Today? Nothing really. Even casters can nuke something in a few casts.
Mages and rogues also both get invis/vanish to get them out of nasty situations if they somehow get over their head.
I’d honestly say priest…shadow is a dot spec so inherently slower to kill, has no cheap ways to escape combat unless you are a NE, and as shadow you don’t have infinite heals. Still doesn’t make it that hard…like maybe a 3 or 4 on a difficulty scale when everything else is a 1 or 2 at most.
Now if we are talking classic and even pre heirlooms…definitely mage or priest.
That’s basically been mage leveling life since the game launched. Only thing that’s changed is how often we drink.
The fire design change that made it so its DPS is only good when combustion is up certainly didn’t help, though. It used to be that if you were good at judging distances and kiting, fire was decent for leveling but in the past 2-3 xpac’s it’s felt very “wet noodle”. If getting rid of combustion meant I could do decent damage all the time, I’d take that trade in a heartbeat.
Priest is pretty funny to level up right now. It’s a minor thing, but I found out that you get Shadowform at level 10 if you pick Shadow. But you keep Smite til level 11. So every time you go to fight something you lose Shadowform cause you have no other spells besides SW:Pain and Mind Blast which has a CD. Lol
I had a couple low level mages I was working on recently. They seem very OP as arcane for single target stuff but by level 30 I’d just switch to frost. I thought it was just me being a frost mage for so long that I was used to it but I really do feel it’s the best spec, still.
My husband walked by and chimed in that frost also has the best survivability of all three.
This. You cannot just stand there and cast spells, the nasties will thump on you, interrupted you and you are frequently toast. It involves a lot of movement and learning to use the tools you have. My first toon (which I still have) was a Troll Mage and I learned that the hard way playing my first expansion, Wrath.
Onnce you get over a certain level it gets a lot easier, though its still difficult coming into Shadowlands as everything hits hard again.
Rogue is the worst, until they have all of combo spenders and spells are capable of giving you more combo points you feel like everything is slow as heck and it makes you weak.
Arcane Explosion is your best friend when leveling a Mage.
I just leveled one to 50 recently in a little over 1-day of played time.
I did quests in WOD Chromie time while queueing for dungeons. I was 50 before I realized it. On boss fights, I just spammed Arcane Blast, nothing else. Mana stones and Evocation kept my mana good until the boss died. On AOE trash pulls, I just spammed Arcane Explosion until Arcane Missiles procced.
Leveling a priest is a pain for me. Shadow is too slow, and the other specs are only good in dungeons imo.
