It is possible to level as resto?

[HotJoint]

It will be possible to level up as resto in Legion? If so, how much more will take as if i level as dps?

Thanx guys

[ItsTiddles]

It is possible, you'll probably be about an hour behind if you level as resto though. If you level at launch, you wont have to kill a lot by yourself because of the multi-tagging stuff. DPS will always be faster, but healers aren't as far behind as they use to be.

[HotJoint]

It is possible, you'll probably be about an hour behind if you level as resto though. If you level at launch, you wont have to kill a lot by yourself because of the multi-tagging stuff. DPS will always be faster, but healers aren't as far behind as they use to be.

I see. Thanx a lot, i think i will just go with resto all the way to 110

[MyLifeIsRandom]

While possible, it is much faster and subjectively more fun to level as DPS. You can easily get away with most of the same trinkets for say, Elemental. Seems neck and ring items are just +STA with secondary stats, at least that I've seen so far. Just go Elemental and get that artifact first. Level up to 102 and save all items you can use to give artifact power, and use them instead on your main spec artifact. You can get your questing done with just a baseline DPS artifact slotted with some decent +ilvl relics and give all the power and best relics to your main spec artifact. Trust me, it much better to go that way than to level as a Healer.

[Aggrophobic]

It's possible but why would you?
There is no point in it unless you want the quests to take longer I guess.

[XDurionX]

It's possible but why would you?
There is no point in it unless you want the quests to take longer I guess.

Is it possible to get the resto artifact and then level as dps? Or are you forced into the dps artifact?

[Aggrophobic]

Is it possible to get the resto artifact and then level as dps? Or are you forced into the dps artifact?

You can get every artifact at lvl 102. It takes an hour or so to get there.
You get all your artifact power as a small item that you can use on the weapon you want to level up so you can play as a DPS and still level up your healing artifact.

The only thing that really matters when you level are the relics that increases your weapons item level but you can just switch to healer for the last few quests to get these spec specific relics or get them from Suramar once you're max level.

Edit: Or you can just switch spec when you see a quest that rewards relics, of course.

[XDurionX]

You can get every artifact at lvl 102. It takes an hour or so to get there.
You get all your artifact power as a small item that you can use on the weapon you want to level up so you can play as a DPS and still level up your healing artifact.

The only thing that really matters when you level are the relics that increases your weapons item level but you can just switch to healer for the last few quests to get these spec specific relics or get them from Suramar once you're max level.

Edit: Or you can just switch spec when you see a quest that rewards relics, of course.

Thank you. So it would suffice to change loot specialization?

[Aggrophobic]

Thank you. So it would suffice to change loot specialization?

I'm not sure it does. You could not do that befor, they might have changed it though.

Can't try it out when I'm at work.

[Imnick]

Lava Surge as Restoration is fun, but you're essentially just playing a less exciting version of the Elemental rotation and might as well just level as that instead, at least once you're level 102 and get the artifact for it (no need to put the points in, just for the item level).
You can change specs any time so it's not like it will be holding you back any.

[Ham on Rye]

I leveled multiple healers in beta. I leveled them as a mix between healing spec the whole way, dps spec the whole way, and even did one as healing spec until about 107ish, and then dps the rest of the way.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I will be leveling as DPS the whole way to 110 (probably Enhancement). There is really no reason not to. Here's the things to keep in mind:

1) There aren't any quests that directly award artifact power anymore. It all comes in consumable form now. So between 100 and 102, just save all the items in your bag or bank and do not use them.

2) Get the dps artifact of your choice at level 100 and level as that spec to 110. Remember that most of your gear will change over between specs anyway. Right now, you'd need rings, trinkets, cloak and neck for both specs, but Legion gear you only need trinkets. Cloaks, Necks and Rings do not have primary stat on them anymore so you can use all of them for any spec.

3) At level 102, do the artifact quest for your healing artifact. Once you do that, you can use all those artifact power tokens that you had been saving up. However, I'd suggest that you can also do the opposite: put all the artifact power you get while leveling into your dps artifact. It will make leveling easier.

You may be thinking "isn't that a waste of artifact power?" It used to be early in beta and back in alpha, but they changed it so that it's actually not bad. Up until Artifact Level 12, each trait goes up in cost until level 13 requires something like 1100 artifact power. Level 14, however, jumps sharply to require something like 6850 Artifact Power. It actually will cost LESS to put another 13 points into a second artifact (the healing one, in this case) than it costs to put the 14th point into the first one.

