1. #1

    Holy useless while leveling?

    Is it just me or is there no point in going holy until you get chakra, circle of healing, and maybe even mastery, and even then disc has more to offer...

    Leveling a priest for the first time since end of vanilla/beginning of BC, and was looking forward to leveling through dungeons as a healer as I healed as a holy priest for a good bit of BC before I switched to my shaman (which I have mainly played since then with a little break here and there to play other classes), and I really enjoyed it. So I do some reading up on how they play at 90 and it sounds like I'll really enjoy playing a priest again, and decide to start a fresh priest on alliance side for a little bit of a change. Start leveling, get to 10 and look over the spells each spec gets and see that holy gets nothing but a damaging disorient until level 50 when they get circle of healing, 56 when they finally get chakra and that their heals are no stronger than disc's heals until 80 when they get a hot added to them by mastery. Disc on the other hand starts with penance, gets divine aegis pretty early on,
    rapture pretty much means you never go OOM, atonement lets you basically dps half the instance and most bosses, archangel which further buffs atonement healing, and grace makes disc heals stronger than holy and you get it before holy gets chakra which has it's strengths yes, but for straight healing output seems quite weaker than a spec based around absorbs.

    So can anyone think of a good reason to even bother with holy before level 80 besides the added challenge of being a weaker healer?

  2. #2
    Bloodsail Admiral Frmercury's Avatar
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    Sep 2009
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    You can, it's just that it's such a bad choice next to Disc or Shadow for many reasons.

    Then again you could probably level without choosing a spec or selecting any talents / glyphs, so there's that.

  3. #3
    From my experience with holy, it's extremely gear dependent. I found disc wayyyy easier doing heroics at 90, and up until recently(at 385 ilvl) holy just felt really weak to me. It feels better at my current gear but I would still go disc over holy any day

  4. #4
    I don't quite recall when disc gets Atonement as it has changed a lot, but I believe it was moved from lvl 60 to lvl 20 something.

    In short: Atonement is really awesome, and Holy generally cannot compete with that until the very late game.

    What holy gets is Chakra:Chastise. This makes smites virtually free-of-charge, they are awesome for proccing FDCL, and they do lots more DPS than a discpriest. Unfortunately, this isn't happening until level 56. Until then, Holy is dead last in pretty much anything the game has to offer, amongst pretty much all specs in the game. I suggest healing as shadow since killspeed in dungeons is the only thing that really matters.

    After lvl 56, holy sure beats disc at questing. But so does shadow, making the point rather moot.
    As for levelling dungeons, it's pretty even between the healing specs. Holy does more DPS, but need to stop attacking to you know, actually heal. And at some point, shadow just cannot keep everything up anymore, making Disc AND Holy both useful.

    - Before lvl 56: yes.
    - After lvl 56: no.

  5. #5
    Bloodsail Admiral Frmercury's Avatar
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    Yeah it's funny Atonement says level 60 and is red, yet I still get the ability. It makes LFD go that much faster.

  6. #6
    Yes, indeed, if u play holy will make the rdf go much faster.

  7. #7
    If you're talking about questing then its got to be Shadow all the way!

    I levelled 85-90 as disc when the xpac came out and it was painfully slow compared to the rest of my guild, and thats WITH dungeon spam.

  8. #8
    I leveled another priest to 85 right after 5.0 hit the servers. Since I play my other priests as healer, I wanted to level this priest purely as DD.
    Normally I do not PVP, but leveling as shadow was so easy in my heirlooms I decided to melt some faces in warsong. But I got pwned, by other priests penance.
    So I switched to disc, and I can absolutely confirm that leveling as disc kills mobs faster than leveling as shadow (at least until ~81, then it changes towards shadow). Until about level 70, you have a free kill everytime penance is up, and you can still multidot several targets to pull, and also have a punch with instant holy fire and extremely fast casting smites that never miss (another advantage compared to shadow while leveling).

    But back to topic: Yes, right now there is no advantage in leveling as holy. You are still a "viable" healer, but to be honest also a moonkin or shadow or ele can heal dungeons until, well, I'd say stonecore.

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