Spiritual Guidance: Levels 1-40, page 2

Talents
As I mentioned earlier, my shadowy colleague Fox has been working on a leveling guide for shadow priests and I am doing a disc and holy guide. This, unfortunately, leaves me without a clear path for how to best approach the leveling process since depending on what you're doing, there simply is no best way.

However, I am inclined to give you some sort of a talent guide, even if I'm not particularly thrilled about giving you a generic or specific build when I don't know what you'll be doing. If you have something very specific that you want to do and want help, please feel free to leave a comment and I'm certain the commenters and myself can draft something up for you. Until then, take a look at these builds to get started:

• Discipline: Random Dungeon Healer: The focus behind this build is threat reduction, mana regeneration and spell cost reduction. Improved Power Word: Shield and Twin Disciplines will buff the amount absorbed by Power Word: Shield but it's not anywhere close to the shields you might have seen other priests use at level 80.
• Discipline: Solo questing: Keeping a shield up on yourself as a solo disc priest will help you with interrupts and reducing incoming damage. Like a healing spec, this build does take disc's mana efficient talents like Meditation and Mental Agility (the latter which, by the way, will aid your DoTs as well as your shields and HoTs.) The big difference though is that by taking Reflective Shield, all the talents you put into improving Power Word: Shield will improve how much damage you do back to mobs.
• Holy: Random Dungeon Healer: In the random dungeon finder your focus will be on healing your party and not yourself. You shouldn't need push back reduction, even if the tank's threat is questionable (remember to use Fade!) Inspiration won't necessarily do you a lot of good at low levels because you don't have a lot of critical strike rating, so if you want to swap those talents around a bit, feel free.
• Holy: Solo questing: You may choose to swap out a talent to Surge of Light, since a free Smite is a free Smite. However, like I said about Inspiration about, you won't have much crit to activate the talent to begin with. Also, feel free to stick the talent points in Spell Warding into Improved Renew if you want to HoT yourself up while you Smite spam.

Gear Upgrades
While I am not going to break down all the gear upgrades you could possibly chase down through questing (or professions), I thought I'd go ahead and assemble a list of respectable upgrades acquired from 5-man dungeons. I am under the impression that a priest choosing to level in as a healer would be inclined to run a lot of dungeons, so knowing which dungeons to run for gear seems helpful.

Don't feel like you need to get every item on this list. it's just a loose guide for

Dungeons Upgrades

PvP Upgrades
If you're hitting up the battlegrounds to level, you can grab some really nice upgrades from the battleground supply officers. To find them you'll have to trek out to your faction's supply officers for each battleground.

Got any other questions or recommendations? Hit up the comments. Next week we'll be heading up to level 70.

Want to find more great tips for carrying out your priestly duties? Spiritual Guidance has you covered with all there is to know. Check out Holy 101 or Disc 101 for an introduction to healing as a priest; for the party-minded healer, check out a priest's guide to tanks.