlocks start to get hit capped… they can dish out some pain. Especially when fire mages start stacking crit rating with ignite.
Again, just never really enjoyed it, personally. I guess it’s the fact that you’re generally standing there immobile, watching 3 second cast bars, and then going OOM.
I don’t think I’ll ever get there, because when I think “caster” I want Diablo II Sorceress. Instant cast epic spells and be limited only by the number of frames in your cast animation… which you can reduce with gear. 
Mage is pretty much broken OP from Now until i dunno BFA?
And they don’t oom all that easy in classic.
Spriests will oom in most pve encounters but nobody fks with a spriest in wpvp unless they got buddies with them.+
You will need to raid. Be prepared to be ignored by all warlocks. Try hard is try hard. Best of luck. Be ready to play 8 days a week and 28 hours a day.
cloth works
Honestly friend he might have the best luck gearing up as a healer, or at least power infusion/shadow weaving spec.
The community perception on hybrid classes dpsing isn’t that great and some people will simply not take them because they heard somewhere on the internet that “hybrids can’t dps in classic”
Hoewever if you have a friendly casual guild, or are able to find one they might be a lot more accommodating.
Pre-raid BiS should be more than good enough for him to start out with an go for the blue pvp set when it’s released. As far as I’m aware that set shouldn’t be too unattainable for someone who is focused mostly on PvP.
Just be aware there isn’t much to spriest in raiding in classic. The debuff limit really hurts them, generally speaking you will only be wanding and casting mind blast (often low ranks because of the threat modifier) as both SW:P and Mind Flay both require a debuff slot on the boss.
That being said, it’s not all doom and gloom, spriests are possibly one of the most fun PvP specs in classic to play, so whilst your friend might have a bit of difficulty initially, long term they will be rewarded greatly from the experience.