Priest Leveling Guide 70-80 for WotLK Classic

Are you a Priest player in World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion looking to level up from 70 to 80? This guide is here to help you with our top 5 tips and strategies to make your leveling process quick and efficient.

1 - Choose the right Talent Spec for Leveling

When leveling your Priest from 70 to 80 in World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion, it's important to choose the right talent specialization. The three main talent specs for leveling are Discipline, Holy, and Shadow. Each spec has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to consider your playstyle and preferences. Discipline is great for survivability and damage mitigation, Holy is focused on healing and support, and Shadow is all about dealing damage. Experiment with different specs and find the one that suits your leveling style the best.

2 - Utilize your Healing Abilities for Survivability

As a Priest leveling from 70 to 80 in World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion, your healing abilities can be a valuable tool for survivability. Whether you choose the Discipline or Holy talent specialization, both specs have strong healing capabilities that can help you stay alive during challenging quests and encounters. Make sure to prioritize healing yourself and your party members when necessary, and don't be afraid to use defensive cooldowns or potions to enhance your survivability. By utilizing your healing abilities effectively, you can ensure a smoother leveling experience and progress through the expansion content more efficiently.

3 - Take Advantage of Questing and Dungeon Grinding

Questing and dungeon grinding are two of the most efficient ways to level up your Priest in World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Questing allows you to earn experience points and rewards while exploring the game world and completing objectives. Look for quests that are appropriate for your level and focus on completing them efficiently. Additionally, dungeon grinding involves running dungeons with a group of players to defeat enemies and earn experience points. This method can be especially effective if you have a dedicated group or guild to run dungeons with. Be sure to communicate with your group and coordinate your healing abilities to ensure a smooth and successful run. By combining questing and dungeon grinding, you can maximize your leveling speed and progress through the expansion content at a steady pace.

4 - Use Addons and Macros to Optimize your Gameplay

Addons and macros can greatly enhance your gameplay experience and make leveling your Priest in Wrath of the Lich King much easier. Addons are third-party modifications that can provide additional information, improve your user interface, and automate certain tasks. Some popular addons for leveling include questing addons like QuestHelper or Zygor Guides, which provide step-by-step instructions and waypoints for completing quests efficiently. Other useful addons for Priests include healing addons like Grid or VuhDo, which can help you keep track of your party's health and manage your healing spells effectively. Macros, on the other hand, are customizable scripts that allow you to combine multiple actions into a single button press. For example, you can create a macro that casts your most frequently used healing spell and applies a specific buff to your target at the same time. By using addons and macros, you can streamline your gameplay and optimize your leveling process.

5 - Prioritize Gear Upgrades and Enchants

As you level your Priest from 70 to 80 in Wrath of the Lich King, it's important to prioritize gear upgrades and enchants to maximize your effectiveness in combat. Look for gear with stats that are beneficial to your Priest's specialization, such as spell power, intellect, and critical strike rating for a Holy or Discipline Priest. Enchants can also provide significant boosts to your stats, so be sure to enchant your gear with appropriate enhancements. Additionally, don't forget to regularly replace outdated gear with higher-level items to keep up with the increasing difficulty of quests and dungeons. By prioritizing gear upgrades and enchants, you'll be able to tackle challenges more effectively and level up more efficiently.

General Priest Leveling Tips

The following are some general tips that should be followed as a Priest to maximize leveling efficiency and speed.

• Stack up on consumables that restore mana and are appropriate for your level at all times. These can be bought from Innkeepers and vendors in your relevant zone and can be very useful as the class is fairly mana-reliant when questing.

• Priests have a lot of buffs to maintain when in combat scenarios, so learning how best to apply damage-over-time abilities and other buffs/debuffs can be very useful in increasing your potency and efficiency when leveling. Certain addons can make this process easier by making it clearer when a buff is running out and needs to be reapplied.

• Any Holy ability that relies on Holy power will take a Shadow Priest out of Shadowform when cast – so make sure if you have to dip out of the form to heal or do something else under the Holy portion of your spellbook that you go back into Shadowform before beginning to deal damage.

• Shadowform can be the most important ability when it comes to drastically increasing your leveling experience due to it increasing damage output significantly whilst in the form.

• Don’t refresh DoT abilities and other buff/debuffs when they do not need immediate refresh – make sure you learn to time the abilities right when they are about to run out as this will offer better mana sustainability and resource economy.

• Similarly to other caster classes, at early levels wands can be very useful in increasing leveling speed. You should apply your DoTs and debuffs to enemies, and then proceed to shoot them with your wand to deal constant damage in between DoT reapplication. This will also result in your damage output being massively reliant on your wand at early levels, and so you should prioritise wand upgrades over other pieces of gear if this playstyle appeals to you. The Great Magic Wand which is a level 13 green Bind on Equip wand is extremely useful for early levels until you can acquire a better wand. And can often be used continuously until mid-level-20 if an upgrade hasn’t appeared, whilst still dealing adequate level-appropriate damage. 

Best Priest Leveling Spec

As mentioned previously, there are three specs available to Priests – the Discipline Priest and Holy Priest which are both healer specs, and then the Shadow Priest which is the damage-dealing spec. Each specialization has its own unique talent tree and playstyle for game content, however as always, the damage dealing spec is often the most chosen for leveling as being in a damage-dealing spec can provide a more efficient leveling speed, especially for solo-players.

Discipline Priests offer a very balanced play-style which prioritizes healing. However, has access to adequate damage dealing capabilities which makes it a sort of hybrid healer. Discipline Priests are as a result very popular in PvP, as the class allows the healer to also deal good damage in team comps to avoid downtime. In ground content such as PvE, the Discipline Priest can also be useful as the extra damage can be a good addition to any dungeon or raid group. However, for leveling, these benefits do not really come into light, and even if you choose to run dungeons primarily for the majority of your experience gain, Discipline Priests can be mana-reliant resulting in lots of downtime spent drinking. And also there healing capabilities cannot be as great as the Holy Priest. For questing, this spec is not efficient at all as the damage output is low.

