I did Shadow last night. It was awful. I’m awful.
Then lo and behold, Wow Insider covered this topic recently, as in why I SHOULD do shadow. Hrm.
Reasons to do Shadow (for me):
- I can run heroics with Team Heal (some of us HAVE to go DPS for this to work)
- I can be DPS in a raid… if we are oversubscribed on healers, and there’s no other healer that outputs better DPS than me, oh right, not gonna happen.
- I can avoid getting roflstomped while doing dailies, but you all know I hate dailies. And I’ve already retasked herb gathering to the cheater druid.
Reasons to NOT do shadow and go disc instead.
- I super-suck at shadow
- Laral is obviously better at shadow and makes my super-suck more obvious
- Apparently Disc is awesomesauce. Not that I’m going to give up HOLY for it.
- I’m going to get the tier gear anyway, and it works for both. You bet I’m lazy about getting MORE vp for a shadow set.
For you healing priests out there, is your second spec a healing spec or shadow? And how do you like it? How does it affect the raid team? How does it affect your ability to do heroics?
I leveled as Disc via the dungeon finder to 80. From 80-85 I went Shadow. My main is an Aff lock so transitioning to Shadow wasn’t _that_ difficult. It has helped tremendously with dailies and farming. I’ve had to use it a few times in heroics because some people (my boyfriend & repgrind) didn’t have a dps spec on their healing toons. I don’t think I could raid as shadow though. The way I view it is if I am on my priest I am there to heal, if they need me to dps I am coming on my warlock.
I think for you since this is your main, ultimately it will come down to the type of flexibility you want. If you want to be able to bring your priest when there are too many healers then definately go shadow. If you want to be able to change your healing style based upon what the raid needs, then definately go Disc.
Yeah… the raid almost never needs disc because we already have 2 disc-ers, and I’m the only lolwell wielder in the guild.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice Zel, practice.
You were not as bad as you thought. I PUG heroics regularly and I can tell you this, I’ve seen worse. Much much worse. Especially since your “shadow set” was not fully tweaked and maxxed out since it’s your neglected off-set. You too can release the DPS beast inside you, you just have to decide that you want to and then practice man, practice.
I feel a hot date with the target dummy coming on…
You are significantly better than me at DPSing! Although I also, inspired by you, went and tweaked my offset gears.
What Furiel said, Zel! You were not at all awful last night, putting up respectable DPS higher than where I expect someone to be when I hit the dreaded “give me a random PUG button”. Obviously, that means you likely want to improve beyond that point, but you cannot expect that you’ll be awesome at shadow since you hardly ever get to run in shadow spec in groups, and you haven’t spent months building a shadow-specific gear set with all the right gems, enchants, and reforges.
I’ll be happy to heal heroics with you as DP, or we can even make you run some T11 in shadow spec for extra practice now that we’re getting more depth on the healer roster.
Up until very recently I ran with 2 Disc specs. One with Atonement and one without. Last week I changed one of those to a shadow spec so I could do dailies. I have yet to do a single daily on my priest, so perhaps that choice was misguided.
Well, to be fair, I don’t think any of the dailies give you spirit gear…
My Priest has a Shadow spec, but I really don’t enjoy it. It’s basically only so I can do Firelands dailies, get in on BH runs if they are full on healers, or do guild runs if someone else was wanting to heal. I’m not terrible at it, but I’m not a huge fan either. I WOULD highly recommend giving Disc a try
though with two Disc-ers in Eff already, I’m not sure it would actually be that useful for you guys.
I definitely have done disc before, for long periods. I was disc/holy until Laral joined and I had no reason to need to swap to disc anymore. I do enjoy disc, especially for healing heroics.
It’s not just a question reserved for priests. I regularly ran with 2 (pve!) healing specs on my druid. One was a standard spec and the other depended on what we were working on … during ICC it was a gimmicky spec for Dreamwalker, and during T11 it was often a trial spec to play with putting a point here or there (and not have to respec if I didn’t like it in the middle of the raid).
I’m super annoyed with the paladin, since it’s the only healing class without a dps caster spec. I have an entirely different set of gear for dailies, and I never bothered with that before even when I kept a dps spec (for dailies or finishing up Loremaster of [xpac]).
I super-suck at boomkin, so I still need a second set on my druid (for feral cat) to dps. However, our guild only has 1 rogue, so I can soak some off-spec gear when we start alt runs.
For a while I ran with a holy off spec. Had a lolwell macro and everything. I do recommend a shadow offspec. Makes dailys easier. But if you dont do them, may not be needed, but those pets and recipes I wants. Also makes it easier to get more people in a group, especially those who may not have a DPS OS.
I’ve been shadow for the past few weeks, doing dailies and such, too. I was asked to work on a discipline spec for certain encounters, as needed and so I took a weekend to farm Heroics and learn how to do it. But once I knew I could do it, I went back to shadow to keep doing my dailies.
Now that I’m getting a bit further into Firelands, I’m able to spot a fight or two where disc may be better for me, so I will be making that my off-spec again.
Hrm… We usually have a disc priest with us (part of the reason I specced shadow, because I was not needed to disc). Would there be a fight, in your opinion, where TWO disc priests would be useful? (I would do a non-smite spec, obviously, because I super-suck at smite.)
I have two holy specs right now, one for PvE and one for PvP. I’ve done dailies in my healing spec and found the Molten Front to be a lot more healer-friendly than previous dailies. (No tag wars on the big elite mobs so you just throw a dot on to get credit and let some dps kill it, lots of friendly NPCs preventing you from getting overwhelmed etc.) Most of the time I team up with my boyfriend on his warlock though, which makes things even easier.
I had a shadow spec for a while early in the expansion when I was doing a lot of solo questing because it made things easier and I wasn’t really doing any PvP at the time. Now that I’m doing rated battlegrounds at least once a week I wouldn’t want to miss my dedicated PvP spec though.
It feels strange to think now that I used to be a pure shadow priest back in BC. The spec just completely lost its appeal to me once they normalised the damage and made replenishment a fire-and-forget buff instead of mana regen being something you had to work for. I do feel a little bad about being so inflexible about my role at times (back in ICC we’d have regular arguments about which healer should go dps on Saurfang because nobody wanted to do it), but we’re never really short on dps these days anyway.
Stay Holy. Been holy for 3 years now. Duel’d Shadow…. hate. Duel’d Disc…. hate. Love me some Holy, period.
Meh
On a previous blog you posted the Arch-Heal spec…. I use it to solo. @ 84 I’m still going, but in 3 months it has all been dungons. So I haven’t had to switch specs in a long time.
My priest is an Alt, hence why I’m laggin so behind.
Suggestion? Spec
I find shadow a bit quicker than disc for running dailies etc. At higher levels Disc/smite falls behind for DPS (though at low levels it’s ridiculously overpowered).