I am well aware that shadow is the DPS spec for the class, I realize that holy and discipline are geared towards healing.
However with that being said, I was playing around with a classic talent calculator and came up with a 31/20/0 build that focuses on holy damage via Smite, Holy Fire and Holy Nova. Would this be sufficient for solo leveling? I’m not expecting to be competitive or viable, just “doable”.
Thanks
While leveling, you’re not going to have 31/20. You’re going to progressively get talent points as you level, so planning it out on what it will look like at 60 isn’t necessarily the best move.
Personally, I think the best leveling approach is 5 points into Shadow (Spirit Tap) and then pour points into Holy. You get relatively little useful from Discipline until deep in the tree (mostly raid/PvP-oriented talents).
The Holy approach will do less damage than Shadow but is more durable. More importantly, your goal should be to solo as little as possible - solo’ing isn’t a very effective way to level. If you go deep Shadow from the get-go, you might be able to solo marginally better but you will heal - and thus group - enormously worse.
So far I’ve had it pretty smooth by putting my first points into Wand spec. And grinding out Tailoring/Enchant. Lesser Wand and then into Greater. Puts out nice damage on a 1.5 GCD and costs no mana. It’s rather nice.
This build?
https://classic.wowhead.com/guides/shadow-priest-dps-talents-builds-classic-wow#smite-and-holy-fire
Strictly speaking, even if you have 0/0/0, it’s still “doable” so play however you want.
Yes that is what I came up with, though the article calls it a joke build. I was hoping that due to no holy resistance in the game it would make it better than just a joke.
There is indeed no Holy resist. There is also no Holy spellpower. This makes Holy completely untenable as a form of dps at 60 (Shadow isn’t actually all that viable compared to actual dps specs either).
Wands and spirit tap are the best things you can get for leveling, after that you can kind of do whatever. Shadow is probably faster for soloing but you may find it worth to pour points into holy or disc if you want to run some dungeons while leveling.
Get a good wand > profit
Yea…always get spirit tap and wand. Rest is really on u. Those 2 alone make priest one of the most efficient killers. Not fast but no ither class can go kill to kill 20 times over without losing under 50 percent mana. And once u know when u can use some extra smites or blasts. U csn kill pretty fast.