Can anyone who has quested 85-90 as holy advise me?

Post by 962854

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Post by Frappian

There is a way to cause significant damage with Holy abilities. The best I've found is Holy Shock and Denounce with glyph and the other damage spells peppered in for flavor or if you need them. It's not completely unbearable, but Ret is faster and more efficient. Some mobs are more difficult than others, but you may enjoy the challenge. It would help break up the monotony of Ret leveling.

Dual Talent Spec it so that you can try it and decide what you want to go with. Then the option remains for you to switch back and forth if you need to...like for a particularly difficult quest mob or something. If you're trying to upgrade your Holy gear, you have the option of completing the quest as Ret and then switching specs to Holy before you turn it in so you get the Holy gear. That might make the transition a little easier for you.

Overall, it is definitely doable as long as it's something you want to try and be patient with feeling it out. As you get better holy gear and increase your SP, your damaging abilities as Holy will become more formidable. But at first, it may be kind of frustrating. At the end of all this though, I would say try it. If you don't like it, oh well. If you do, the game just got a little more fun and isn't that the point?

Post by elcoroto

I leveled to 89 as holy before going Ret. I don't really recommend it for a few reasons.

First, it's incredibly dull. You'll be doing pretty much nothing but spamming denounce, weaving in holy shocks to heal yourself; you'll be taking a fair bit of damage, but if you only pull one thing at a time you'll pretty much never be in danger of death. You'll want to take the denounce glyph to speed up the grind.

Second, when you hit 86 you're almost certainly going to start having mana problems due to your mana pool drastically increasing in size. I came into the expansion decked out in heroic raiding gear and tons of spirit for an 85 (going OOM was practically impossible). I hit 86 and immediately starting reeling from the cost of spells. Your spells cost significantly more each time you level, requiring much more spirit to break even. You'll likely spend a fair bit of time drinking to regain mana.

Third, it's very inefficient. You have no AoE capability as holy until you hit 90, not that you'd likely survive several mobs anyway. Each enemy will take you somewhere around 20 seconds to kill, assuming you can free cast denounce. As prot or ret, you could kill several times that many mobs in the same time frame. Some quests require you to go places where you can't help but pull several enemies. This is very bad for you.

Fourth, if you're on a PvP realm, a holy paladin questing is basically walking honor points. You have no recourse except bubble-hearth, which can be foiled by warriors and priests at minimum. It may not be as bad now as it was at release, but basically every enemy player I ran into (which was all the time) decided killing me was more important than anything else they could be doing, even though (or precisely because) I posed them no threat.

I highly suggest just leveling as Ret or Prot, unless you're particularly masochistic. If you're worried about having gear for healing heroics, buy or craft pvp gear and the 463 weapon, reforge heavily toward spirit then mastery, and you'll be fine (PvP gear doesn't include PvP stats in its item budget like it used to). You're not going to want to run each dungeon more than once (for quests) while leveling anyway, so don't worry about queue times.

Hope this helps.

Post by 962854

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Post by 581897

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by 962854

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by 581897

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by GreatePier

I agree, except that leveling through dungeons means you'll miss out on quite a bit of Reputation from the quests you would otherwise do to level up, which could hurt / hold back the development of your char at 90. You can always still do those quests when you're 90, but it will probably take you a little longer to get to the point where you can enter LFR.

I haven't played Holy beyond the L14 BG bracket myself, but for leveling, I'd suggest you go Ret or Prot and just keep the best quest rewards for your Holy gearset so you'll have something decent when you hit your first Heroics. From what I read here, even a suboptimal Ret >> Holy for leveling out in the wild

Post by Shalako

I've been leveling ret/prot and i am enjoying both. However, I like to play all specs on my characters so I dropped prot for holy yesterday. I was kinda thinking about the gear from quests only being str/stam and I wanted to play holy quite a bit at 90. So i bought up some 87 gear from an adventures supplier, but that gear is under 400 item level, and quest rewards are 425ish. But as I'm reading this, I wonder if before you click on the exclamation mark for a quest you switch to holy spec, then accept quest, then go back ret?

Anyone know yet?, I will try this out

Post by Frappian

I haven't done this in a while, but I seem to remember as long as you switch to Holy before you turn in the quest, your reward will be for Holy gear. This is a good way to get higher ilvl gear to heal heroics without having to quest as a healer (which can be fun to try, but does get tiring).

Post by Flonnette

It would make more sense to "level" as Holy by constantly using LFG instead of questing. It isn't impossible to quest in Holy and you will be hard to kill vs. most world monsters but it is so slow. So very very very slow.

Post by 365029

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Post by Arannia

The only thing about levelling as Holy that sucks in MoP is you have no answer to large packs of weak mobs. Holy Paladins don't get any noteworthy AoE until 90.

Can anyone who has quested 85-90 as holy advise me?

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