In any good experiment you have to have a control group.  For instance, if you are testing a prescription drug you would give one group the real thing, another group a placebo and yet another group nothing so that you have a baseline.

In our quest to give you the very best leveling guide possible we are using the ultimate control toon - the priest.  It is pretty much the standard line that hunters can level solo faster than any other class.  You could make arguments for a lot of other classes and builds, but when it comes to raw killing power and low downtime it’s just really hard to beat a BM hunter for fast leveling.  No wonder almost everyone who has done a leveling guide has used a hunter to do the speed run.

But to make sure that Gavin’s leveling guide is better than anything else you’ve ever seen, we’ve done something different.  Now, I still use a hunter to test routes and do the final speed run for time, but I wanted to make sure that anyone, with any class, could do everything in the guide with relative ease.  That means everything from beginners and nubs to complete pros; from BM hunters to warriors and priests.

Even though we always recommend you run in a party, that’s not always possible, so we wanted to make build our guide so that you can run through from 1-70 no matter if you’re by yourself or have an entire guild full of buddies.  In other words it has to be able to work for anybody in any class.

It would also be hard to argue that priests can have a tough time with leveling solo. They don’t have a whole lot of firepower, are very squishy, have no AOE and can only crowd control undead.  That means that they pretty much have to try to force mobs into 1 on 1 matchups.  A bad pull usually ends up in a bubble, scream and run.

So while I was jamming through on my hunter I wanted to ensure that I didn’t put anything in the guide that anyone would have major problems with.  So I asked our good buddy Lawbringer to bring a priest through the guide segments as I completed them and since we’re almost to 70 I thought it would be good to report some of the interesting tidbits he has uncovered when it comes to leveling solo as a priest.

  1. Toss out everything you think you know about playing a priest when leveling.  Start all over with a clean slate and look at it as though you were playing a mage or lock and not a healer.  Select gear with +Int for a larger mana pool and increased crit rate to help you kill mobs faster.  In other words, kill them before they burn through your bubble.
  2. Dump all of your points into the shadow tree and select a build that you certainly wont find on the wiki or anywhere else for that matter.  Here is Lawbringer’s setup: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxZZEMgtMtRhtEo The 5 points in the discipline tree only come after level 65, until then spend them all in the shadow tree.
  3. By using spirit tap AND blackout, you reduce your downtime and give you a blackout or two in almost every fight.  95% of the time mobs will never burn through you bubble, meaning you get hit very very seldom.  Blackout will proc quite a bit, and spirit tap gives you enough mana regen to make it through about 10 mobs before you have to drink.
  4. When you hit 60, start collecting “of the invoker” gear.  The high intellect, spell damage and critical strike will really speed up your kills.  I know it’s tempting to opt for spirit, but you are killing, not healing.  It sure is nice to have back to back crits of 1700+ from mind blast and shadow word death from all that extra spell damage, crit rate and the shadow power and misery talents. 3,500 Dmg in two seconds is pretty dominating for any class.
  5. Dot, rebubble and then take them out one at a time.  If you get vampiric embrace up you can take an extraordinary number of hits in shadow form and never lose much health.  If you are getting hit so much that you can’t cast, you can always wand something to death if you are waiting on a bubble cooldown.  There are several really nice wands as quest rewards in outlands that make this feasible.
  6. Don’t be afraid to be a little girl.  Psychic scream, bubble and run if you get in a tight spot.  It’s better to get out of the way than take the corpse run.
  7. Don’t forget to hotkey Touch of Weakness.  With the buffs to shadow talents it will often crit for over 250!  When you add in the debuff that reduces the damage they do to you it can be a pretty big help, especially when faced with multiple mele mobs.  Put this skill somewhere as easy as your bubble and make it just as automatic to throw it on again every time it pops.
  8. For heaven’s sake level fishing and cooking.  The extra 23 spell damage from poached bluefish makes a difference you can really notice in every fight.  That’s also why the invoker gear can be a make or break selection when running solo in shadow form.  Invoker gear and bluefish can give you +350 bonus damage before level 65 which aint too bad considering we are only talking about stuff you can grab from the AH and quest rewards - just greens in other words (remember it has to be something you can do solo, so don’t laugh if you’re comparing that to instance drop gear).
  9. When you get shadow fiend, you can take on up to 4 mobs and come out smiling.  The mana return is great, and he can keep several mobs focused on him while you get everyone their very own set of dots.  By the time he expires one or two of them are dead and the others are in bad shape.
  10. If you get in a groove with your fighting and know when to blow your cooldowns, you can fight longer than you would think and make more pulls than you thought possible with a priest without drinking.  You may be giving up mana regen for selecting gear with int instead of spirit, but you can kill so much faster that you’ll never miss it.
  11. It’s pretty fun to be able to nearly keep up with a hunter once you understand the process of playng a shadow priest solo.  And heck, if Lawbringer can run to 70 on his first priest nearly as fast as he did on his hunter, then you can do it too.  Part of that is that we have built the guide so that anyone can follow it.

It can be tempting to start collecting healing gear as soon as you get to outlands.  If your ultimate goal is level 70 and heroic dungeons and raids, then don’t mess with the level 61-68 instances.  Just get to 70 as fast as you can and then go blow through all the ones you missed on the way.  It’s so much faster to hit the level cap and then go raiding than to try to do them both together.  That way, you only have to respec once to holy when you hit 70.  You may even find a guild that actually needs a shadow priest in the rotation for 10-25 man raids.  They come in awfully handy in Kara.

Also keep in mind that in a few months everything in TBC is going to be instantly obsolete anyway.  More than likely those guys who have spent months getting all that purple gear will be replacing much of it with greens from Northrend, so don’t kill yourself getting T5 now.

So don’t be afraid of the super squishy priest when it comes to leveling.  If you’ve always wanted to try one, now you have the basics of how to play one without it taking you a year to hit the top.  Of course, a lot of it has to do with the fact that Gavin’s guide is simply better than anything else the WoW world has seen.  You’ll have to wait a little longer to get your hands on it, but it sure proved that with the right system, even a priest can Dominate at leveling.

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