newly dinged 80 priest. advice

[Danii]

heya,

- I have already tried searching for a same'looking thread but can't seem to find one -

i just dinged 80 with my priest, which is my third lvl 80. The other 2 char's are a prot warr and a DK.
so as you might already have configured, i've never dealt with a ranged class before, nor have i tried a healer which is what i want to do with my priest.

i have all the priest heirlooms, but my question is. can i go healing with the shadow gear i have from leveling and start gearing healer gear throughout that or shall i stay in dps and farm gear for healing?

And, before starting hc's as healer, do i need something speciel? like tanks need defense cap or something likely?


Best regards
Daníi

[Quibble]

Now, I never tryed to really heal from the start, only started to do it recently in heroics and thats in my icc gear so no problem for me lol..

I do how ever don't think it will be a big problem for you, my advice would be to try it out, see if your able to heal which I will guess you are. If it's a problem, do a few normal modes first and get some of the ilvl 200 gear. but with the msot tanks (atleast thos eI get in group with) there should be no problem healing them even with shadow gear.

Anyway, imo you should not do heroics as shadow if you intend to heal later, I my self leveled as shadow in tbc and started out as shadow in raids, and I never learned how to heal as priest. Those times where I Tryed it for fun back in tbc I ended up wiping the partys cause I had no idea what the fuck to do ^^
But being in todays heroics even my healing was VE is enough so it's easy for me to do it to get faster queues =)

[Azyoulike]

decent quest blues should certainly be enough to start healing, but priests have it a bit harder than other classes at low gear levels - so be prepared for a bit of a challenge.

There aren't any special benchmarks you need to hit, but I'd recommend you farm toc-5 normal for the healer trinket before you start running heroics. You'll need it anyway and the cloth epics from toc-5 will give you a good base level of gear.

[Crazhr]

Just go for it, as a newly dinged priest you are only going to get the 40-50k hp tanks in full raid gear and my guess is that you are also going to get mostly very easy heroics. This means that you are maybe going to throw a heal or 2 every pack of mobs and the rest of time you are just standing around doing nothing.

About if you need anything special then no but there are alot of things that can make healing much much easyer. First off all I found decursive a big help since there are tons of dots that deal alot of damage, hhor sw comes to mind but there are others as well.

Another thing is alot of people rolled priest because they wanted to be holy but to be fair its not every effective in low lvl gear. No matter what you want to do when you are geared up I would start with disc and then when you get some gear you can switch back to holy if you like. Disc is simply perfect since it allows you to spam fh like there is no tomorrow which I find is quite common among new healers. It also got some pretty powerfull oh shit buttons so even if you did not see that rogue tanking a few mobs a shield->penance combo can quickly save most people.

Other then that then either mouse over macros or qlique can also help ton when you need to heal both the tank, a ret and a fury all attacking diffrent targets. This with some decent party frames can make healing so much less of a hassle if you dont know about macro then there are tons of guides both on this site and wowwiki but it could look something like this:

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover] renew

Another importent thing it to learn to use all your spells, binding heal and prayer of mending are the ones that are often ignored by new healers but both can be very powerfull. Binding heal can save you a gcd which is awsome and pom is just insane, 90% of the time you cast it on the tank and just give him a buffer but for fights like first boss in pos ist just wicked and can pretty much be the only thing you need to cast if you are abit lazy.

Last thing you ARE going to at some point have mana problems because you get to the point where you get bad tanks but still got semi crappy gear. To compensate for that gem int in every socket untill you get atleast 4 parts t9, you do not need the big heals to begin with but you are going to need the mana and mana reg you get from int, rupture and replenish.

Oh and for the love of all that is holy 1. Dont stand in void zones, fire or anything else. 2. Make 100% sure you can always able to see where you are standing and also keep an close eye at your hp bar. There is nothing worse then dieing to random aoe because you were trying to heal the tank.