Holy Priests excel at healing, but do not offer much damage unlike the Discipline Priest spec. For questing, this spec is not a recommended choice at all, as it has the lowest damage output of all the three Priest specs and is only useful when played in a dungeon-focused leveling playstyle. Although the spec will be able to find a dungeon group easily whilst leveling, which can offer efficient dungeon-grinding with little downtime, players of this playstyle will forfeit their ability to solo quest.

Shadow Priests on the other hand, offer the fastest and most efficient quest-reliant playstyle out of all the other Priest specs, mostly in due to the spec being the only damage-focused spec of the class. Shadow Priests rely solely on dealing damage, and as a result with the added bonus of inherited survivability and healing capabilities from the other two healing specs, Shadow Priests are excellent for solo leveling. Questing as a Shadow Priest is much faster than as another Priest spec, and so for new players it is recommended to play as a Shadow Priest when leveling.

Dungeons vs Questing

An efficient way of leveling as a Priest in Wrath of the Lich King is grinding dungeons for the majority of your experience gain, as it can provide a more efficient leveling strategy as opposed to relying on quests under certain circumstances. Playing one of the healer specs of the Priest class – either a Discipline Priest or a Holy Priest – you can expect quicker dungeon queues than if you are playing a damage-dealing role.

Healers are more in-demand than damage roles; as has been the case in all WoW expansions not just Wrath of the Lich King. When playing this role, the increased speed at which you can find a dungeon makes this an efficient leveling method that can, in some circumstances, offer a faster leveling than questing.

Both Discipline and Holy priests can offer great healer roles in dungeons, however you do not get your AoE healing abilities until much later in the game which makes early level healing as a Priest a bit slower than other healing classes that have AoE healing much earlier. Choosing to level a Priest via dungeons as a healer can be a reliable and safe option for leveling.

As a Shadow Priest, you won’t be a more efficient damage-dealer than other damage classes that have AoE damage, as the Shadow Priest relies on single-target damage. Therefore, playing a Shadow Priest in dungeons isn’t the fastest damage-dealing class to level via dungeons, and so the increased wait time for dungeons plus the slower and less efficient damage-output can make leveling a Shadow Priest via dungeons not as efficient as questing. Unless, you are partied with a strong group that also has good AoE damage and efficient healing for minimal downtime between mob fights.

Therefore, it is generally recommended that Shadow Priests stick to questing for the majority of their experience gain, completing the occasional dungeon when appropriately leveled, and making sure to complete all dungeon-specific quests to maximize experience and item rewards.

If you wish to choose a dungeon-focused leveling strategy however, choosing a healer role will be a much better option as the healer roles are performed better in comparison to damage dealing roles as a Priest.

As a new player to World of Warcraft, it is also not recommended to rely solely on dungeons for your experience gain, as it restricts the player to dungeons and as such, they do not gain the same experience and understanding of the game as if they had relied on quests.

Therefore, new players to the game and to the class are strongly advised to rely on quests for the majority of their experience gain for the most efficient leveling strategy. And furthermore, are advised to select the Shadow Priest class as it offers a safe and easy questing experience due to the classes favourable kit for solo leveling.

Priest Professions

When leveling, unlike other classes that do not have healing, First Aid is not necessarily a good choice for Priests regardless their spec – even the Shadow Priest spec has adequate healing, and with its playstyle that relies on wand damage at early levels and application of damage over time abilities, the class is not as mana intensive as other classes. Still however, if you are managing to deplete your mana often whilst questing, you can opt for First Aid to reduce mana usage that would otherwise be spent on healing abilities – which can increase your leveling speed as it reduces downtime between fights when you would have been drinking consumables to recover your lost mana.

There is no standout profession for the Priest class that makes healing faster and more efficient, and so you should pick either gathering professions such as Herbalism, Skinning or Mining to provide you with a steady income of extra gold as you level. Furthermore, unlike other classes, you can consider your endgame professions early on, and begin progressing your chosen profession prior to reaching max level.

For instance, Tailoring is a great choice for Priests at max level as it offers a unique cloak enchant at level 80 that can be very useful, and so learning Tailoring as you level is not a bad choice. It will also give you access to crafted Tailoring items which can come in handy as the class is a cloth-wearing class which cannot wear any other types of Armor. 

Important Class Quests

Priests do not rely on class-specific quests for important abilities that make up the majority of the classes’ playstyle unlike other classes in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion that do. However, as a beginner player, it is still advised to pick up class quests when available from the Priest trainers that can be found throughout the game world.

One standout quest chain however is the level 50 quest chain that all classes receive, which takes them to the Sunken Temple and can give Priests useful items that they can utilize until late in The Burning Crusade when these items will be replaced for higher item level pieces.

For Priests, this class is called Blood of Morphaz, and offers players the choice between the Woestave, Blessed Prayer Beads, or Circle of Hope items.

Blessed Prayer Beads is a trinket that offers a spell power increase cooldown which can come in handy for increasing your damage output as a Shadow Priest, and can make killing mobs much faster than without it. If you choose this item, it is advised to use the abilities whenever available, and not to keep the ability for sticky situations. This item will also most likely last you the longest throughout the TBC expansion out of the other rewards from this quest.

Furthermore, Woestave can be a great item if you are still relying on your wand damage, and again can last you for a good few levels until mid TBC when you will most likely receive an upgrade. This wand also has a bonus increase to spell power which is an on equip passive increase, which can also significantly increase your Shadow Priest damage output.