Rolling a Spriest: Am I Making a Mistake?

[baele]

My main is a holy pally and I've grown bored of healing all the time. I want to roll a ranged dps class for a change of pace from my pally, a class that is enjoyable and decent in pvp, both arena and bgs. I decided to start a Spriest, and I have no intention to heal with this character since that is what my holy pally does. I realize Spriests are fairly weak in arena right now but as long as they aren't massively underpowered (a la fire mages or enhancement shamans) I don't mind. My main concern is that the class is fun to play and requires a certain skill level to master (one of the reasons I don't like playing ret pally).

[Juicebox]

I'd roll a mage or a warlock. Since you have no intentions to heal at all with your priest, i see no benefits of actually being a priest. Warlocks have the same playstyle with dots and a main nuke etc.
Mages are a bit more one-button spam in pve but's still nowhere near to what they where in tbc.

[Evil_BunnySanta]

Try rolling a warlock. Pure dps> hybrid wannabe warlock spriests. Warlocks are also much easier to lvl than a shadow priest.

[Xucuroz]

Since you mentioned PvP specifically in your post, i'd say avoid Spriest, as they really aren't in that great shape in my opinion. You'd be much better off with a Mage or Warlock.

[Freyros]

PvE POV:

Shadowpriests have one possible "rotation" that uses almost every offensive spell they've got (well, SW is optional, but it doesn't change a thing). It's hard to master and it's easy to screw up.

Shadowpriests were the buffing class in TBC. Right now they're just another hybrid-DPS spec.

If you do not intend to heal with this char, I'd also recommend a warlock instead of a shadowpriest. Warlocks deal higher damage and are more flexible when it comes to builds and playstyles.

PvP POV:

BGs are enjoyable, however the time you spend drinking is annoying.
In arenas you're always the first target and usually you die too fast to do enough damage.

[Greid]

Shadow priests do take some skill to master, having MB on a cooldown makes the class fun to play in pve when you have to make priority decisions on the go, but other that that, if you really have no intention of healing, then a priest is a waste of your time. If you don't hate healing too much to consider playing a priest, (pally healing is drastically different than priest healing), the multiple healing specs can keep you interested for a while.

PvPing as shadow is a waste of your time as you will spend most of it wondering if you should just pop out of purple form and heal...

[Yarmi]

Make the spriest! They are more fun than warlocks :P ... So you don't want to heal, that fair enough, doesn't mean its pointless rolling a priest. Personally playing as a spriest is much more enjoyable than as a warlock, and I have tried to play one of my friends one before ^ ^

[Pheonixis]

Why would you make a mistake? It's fun to play as a shadow priest :3

[gagglone]

my main is a shadow priest. I used to be holy and hated the thought of doing dps with her, because she's a priest. My guild needed a shadow priest(we had 3 holy priests and a disc priest already), so I said I'd bite the bullet and roll. Well, needless to say its really easy to play(really hard to master) and quite fun to do. I have had my problems with doing the rotation, but they're getting worked out.

You arent making a mistake, its incredibly fun.

[Nezoia]

Nobody should do the mistake of rolling a class for a specific role only today, specially not if the said class is a hybrid.

You want to play PRIEST, not shadow priest, not holy priest, but PRIEST.

If you don't think you'll enjoy the total aspect of priest, it's probably a wrong class for you, and warlock is a better choice.

[Drooid]

I say play whatever you enjoy playing the most.

But.....

If you want to be able to do PvE, BG's, Arena well, then Warlock or Mage is your class, but I think Warlocks edge out Mages in PvE dps, at least on my server.

Shadow Priests do well in PvE as well and BG's but are total garbage in Arena.

If you're just going to PvE and BG then nothing wrong with going shadow priest, I play Shadow Priest and Disc Priest as my specs and find them both fun in PvE, though for arena it's really Disc Priest or bust at this point.

[apostate]

First off - Roll what you feel like you might enjoy.

That being said, I am shelving my shadowpriest for the forseeable future.

My guild is very cool and never made me heal. Still, the lack of attention shadowpriests are getting, in addition to no longer bringing any unique buffs and doing meh dps has pretty much killed my particular desire to play the class. With nothing happening and nothing on the forseeable horizon to change that, I'm pretty much done. That being said, I've played SPriest for 2 expansions so far, so that also contributed to my desire to switch classes.

Since it would be new for you, you may enjoy it. If you like topping the charts, I wouldn't personally roll a spriest.

[Darkeningsky]

i personally would respec the paladin to dps and use the priest to heal. priests from what i noticed are way better healers then paladins, as when i am in a group with one of them i know at minimum 2 wipes are on the way, where as a priest i know i'm gonna stay alive. but if you need a little incentive then here:

shadowpriest vs warrior= warrior wins
shadowpriest vs paladin= paladin wins
shadowpriest vs druid= druid wins
shadowpriest vs mage= mage wins
the list goes on, but out of curtesy, i'll stop with mage
hope i helped
all the best

[syanid]

Re: arena - SP fails there unless played by an exceptional player paired with exceptional teammate. Those are the ones that'd get high rating with almost any class. It's extremely hard

Re: battlegrounds - well, BGs are sometimes filled with idiots, sometimes with smart guys but mostly with idiots and you can use some trickery there, like frostweave nets (tailoring thingy, 3sec root). I quite like it, but I play with PvE gear since everyone go down faster and I die anyway if focused so no point having pvp gear and waiting after every fight to fill up by drinking water.

