Priest leveling, when to switch to shadow?

[Deleted]

Hello all.

Im playing around with a priest, that is currently level 44. It has all the heirlooms (except the ring). Up until this point i've been leveling it as disc and almost exclusively been running dungeons. 2nd on dmg (after the tank) while also healing, gotta love it.

My question is at what point shadow overtakes disc for questing.

[Fluttershy]

Just levelled as offensive chakra holy. was good up until 88-89, but then again everyone suffers cause of mob's retarded hp scaling at that point.

[Rucati]

Honestly Disc questing isn't that much worse than Shadow. In the time it takes to apply SW:P and VT to mobs you can basically smite them to death anyway.

I'd just stick with Disc and queue for dungeons in while questing, that's what I did mostly on my Priest up to 89. I then did BGs from 89-90, but more instances would have worked as well.

[roflwaffle]

Stay disc, it just makes everything easier

[Pascal]

Literally was disc 1-90. Only a couple offensive spells, but you don't ever die. I tried multiple times to go shadow but the damage really wasn't even better than disc and I couldn't even reliably multidot to kill several mobs at once, like I do with any multidot-able class (which seemed odd since... you know... shadow priest).

[bdew]

Until 85 disc is the way to go, in 85+ it kinda starts falling behind in DPS. When i was leveling i started to feel like my DPS becoming inadequate when soloing around 87 and tried to switch to shadow, but the loss of survivability + spec i have no idea how to play made the experience even worse. Ended up mostly doing monkey runs till the end... took like 10 hours but my brain was bleeding by the end of it :P

[tangers58]

You can stay disc and it will never make much of a difference. Source: Just leveled a disc priest to 90 last month

[Wonderbred]

I went disc up to about 83 then went shadow till 85 in cata. I figured 2 or 3 levels would give me enough time to learn shadow before cap.

[Deleted]

Pretty much what I figured, thx for the input.

[Rangoo]

I've leveled my priest as a disc in 100% time.
I really like to play as a disc.

[Deleted]

These days I'd probably jsut go disc all the way. Like others have said, you'll start noticing that your dps is a little bit on the lower side at level 88-89ish, but up until that point i could literally smite+penance+HF any normal mob to death in 3-4 seconds.
Problem at those levels are that you start falling way behind the gear curve. If you have stuff like the Inscription BoA staff etc you'll probably be fine though.

I also found it a lot easier to deal with rares and elites as disc for some reason btw.

[Volitar]

If you chain pull with Shadow I have to think you would be going much faster than Disc doing 1 mob at a time.

[Celawien]

If you want to take on multiple mobs at a time go shadow. If only doing single mobs stay disc. As shadow I can kill 3,4,5 mobs in the time it takes me to kill 1 or 2 as disc.