I see that priests have a lot of DPS spells and some talents that increase their damage. How are holy priests when it comes to questing out in the world or 1v1 pvp?
EDIT: I also see that resto druids get insect swarm. Does that ability make them viable to solo content as well?
I’m just trying to choose on a main class and I love healing. So I want to level up as a healer. (I know it’s not the best choice, but it’s what I have always done and I personally enjoy it.)
I picked up all the holy dps spells/talents up until 40. It wasn’t bad per se, but respeccing at 40 to pick up shadow form felt really really good to say the least.
If I leveled a priest again, I’d do it the same way again: holy dps until 40, then shadow til 60.
If you really want to level with a healing spec (no judgement, I’m doing it too), then priest is the way to go. Just make sure that your first 10 talent points go into 5/5 wands and 5/5 spirit tap. Treat your wand the same way warriors treat their weapon. Get the best one you can afford because you’ll be using it pretty much continuously. Shield yourself, pull with smite/holy fire, dot, and then wand it to death. You can pretty much sustain that indefinitely without pausing.
That being said, it’s totally possible to level as a holy paladin or a restro druid. If one of those classes sound interesting to you, go for it. It’ll just be slower at mob grinding than a priest, but “meh”, not really that big of deal unless you’re racing to 60.
Priest is considered strong solo levelers in classic because they have moderate kill times and zero downtime on single pulling mobs. The only caviates are 1. low mobility 2. they rely on wanding (after frontloading spells) in order to be mana efficient, so wand progression will impact leveling efficiency.
putting points into holy or shadow (after 10 core must have talents) are both considered viable. holys dmg is high early on from smitespam and holy fire when talented.
The core talents will be 5/5 wand specialization in disc (+25% wand dmg) and 5/5 spirit tap (buff from killing mob that gives +100% spirit and 50% spirit regen after casts). From there, you can continue down shadow, or go into holy. holy spec while leveling can do higher damage at the cost of more downtime as you will be casting more smites/spells.
The benefit of leveling shadow is you have efficient solo grinding, you can still heal leveling dungeons as shadow, and later on you can do well in pvp with silence, mind flay, mindblast, shadow form. its also very engaging in dungeons to try to weave in dps during low dmg phases and try to proc spirit tap from last hitting mobs with mindblast or wand.
Typically you want to respec shadow at 40 or 45 (shadow form + wand specialization) as the DPS gain from shadowform will trump holy dps at that point. as said before, you can still heal dungeons as shadow from 40-60 (main thing is to healer/spirit gear).
I cant speak much to druids but i think they also level fast via catform and travel form.