As a result, once you get your 13 points in the dps artifact (or maybe only 8 or 9, depending on how it feels to you/how fast or slow you're killing things while leveling), then you start putting everything into your healing artifact until it's totally finished. Because of Artifact Knowledge, the first 13 levels you put into your dps artifact actually turn out to be pretty negligble since costs of traits go up into the 5,6,7 digits, and the consumables and rewards give you 4 and 5 digit artifact power rewards. For example, right now on Beta I have a weekly world boss quest that would give me something like 20,000 artifact power as a reward. That 6800 you put into the dps artifact originally really doesn't mean much anymore compared to that. so it's worth it to make leveling and world questing much easier, since you'll have some pop and some good dps traits that will help.

You might also be thinking "If I don't get my healing artifact, and don't put any points into it when I do, won't that make it really, really tough to heal dungeons while leveling?" The answer to that is it doesn't matter, because there is no reason to do dungeons while leveling. The XP you get is really, really bad, and you don't really need the gear since quest rewards gear is just fine. When you finish each zone's main story, you'll then get a dungeon quest for that zone (except maybe Azsuna?), so you can just save them all in your quest log and do them all when you hit 110. That quests does reward you with an iLevel 800 gear piece, but again it's not extremely necessary when leveling and you can just as easily do it at 110 to start on your iLevel boosting in order to get into Heroic Dungeons.

There's one other thing I want to mention. As Resto, I usualyl had to kill only 1, maybe 2 mobs at a time. As Enhancement, however, I could kill 4-5 at a time easily. So you're not just killing things faster, but you're killing more of them faster. This really makes a difference.

Any other questions you might have?

[HotJoint]

Please give this man a beer, a nice women and some stand ovation.

Thanx a lot man!

I leveled multiple healers in beta. I leveled them as a mix between healing spec the whole way, dps spec the whole way, and even did one as healing spec until about 107ish, and then dps the rest of the way.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I will be leveling as DPS the whole way to 110 (probably Enhancement). There is really no reason not to. Here's the things to keep in mind:

1) There aren't any quests that directly award artifact power anymore. It all comes in consumable form now. So between 100 and 102, just save all the items in your bag or bank and do not use them.

2) Get the dps artifact of your choice at level 100 and level as that spec to 110. Remember that most of your gear will change over between specs anyway. Right now, you'd need rings, trinkets, cloak and neck for both specs, but Legion gear you only need trinkets. Cloaks, Necks and Rings do not have primary stat on them anymore so you can use all of them for any spec.

3) At level 102, do the artifact quest for your healing artifact. Once you do that, you can use all those artifact power tokens that you had been saving up. However, I'd suggest that you can also do the opposite: put all the artifact power you get while leveling into your dps artifact. It will make leveling easier.

You may be thinking "isn't that a waste of artifact power?" It used to be early in beta and back in alpha, but they changed it so that it's actually not bad. Up until Artifact Level 12, each trait goes up in cost until level 13 requires something like 1100 artifact power. Level 14, however, jumps sharply to require something like 6850 Artifact Power. It actually will cost LESS to put another 13 points into a second artifact (the healing one, in this case) than it costs to put the 14th point into the first one.

As a result, once you get your 13 points in the dps artifact (or maybe only 8 or 9, depending on how it feels to you/how fast or slow you're killing things while leveling), then you start putting everything into your healing artifact until it's totally finished. Because of Artifact Knowledge, the first 13 levels you put into your dps artifact actually turn out to be pretty negligble since costs of traits go up into the 5,6,7 digits, and the consumables and rewards give you 4 and 5 digit artifact power rewards. For example, right now on Beta I have a weekly world boss quest that would give me something like 20,000 artifact power as a reward. That 6800 you put into the dps artifact originally really doesn't mean much anymore compared to that. so it's worth it to make leveling and world questing much easier, since you'll have some pop and some good dps traits that will help.

You might also be thinking "If I don't get my healing artifact, and don't put any points into it when I do, won't that make it really, really tough to heal dungeons while leveling?" The answer to that is it doesn't matter, because there is no reason to do dungeons while leveling. The XP you get is really, really bad, and you don't really need the gear since quest rewards gear is just fine. When you finish each zone's main story, you'll then get a dungeon quest for that zone (except maybe Azsuna?), so you can just save them all in your quest log and do them all when you hit 110. That quests does reward you with an iLevel 800 gear piece, but again it's not extremely necessary when leveling and you can just as easily do it at 110 to start on your iLevel boosting in order to get into Heroic Dungeons.

There's one other thing I want to mention. As Resto, I usualyl had to kill only 1, maybe 2 mobs at a time. As Enhancement, however, I could kill 4-5 at a time easily. So you're not just killing things faster, but you're killing more of them faster. This really makes a difference.

Any other questions you might have?

[GT4]

There's one other thing I want to mention. As Resto, I usualyl had to kill only 1, maybe 2 mobs at a time. As Enhancement, however, I could kill 4-5 at a time easily. So you're not just killing things faster, but you're killing more of them faster. This really makes a difference.