Re: PvE - as someone said, there's a certain system of dpsing, it's not THAT hard to understand and master but it's really easy to screw up and if you do it you're done for. SP can't do as much damage as a Warlock can, except on certain fights. I'd say it's a rewarding class to play, it's one of those dps classes that die the last due to certain "pvp" buffs that had best reflection on Ulduar PvE.

But if you're in for somewhat easier ride with leveling and more rewarding feeling after finishing the instance called DPS meter - warlock is your best bet.

[Stixxz]

If you want a caster dps, roll lock.

[Funkbucket]

Nothing wrong with a Spriest D:
just make sure befor you raid, get the gear.. if you plan on pvping... dont bother :-\

[Worshaka]

My main is a holy pally and I've grown bored of healing all the time. I want to roll a ranged dps class for a change of pace from my pally, a class that is enjoyable and decent in pvp, both arena and bgs. I decided to start a Spriest, and I have no intention to heal with this character since that is what my holy pally does. I realize Spriests are fairly weak in arena right now but as long as they aren't massively underpowered (a la fire mages or enhancement shamans) I don't mind. My main concern is that the class is fun to play and requires a certain skill level to master (one of the reasons I don't like playing ret pally).

Spriets are massively underpowered for pvp... if that's a concern i'd be rolling something else.

[baele]

On paper they seem pretty powerful. They have an aoe fear on a 23 second cooldown, a mix of dots and hard hitting spells, defensive spells like power word shield, passive healing, silence, dispersion, etc.

Also I want to twink my spriest at 49/59/69/79 etc and do BGs. I never see a Spriest (in fact very few casters) lead the damage charts in BGs. It seems like you can just tab cast dots and do a lot of damage.

[lodoo]

Hint: do RAF on yourself and duobox a priest and a warlock at the same time. You will have plenty of time to decide which suits your play style better.

[Worshaka]

On paper they seem pretty powerful. They have an aoe fear on a 23 second cooldown, a mix of dots and hard hitting spells, defensive spells like power word shield, passive healing, silence, dispersion, etc.

Also I want to twink my spriest at 49/59/69/79 etc and do BGs. I never see a Spriest (in fact very few casters) lead the damage charts in BGs. It seems like you can just tab cast dots and do a lot of damage.

What they seem like on paper isn't what happens in practice. You can take my word for it or you can spend all your time leveling a spriest and finding you get smashed in arena, I don't really mind.

I also want to comment on some of your preconceptions.

1. spriests do not have hard hitting spells, we have lots of small hitting spells, we are damage accumulators. As such, in PvP we don't have the ability to offensive pressure (melee in particular) most classes and as such we totally end up behaving defensively which compounds the problem.

2. We have very poor defensive capabilities, PW:S doesn't absorb nearly enough and is on a 13sec effective CD. Dispersion lasts 6 seconds and silences us making us completely vulnerable. Fear is on a 23sec CD and prone to breaking early quite often. Once a fear is trinketed, dispelled, WotF, CoS, Lichborn, Fear Ward... you can go on and on and on, you have nothing. Psychic horror helps a little but the 2min CD means you can use it very seldom.

3. Passive healing is only powerful over time. In PvP unless you can output full DPS for long periods of time the VE healing is somewhat redundant. VE is also susceptible to Dispel and consdiering you will be acting defensively for most of your PvP encounter you almost can't afford the GCD to put it up let alone actually get some shadow damage on the target.

4. DoTs are very slow forms of dps and one of our dots has a 24sec CD. That means if it gets removed we have no ability to put it back up. It also limits our capactiy to multi-dot. SW:P is a very weak dot with VT being our most powerful DoT. There is very limited protection on those DoTs, people are not scared to dispel VT and the fact that VT has a cast time can make it difficult to cast on a lot of targets.

5. Our number one damage spell MF suffers from poor range and due to the channeling nature of the spells makes it highly vulnerable to interrupts. If you glpyh MF for the extra range you completely destroy the snare effect. You also probably can't afford the MF glpyh if spec'd for PvP, meaning you need to basically put yourself in harms way just to be able to dps.

6. BG's are a poor measure of pvp balance... generally speaking the level of skill in BGs is poor. Anyone with a bit of gear and half a brain is going to top damage meters or healing meters in a BG. Also just doing the most damage in a BG doesn't equate to being powerful in PvP.

Take it from me, spriest representation is low, part of the recent resilence changes was an indirect buff to dots to help get both lock and spriest representation higher. Locks at least have repeatable control and some nifty survivability. We have none of that, if you like to PvP you are going to be pretty annoyed when you hit 80 and find yourself being smashed in 5 seconds + your dispersion time.