First time priest questions

[mahonisaya]

Hi! I have been playing WoW for a while now and I have recentley decided to create a priest but I realized I don't know much about them. I had a few questions specificly I wanted answers to if you know the answers, please respond below.
What is the big difference(s) between disc and holy?
Is it better to learn as a healer or as a dps?
Can you play PvP and PvE well or should you focus on one (getting geared is no problem I mean spec wise)
Should I wait until WoD to avoid any major class changes or learn the basics now?

Answer what you want and thanks for the input!

[Dracodraco]

Disc uses offensive spells (smite, penance, holy fire) to deal damage and heal at the same time, along with relying much more on absorbs to prevent damage.
Holy is your more "standard" healing spec, that just casts a lot of heals that does a lot of healing to keep people alive.
Learning as either will depend on what you prefer. The easiest I found was levelling as disc, though, as it had both damage and healing.
You can PvP and PvE well as any class, assuming you aren't exactly going for gladiator/cutting edge (as you just started levelling).
If you want to play a priest, don't wait. The basics are unlikely to change.

[SwizzleTweets]

Playing a Priest is easy, all you need to know about spells are described when you hover the mouse over your spells that you learn.
If you want to be a healer, you should play as a healer, you get progressively new spells instead of learning everything at once - when to healing at higher level.

Holy is more chill and thoughtful, Discipline is more casting all the time.

[Dracodraco]

Playing a Priest is easy, all you need to know about spells are described when you hover the mouse over your spells that you learn.
If you want to be a healer, you should play as a healer, you get progressively new spells instead of learning everything at once - when to healing at higher level.

Holy is more chill and thoughtful, Discipline is more casting all the time.

No healer specs are "chill and thoughtful" at max level anymore. If you are not casting something, ANYTHING, 24/7, you are doing it wrong in this day and age. This goes for every healer spec, not just priests, and it's why you often see a lot of "awfull" healers with horribly low output - because they wait for the damage to happen before they start healing.

[SwizzleTweets]

What I should had said was Holy focus on more a tool of variety of spells while Dicisiplin is a lot of quick Smiting, Holy Fire and maintaining mana while using Penance anf Wings effective to gain better healinh plus using other spells from mass toolbox of Priest to save people that Smiting won't do alone.

People say Disc is easy sure but to master it is not. You need and want to use many more spells than people give Disc credit for.

[Deleted]

Something doesn't feel quite right with what you said. I remember reading something the other day concerning Blizz trying to reduce the amount of smart heals already present in the game. That relates to preemptive healing and to be "casting 24/7" as you put it. Managing your mana levels is nice too and despite all the fuss when cata hc's came out it was glorious to have to make decisions while healing instead of spamming 4 skills (at best) without any regard for resource usage.

In regards to the questions put by the OP, I'd say if you want to be a healer at end game then level up as a healer. Specially if you never really had a healer (and a priest in particular). You will learn it skill by skill and when you have all of them available you already know how and when to use them.

As for the spec for leveling I'd suggest Disc as it allows for both dps (to a far lesser extent than shadow, but still better than holy) and healing. This is particularly true if you run alot of dungeons: you will notice that using atonement (to heal while dealing damage) will increase the pace at which mobs die thus making the runs go a bit faster.

[Dracodraco]

Something doesn't feel quite right with what you said. I remember reading something the other day concerning Blizz trying to reduce the amount of smart heals already present in the game. That relates to preemptive healing and to be "casting 24/7" as you put it. Managing your mana levels is nice too and despite all the fuss when cata hc's came out it was glorious to have to make decisions while healing instead of spamming 4 skills (at best) without any regard for resource usage.

In regards to the questions put by the OP, I'd say if you want to be a healer at end game then level up as a healer. Specially if you never really had a healer (and a priest in particular). You will learn it skill by skill and when you have all of them available you already know how and when to use them.

As for the spec for leveling I'd suggest Disc as it allows for both dps (to a far lesser extent than shadow, but still better than holy) and healing. This is particularly true if you run alot of dungeons: you will notice that using atonement (to heal while dealing damage) will increase the pace at which mobs die thus making the runs go a bit faster.

People didn't care for their mana, not even back during the start of cata. If you weren't always casting, you were still doing it wrong. Back then it was just Heal and Nourish (for example) you'd be tunneling into the tanks, rather than more expensive heals as you do now. Since I started playing (mid WOTLK), they haven't been able to make it so that "triage" has ever been so important for any healer that you actually had to stand around and wait for damage to happen before healing it up. That's just not how it works when the damage is so "big and bursty" as it's been for years. All their "triage" does, is force people to gem spirit the first tier, then slowly drop it as you gear up in the second tier, and completly disregard it in the last.

[TirielWoW]

People didn't care for their mana, not even back during the start of cata. If you weren't always casting, you were still doing it wrong. Back then it was just Heal and Nourish (for example) you'd be tunneling into the tanks, rather than more expensive heals as you do now. Since I started playing (mid WOTLK), they haven't been able to make it so that "triage" has ever been so important for any healer that you actually had to stand around and wait for damage to happen before healing it up. That's just not how it works when the damage is so "big and bursty" as it's been for years. All their "triage" does, is force people to gem spirit the first tier, then slowly drop it as you gear up in the second tier, and completly disregard it in the last.

Er...maybe you didn't care for your mana at the start of Cata, but I assure you that many other healers did. I was one of them.

[Dracodraco]

Er...maybe you didn't care for your mana at the start of Cata, but I assure you that many other healers did. I was one of them.

I find that hard to believe unless you geared wrong.
But I concede that priests may have been different - I know for a fact that the char I played the most healing-wise during cata (resto druid) never had to stop casting. Then again, it would also depend on your partners and the content you were adequately skilled/geared for. Obviously if you had to do 70% of the healing (with the other guy doing 30%), you'd be able to cast less spells overall as you had to use the more expensive spells. Mana regen was tied heavily to int pools back then, too, which made it quite different from what it is now (if I recall correct), making both your best throughput stat (int) a very strong mana regen stat (close to what spirit is ATM).
That being said, at no point did I ever see a trend where you had to apply "triage" in the form of "not casting to maintain mana". After they removed the 5-second thing, there never really was a reason NOT to cast your cheapest, most efficient spell, unless literally zero dmg was going out (and if I recall correct, no fights had any of those "moments" in T11). The only "triage" I've seen since I started playing, has been deciding if you needed to cast a minor (heal, nourish, healing wave) or a greater (Greater heal, Healing Touch, Greater healing wave) heal in a specific situation.