Priest Leveling Guide from 1 to 80

Welcome to our Priest leveling guide. Here you will find all you need to know to level up your Priest efficiently. In addition, you may wish to check out our general Leveling guide, complete with detailed information on XP, mounts, addons, consumables, tips, and more. We encourage to read it to increase your leveling speed even more.

Whether you choose to level solo or in a group, the Priest offers lots of fun abilities and options while leveling up. You have a strong DPS specialization with Shadow Priest and can also choose between two different healing specializations if you ever want to heal a dungeon or group environment. While questing, you will find yourself being a Damage over Time (DoT) machine as Shadow.

Priests have three specializations to choose from while leveling: Shadow, Holy, or Discipline.

Generally speaking, you should always level as Shadow since it is the only DPS specialization and therefore much faster. That being said, Discipline is still somewhat offensive, so if you like that spec, you could make that work as well, especially if you are healing through Dungeons.

If you ever want to venture into dungeons while leveling, Holy or Discipline are great options to get faster dungeon queues and heal through that content. This can also be something you prefer to do while leveling in a large group to make it easier to pull larger mob sizes.

The following abilities are ones that all Priests will learn regardless of specialization. Depending on your specialization you will have access to much more abilities to help fill out that specialization completely.

Until you are level 10, use Smite as your filler ability and keep up Shadow Word: Pain once you get that ability. This, paired with using Mind Blast will be your rotation until you decide to pick a specific specialization to level as starting at level 10.

• At level 1, you unlock Smite, which is a casted ranged ability that will act as your filler spell for several levels.
• Level 2 gives you access to your first damage over time spell with Shadow Word: Pain. You should generally try to keep this up on as many mobs as possible. Be sure to still pull with Smite and then use Shadow Word: Pain to optimize damage.
• Starting at level 3 you get access to your first healing spell with Flash Heal. This is a quick but somewhat Mana-costly spell you can use to heal yourself or allies.
• Level 4 gives you Power Word: Shield, which gives you your first type of Discipline spell that typically rewards predicting when someone will take damage, rather than reactively healing them back up.
• At level 5 you get another Shadow-themed spell with Mind Blast. This is a harder-hitting spell than Smite and should be used on cooldown.
• Once you reach level 6 you get access to our group buff, Power Word: Fortitude. Make sure to keep this up at all times on yourself and other allies for increased health pools.
• Level 7 gives you your first crowd control ability with Psychic Scream. You can use this to AoE fear enemies that are nearby for a quick getaway or to get some damage out while they are not hitting you.
• At level 8 you get Desperate Prayer which is a great self-heal that also acts as a small defensive.
• Level 9 gives you the ability Fade to remove all your threat for the next 10 seconds which is a great spell while doing dungeons or leveling to shift aggro to another player or even your Shadowfiend pet that you learn at later levels.
• Right before you can start doing dungeons you learn Resurrection at level 10, to help recover a pull gone wrong after combat if someone dies.
• Level 12 gives you the Levitate spell, which is not used very often, but can make traveling down cliff sides easier and safer to get around quickly.
• At level 14 you get Mind Vision, which is a unique spell that allows you to see through a target's point of view, which can be handy to scout out an area for treasure chests or rare NPCs. Note that you can re-cast this on a new mob as long as they are in range while currently Mind Visioning another mob.
• At level 16 you learn the passive spell Focused Will, which causes all melee attacks against you to reduce you damage you take by 15% for 8 seconds, making it the perfect solo-leveling spell for survivability.
• Once you reach level 18 you get access to Mind Soothe. This is a casted ability that makes all enemies in the target radius have a lower chance of attacking you. This can make it easier to skip packs of mobs.

Once you hit level 10, you gain access to the talent tree for Priests. Depending on the specialization you choose, you will gain a few baseline abilities, and then that determines which spec tree you get access to. Eventually you can spend talent points in the class tree to get all of them, these are just what you start with at level 10.

• Discipline: Shadowfiend and Renew
  • Discipline Priest Leveling Guide
• Holy: Renew and Prayer of Mending
  • Holy Priest Leveling Guide
• Shadow: Shadowfiend and Shadow Word: Death
  • Shadow Priest Leveling Guide

When choosing Heirlooms it generally is advantageous to pick items that have Haste on them. Haste is the most impactful stat in terms of gameplay on your Priest and generally allows you to kill enemies much faster than you would otherwise.

Once you've reached Level 80 and your leveling journey has found its end, you definitely want to check out the in-depth information on how to excel in all types of PvE content by checking out our Priest Specialization Guides!