I really can’t decide between the two. I like to do quest and rep grind, do dungeons, and a little bit of pvp. I’m not a raider. I know that lock would be the easiest to level, but has a lot of micromanaging. I love the idea of spriest, but am not a good healer if a group needed it. Also, is there a lot of coming in and out of shadow form? Or is it just stay in shadow form unless you are about to die and need to heal? Please give me any pros and cons. Thanks.
If you don’t want to be a healer at all, just roll a warlock. You should be comfortable with all aspects of your class and being a healer is part of being a priest.
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They are both very powerful pvp classes.
The shadow priest like you said could heal, but the warlocks had their own self healing. Both are regarded as very strong 1v1 classes and are constantly ranked near the top of best 1v1 classes.
For simplicity, I’d say shadow priest is a bit easier than a warlock as there are many tools in the warlocks toolbelt. You have many different curses to use depending on the situation and you can really get creative with it. Whereas the shadow priest has a very straight forward playstyle and method of winning.
Let’s look at this scenario:
You are a warlock and you are facing a priest and you have a warrior friend on the priest. What do you do? Do you curse of reckless the priest to drop their armor to allow your warrior to do more damage? Do you curse of tongues to prevent the priest from healing that much? Do you curse of exhaustion to slow their movement? Do you curse of shadows to increase your own damage?
With just one scenario you have four different options for just your debuff. Then you need to think about what pets you want out. Do you want a void walker out for sacrifice? Do you want a fel hunter to deal with casters? Succubus to charm people?
Warlocks offer a lot of options. Whereas a shadow priest you might spam dispel on that opponent priest and then try to kill them with your dot and mindblast and silence them.
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Warlock is faster leveling, but spriest isn’t as bad as some will tell you. It is actually fairly fast.
Ease of play goes to spriest by a good amount. You really don’t have hard decisions to make or have to farm shards.
Plus you melt faces. ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
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Shadowpriest is one of the worst specs for casual play. Not because they’re hard to use, but because they’re good for two things: Being the token SP in the raid and PVP.
They’re not particularly good at farming and if you want to know how desirable they are for dungeons, say “shadowpriest LFG” in chat and listen to the response. That is the true sound of silence. It’s the same silence you’ll hear when saying “boomkin lfg”
I’m terribly bias in my answer, but I say warlock.
Shadow in vanilla was almost insulting easy to play and I’d get too bored and quit if it where my main.
Behind that, I’d point out that actual build diversity is more or less non existent for you as a priest who doesn’t like or want to heal. Warlock meanwhile had no less that 5 entirely different pvp builds that are all viable and good - great power wise. Those builds all play differently, and even within the same build there’s enough room to adapt to an individual, something you don’t really see in shadow priests.
For example, there was a real 14 team on my realm named lifer and ounce, a married couple playing shadow and Warlock. They would routinely play each other’s character even the other was pushing up the rankings… I could never tell which one of them was playing on the priest, but I could always tell when the husband logged into the warlock, because everything the warlock did in combat was different.
Shadow priest goes OOM if they go all out, even in endgear, much faster than warlock. Their main nuke does extra threat, which isn’t a big deal in raids, but can be in dungeons.
Leveling, despite what some say, is painful until around 45. You WILL be auto wanding most mobs from 50% to dead, unless you want to drink after every pull.
You will get asked to heal. You will be expected to off-heal.
I’ve played spriest since wrath into WOD. I have always felt like a sub standard warlock. We need constant attention from other classes to work well. If spriest doesn’t get peels they don’t really stand a chance if they are focused.
you can level both
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Multiboxing!
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Judging by your post, I would recommend Warlock.
Alright, thanks everybody . I will more than likely go warlock then. I appreciate everyone’s input.
yeah good decision.
The out-of-mana issue with shadow makes it frustrating. It also takes them a while to build up damage because they have to stack shadow weaving, and their damage threat is really high. So dungeons aren’t so great. They’re best just using mind control in dungeons IMO otherwise they end up tanking most mobs.