This will depend a lot on which gear you go into the expansion with. It's been a while since I've leveled on beta but I certainly couldn't consistently pull multiple mobs with DPS specs when starting with the premade gear (680?) in some of the zones. Enemies actually have a significant amount of HP and do significant amounts of damage now.

Overall, the worse your gear, the better heal/tank specs will fare compared to DPS specs because you don't have to deal with sustaining your HP and (in the case of healer) you're not missing the damage bonus from mastery as much.

[Jibjub]

The real question is ... which is more painful:

Leveling as resto, with the intent to heal at 110?

Or leveling as ele/enhance, and then switching to resto at 110 and getting your artifact weapon caught up??

[Gunwolf]

The real question is ... which is more painful:

Leveling as resto, with the intent to heal at 110?

Or leveling as ele/enhance, and then switching to resto at 110 and getting your artifact weapon caught up??

I've heard the best way is to start out with your DPS weapon, then get your Resto artifact at Level 102. You can either use your AP on DPS for the first 2 levels till you get Resto artifact, or save the items and use em when you get Resto artifact. You can get 13 levels for very cheap on artifact weapon which gives you one golden trait, so it should be fairly simple to get that for both DPS and Resto artifacts. I personally would start as DPS, get Resto at 102, and then still put points in DPS until L13 where then I would switch out to just putting points in Resto until I am like L30 or so (this is if you want to MS as Resto). You will level faster as a DPS, and you can always que for dungeons as a healer.... and you should be able to get thru dungeons just fine even if your artifact is not fully leveled. You may want to put like 4pts or so in Resto just for one of the early talents like Tidal Chains or Buffeting Waves since it will really buff your overall heals and make it alot easier. Once you get to 110, you should be getting alot more AP from world quest stuff and research so maximizing your MS artifact or catching up your OS weapon will get easier. For what its worth tho, I have also heard that Resto is one of the better DPS healer specs so if you just want to stick with Resto it won't really slow you down too much.

[Ham on Rye]

The real question is ... which is more painful:

Leveling as resto, with the intent to heal at 110?

Or leveling as ele/enhance, and then switching to resto at 110 and getting your artifact weapon caught up??

Based on my experience, I would say leveling as resto is likely more painful. Also keep in mind, you'll get done leveling at least a couple of hours faster as DPS, and then you go do world quests and/or dungeons and/or Suramar story with that time you saved and you make up that artifact power EASILY, and then some.

- - - Updated - - -

I've heard the best way is to start out with your DPS weapon, then get your Resto artifact at Level 102. You can either use your AP on DPS for the first 2 levels till you get Resto artifact, or save the items and use em when you get Resto artifact. You can get 13 levels for very cheap on artifact weapon which gives you one golden trait, so it should be fairly simple to get that for both DPS and Resto artifacts. I personally would start as DPS, get Resto at 102, and then still put points in DPS until L13 where then I would switch out to just putting points in Resto until I am like L30 or so (this is if you want to MS as Resto). You will level faster as a DPS, and you can always que for dungeons as a healer.... and you should be able to get thru dungeons just fine even if your artifact is not fully leveled. You may want to put like 4pts or so in Resto just for one of the early talents like Tidal Chains or Buffeting Waves since it will really buff your overall heals and make it alot easier. Once you get to 110, you should be getting alot more AP from world quest stuff and research so maximizing your MS artifact or catching up your OS weapon will get easier. For what its worth tho, I have also heard that Resto is one of the better DPS healer specs so if you just want to stick with Resto it won't really slow you down too much.

This is likely what I will be doing, with the one exception that I will not stop putting points into Resto at Trait #30 as you say. It's my main spec so I'll go 13 points into DPS, and then switch and go the full 50something points into Resto until the Artifact is completely complete. Only THEN, will I switch back and finish the DPS artifact (and by that time my Artifact Knowledge will be so high that it will not take very much time at all)

[Munkeechick]

I have also heard that Resto is one of the better DPS healer specs so if you just want to stick with Resto it won't really slow you down too much.

Resto shaman is soul crushingly slow in beta. especially in situations where you can't hit just one mob at a time as you spend a lot of time healing yourself since you take so long to kill anything.

only the exceptionally stubborn healer should consider leveling as resto. there is plenty of max level artifact power and really not very much while leveling. put it all in your dps weapon or just the bare min into your healing weapon if you REALLY want to heal dungeons while leveling, then just catch it up at 110, it takes almost no time to make up what you put into your dps weapon.

[Moxal]

Having leveled two healers to 110 in beta, I will personally be leveling as DPS. I'm not sure I could handle doing it again... :/

[tallulah]

leveling as resto isnt that bad, its just boring. I didint feel i was killing stuff slowly neither!