Vanilla question

[enterthemind]

if you weren't an idiot, you specced into dps and brought a bunch of healing gear (intellect for extra mana) for dungeons. Spriest was a very good leveling spec if you kept an up to date wand and understood the concept of pacing (pacing no longer exists due to OP self heals and never running out of mana).

You only respected at 60 or maybe 56 if you wanted to farm BRD for a few levels. Nobody expected anyone to be the proper spec before lvl 60.

This, you just spec shadow/wand and you use healing gear for dungeons.

[Muxtar]

Back in 2006 I lvled as dps geared warrior, while building talent tree as prot (which was my main spec), and having some prot gear in bags in order to tank dungeons. Starting from 45+ levels it became slower, but still doable. God, how awful and long were those Maraudon (green entrance) and full BRD runs...

[Bodom]

I just healed the odd dungeon as shadow. Not as reliable as healing in the right specc but it worked.

[Deleted]

Unless you were a disc priest, which was better than Shadow priest when it comes to leveling, it would take you really long to level up as a healer, most of the healing items only had spirit so you wouldn't deal much damages

You either had to chose a damaging spec or play with someone else

[MagicMert]

Most played as DPS till max or at least the very late levels, Played a druid on a blizzlike private server recently and as long as I had int gear on me there was no dungeon pre level 55 that I could not heal through despite all my points being in feral. There was also a quite strong disc priest smite / wand spec IIRC that was very popular and could almost keep up to shadow priests in damage until they started getting shadow damage gear.

God, how awful and long were those Maraudon (green entrance) and full BRD runs...

You mean how great! I loved having a gearing process that lasted longer than a single day. Really let you take in the game and community.

Edit: Oh I also leveled as a full holy paladin but tanked rather than healed since many good tanking skills were in holy it also allowed me to complete dungeons with less than stellar healers which was always a plus back then.

[Kazgrel]

Thankfully when I leveled shaman in vanilla, I went resto because I had a group of friends who were also leveling along with me.

I still have PTSD whenever I recall having leveled paladin back then. Ugh...

I never got priest to 60 back then, but I do recall how "easy" it was to level starting as disc for wand spec + improved PW:S (at least I think it was there at that time).

Never played druid beyond starting areas back then.

[RobertMugabe]

Since I played the game from TBC to CATA on private servers (shame on me, I know, but it was hard to convince my parents that paying for a game is ok) I never really experienced true low level experience of that time. When I leveled my first char I did only quests and later on with my alts it was queueable.
So I was wondering, before LFG and dual spec, how did one person leveled as a healer? Did he killed mobs and did quest as healer or did he respec at the talent guy every time he was needed for a dungeon?

For example as a druid it was just fine leveling feral and still do healing in dungeons. This was beacuse almost all healing abbilities were available without giving any Points in a spec.

Paladins would've lvl as Holy anways till at least lvl40, beacuse it gave them Consecration.

- - - Updated - - -

IMHO the biggest issue about healing in vanilla while lvling was to be able to afford the dps AND the healing abbilities.

[DStrukt]

I levelled as a shadowpriest

[Muxtar]

You mean how great! I loved having a gearing process that lasted longer than a single day. Really let you take in the game and community.

You really think full BRD/Mara runs were fun? My god, they were awful and veeery long. I remember spending like 6hrs in a single BRD run because people left all the time and someone has to go back to the city and /3 LF1M BRD @ Lyceum for 30-40 min. Then we came back and respawned trash was already there, so we cleared whole thing again... It was really long and awful.
I only liked Stratholme runs, because of the atmosphere and crusader orbs that might drop there. And Stratholme was much shorther than BRD.

[Extrakt]

I still think the change from +healing and + damage to Spell Power was the best change ever.
For as I was a poor resto druid and I did not have enough gold for respecs. Doing the dailies were such a pain in the arse.

[Guy4123]

Paladin didn't start to get really bad once you hit the mid 40's. 1-20 isn't to bad for pretty much any class. At 20 you get your paladin hammer quest which was an absurdly good weapon that you'd keep until about 30. Even as holy that hammer would beat mobs to death in short order (especially if you leveled really early and they hadn't fixed Seal of the Crusader yet).

50 is when even with a good weapon it takes forever to kill mobs. Once you get to this point you were better off just not logging in for a few days to get your rested xp up or level an alt until you've got a full rested bar.

