Thinking of leveling my Priest (85)

[Boyiee]

My Priest was going to be my main for MoP, but I decided against it for a better raid comp (RL friends, 10man).

Now that we've all taken a break, and admittedly lost interest in the game, I've been staring at it wanting to level it. There is about 3-4 of us left, and I feel that if I level a healer it will dramatically help our guild search, since we are all primarily DPS. I've been eyeing up Monkey Runs since they're still viable for leveling, and am not sure if I should heal them to 90 as holy or disc. I haven't played a healer since early TBC, since then I've been DPS on a number of classes, I'm thinking a change to a healer will be dramatic enough to re-spark my interest in the game... but I'm not sure what to expect.

Any thoughts on what I can expect out of going from a DPS to a Healer in PVE? I've been 2400 on a few characters in arena's as well, but what will it be like switching to a healer for this? Does anyone have any experience? Most of my friends were healers since vanilla or TBC, and when the chance to swap to DPS arose, they took it and never looked back. Will that happen for me, but in reverse?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[Deleted]

Healing is really a completely different ballgame than dpsing. It has been made significantly easier to get a decent performance compared to earlier expansioons with the addition of a ton of smart heals but I'd still say that the skillcap is way above that of dpsing. You generally have more spells to use as a healer, but the biggest differences are the following: For dpsing you generally have a set rotation/priority, for healing you have no such thing and ideally just aim to use the best spell for the job. For dpsing you generally have one or a few targets to chose from, and the choice is most of the time very obvious, for healing you have to make split second decisions regarding 10 or 25 targets of equal priority. For pvp I'd say that the difference is much smaller, you have to focus even more on and maintain a slightly different position but that's about it.

You having high leveled pvp will probably help you a fair bit, I'd say that the way you use spells in pvp is a lot more similar to pve healing than pve dpsing is.

If you'll enjoy it or not, I have no clue. I generally find it incredibly fun and complex during progression, but for farm content competing on the dps meter is definitely more fun. Overall I still prefer healing though. For pvp I don't really care if I'm healing or dpsing, I feel that there's a bigger difference between a caster and a melee than a caster and a healer here really.

All of the above really assumes an ideal world, proper class design and that you aim to play your class to the fullest though. Right now you can sadly heal quite okay as disc just spamming a 3 button dps rotation, which essentially just turns it into an extremely boring dps spec.