[Alt] Priest or Death Knight?

[ARogers]

I've recently started a priest on a new server, and I'm almost level 55. A friend of mine had mentioned that I should try rolling a DK. There. however, seem to be a lot of them running around.

Those of you that have DKs, do you find it hard to find groups? Is it easy to solo old world stuff? I'm really getting into achievements, so solo rep grinding would be fun. I hear they can take out the ZG bosses for mounts too. I want to do that.

Are priests good at any solo stuff? Are they more fun? I'll be shadow of course.

[Kelaan]

I'm skeptical that priests have anywhere close to as easy a time soloing old stuff compared to a DK. Perhaps if you specced Disc or something, but I always thought priests were somewhat fragile.

[ARogers]

I'm skeptical that priests have anywhere close to as easy a time soloing old stuff compared to a DK. Perhaps if you specced Disc or something, but I always thought priests were somewhat fragile.

Yeah, they seem to be, and that is my main fear. I don't want to get a pirest and then have nothing I can do when I hit 80 rather than play in groups. I play solo for most stuff.

How is it that DKs function in soloing? I know the main part of warriors and pallies is that they can block incoming damage. Obviously DKs can't.

DKs do have a way to self-heal when fighting don't they? How does that function? And is it sufficient to be useful in soloing old world stuff?

[majiben]

Blood might. I've heard that leveling priests from low levels has improved in wotlk. At 80 I couldn't say. By the time you get to 80 though, dualspecs should be well established and you should consider it.

[Kelaan]

Blood aura's self-heal (1% of the damage you deal?), combined with mark of blood, are probably fine to solo pretty much anything through outlands, I expect. You might have trouble soloing the l70 instances as a non-tank, but they can spec or gear that way too.

[majiben]

They also have blood wryms and rune tap. From what I've read blood's self heals are excessive for leveling the kill speed leaves some to be desired. Unholy is supposed to be the fastest, especially for AoE killing.

[Kelaan]

I seem to recalling Jame say that in his blog, yeah. I believe part of it was having the pet be a permanent part of your damage. My DK has one talent point at the moment (or zero?), so ... kinda moot, heh.

[amh]

Soloing stuff on a priest is necessarily a lot harder than on a DK, but a lot of it is doable. Didn't have to group up (call in guildies >.>) for all that many quests in Northrend, but having done them on two characters kinda helped as well.

I can highly recommend going through the DK starter chain, even if you're not going to level it all the way up. It's very entertaining.

As for soloing on a DK.. A DK is tank, healer and dps, all in one neat package -_- Don't think I grouped up for a single quest throughout Northrend. Spec semi-tank blood and go to town. You cannot die. Improved Rune Tap is your friend. Unholy is probably more dps, but really, imp Rune Tap > everything.

[Sober]

Priests need to level with spirit tap at the very least.

Shadow is kinda poop until you get shadowform, but after that it goes pretty fast. You can still heal in shadow spec.

Otherwise you can go for a levelling that goes about halfway down both disc and holy (after spirit tap) to still level at a reasonable rate but still have some talented healing capabilites.

[Nich]

The big thing I found levelling my DK as blood was death strike. Yes, everything else helps, but when you're healing over 40% of your hp with a DS crit, everything becomes pretty easy.