[Vaelorian]

As a Holy Paladin? Put +Spell Damage gear on and Holy Shock things to death. I miss Shockadin, there were fights in Kara/Mag/GL where I'd DPS as it over healing. :/
But yeah, it was slow going. Even pairing with a Retadin it was still slow; everything was slow compared to my mage who could AoE grind.

No one leveled as a holy paladin mate in Vanilla. Everyone played somekind of hybrid. ( Link )

I remember a different kind of tree tho with Kings on top of the Retribution tree. This is also one of the reasons why everyone specced Retribution even if they were a healer in the raid.
1. holy shock wasn't a healing spell
2. intellect and healingpower was so small of an upgrade to your healingpower... that it didn't matter to spec it or not. What matters was Divine Favor and Illumination. Those talents MADE you a healer. Meanwhile you got deep into Retribution. Making you able to "grind" decently enough and even do some pvp as holy or retribution.
Look at those talents and remember how you played. I am not 100% certain on everything anymore. But I know that

[MagicMert]

You really think full BRD/Mara runs were fun? My god, they were awful and veeery long. I remember spending like 6hrs in a single BRD run because people left all the time and someone has to go back to the city and /3 LF1M BRD @ Lyceum for 30-40 min. Then we came back and respawned trash was already there, so we cleared whole thing again... It was really long and awful.
I only liked Stratholme runs, because of the atmosphere and crusader orbs that might drop there. And Stratholme was much shorther than BRD.

I loved BRD runs. It was like an introduction to raiding its where you really got to know and love / loathe your guild members becasue of its length It had optional bosses and bosses that required very specific items to summon (like the keys) which could drop BiS gear for pre 10 man and crafting mats for the shoulder enchants making it worth getting some guys togther for an evening farming out a ton of keys then heading back into there to claim all that sweet sweet loot or heck we even sold runs in there to people too lazy to pug for their shoulder enchants. I loved how in your first time there you were never going to clear it all you would get lost find little nooks and cranny's containing bosses or quest objectives or just easier ways around the dungeon it was more than just a straight line of bosses.

I really really enjoyed the pre raid content in vanilla becasue it held its own as content and not just something to be blown through without care whilst watching netflix with 4 randoms never saying a word to each other just to get the ilvl to play the raid content. Was it long? Sure but why are we in a rush to push out every piece of content these days I get we have all grown up and have more responsibilities than we did when we were picking the game up at 14 but if the content is fun and rewarding I feel people would not be so bothered about needing to rush to the raiding as quick as possible.

The game currently is TOO fast and it needs to slow down.

[Yad]

I wonder why nobody mentioned the priest + frostmage comp so far beside the one with a tank (unless i skipped it ^^).
This was one of the fastest and most efficient ways of leveling as long as you knew spots with huge amounts of mobs in your level range.
The mage would just pull as much mobs as he could handle with his cc, IB, PW:S, Renew and heal spam to aoe the shit out of them.
Some of these spots where the AB fields, the big SV/HL troll camps, or the PL cauldron fields.
In this case it was almost mandatory to take disc/holy hybrid spec unless you had good healing gear, otherwise each pull would give you mini heart attacks.
This was either due to running oom because your heal was too shit for spamming lower ranks, no threat reduction for heals and pulling aggro, etc....

[Muxtar]

I really really enjoyed the pre raid content in vanilla becasue it held its own as content and not just something to be blown through without care whilst watching netflix with 4 randoms never saying a word to each other just to get the ilvl to play the raid content. Was it long? Sure but why are we in a rush to push out every piece of content these days I get we have all grown up and have more responsibilities than we did when we were picking the game up at 14 but if the content is fun and rewarding I feel people would not be so bothered about needing to rush to the raiding as quick as possible.

The game currently is TOO fast and it needs to slow down.

Totally agree. Still I prefer to hate BRD though Never liked all that volcanoes and fire theme, liked tragedy of Stratholme much much more

[Deleted]

two choices.
1 - Grouping with a DPS or Tank, and then Questing / Dungeoning with them. This was not always possible though as friends would not always be online and finding groups for dungeons back then was a nightmare.
2 - Speccing into a DPS role and questing as you would normally, then at level 60 switching to a healer role for dungeons / raids. This was the more common practice, however you ended up having to collect multiple sets of gears so you could effectively go into the world to do quests, kill stuff.

[Roadblock]

and finding groups for dungeons back then was a nightmare.

Unless for some strange reason you were blacklisted on the realm, finding groups as a healer or tank was super easy.
In fact you had more chances to be bombarded with tells the moment you logged on asking for runs.
The "problem" for most tanks / healers was the exact opposite than finding groups.