Mobs will **never **use potions. If one regains HP, it’s because it healed itself or another mob healed it. Learn which mobs are healers and make sure you take them out first.
Actually, they do. Certain murloc mobs (the foragers, I think) in Elwynn will stop in the middle of combat, take out a potion, down it, get healed by it, then start fighting again. Now, in technical terms, they didn’t just drink an official Healing Potion like the players get, but in story terms, that’s how they healed, by potion.
Anyway, I’ve actually got a bunch of cash on that character from signing guild charters, so I think I’ll just give in and buy a bunch of lowbie green cloth from the AH, after which point I expect my problems will be solved.
But damn, compared to levelling a hunter or even a shaman (last two lowbies I’ve messed with), levelling a priest is hard.
Remember what the goblins always say: “Time is money, friend.” 
Just because you gathered the mats yourself doesn’t mean they were free, if your objective is to make money you have to consider what you could have gotten if you had sold the mats directly or simply spent the time farming something more valuable.
Now, if you level your profession while you level your character you’ll be picking up most of the mats you need as you go along and the cost won’t be as obvious as when you powerlevel it at level 80, but it still isn’t free.
I’ve made the same observation, thing is, you can’t use your epic flying mount to farm the old world ores. So even if the unit price on the old world ores is higher you have to spend much more time farming them.
I didn’t mean that I had trouble, I just wasn’t paying attention got too much aggro.
I agree that soloing in WoW isn’t exactly hard.
As far as Shadow Specing my Priest goes, I may do that, but I will also continue playing my warlock, because I like going through some of these Blood Elf and Horde side quests.
Just out of curiosity, does anybody read the webcomic “The Noob”? I thought yesterday’s was pretty funny 
The story starts here. I actually started reading the strip long before I started playing WoW, and was kind of fun when I finally saw the actual types of situations being lampooned in the strip.
Huh, I have no memory of ever seeing that happen (possibly because I have exactly one Human character). How incredibly annoying.
ETA:
Mister Rik, it’s blocked from work (“Category: Humor/Comics;Profanity;Game/Cartoon Violence”), so I’ll try to remember to check it out when I get home. (Amusingly, Penny Arcade is **not **blocked.)
And Penny Arcade is about five times as blasphemous, foul-mouthed and dirty-minded as The Noob is…
Sadly, the days of the “Wand Spec” are over. They removed the talent. Nonetheless, a good wand is still going to be a major part of a young priest’s leveling career.
I’ve had this debate with my son, too. It’s illusionary profit. Let’s say you need a whole bunch of netherweave and spider silk to make some bags. You spend two hours farming it. Check the auction house. You can sell the cloth & silk for 100 gold, or make bags out of it and sell the bags for 75 gold. My son would sell the bags and say “woot - I made 75 gold.” I’d say, “no, you lost 25 gold.” You’d be richer if you didn’t make the bags.
I did it all along. The biggest costs came in for those last 20 skill points or so. Before Wrath came out, the price of specialty cloth and motes was so high that each piece I made cost me 50-100 gold, and selling it or DEing it made me back only a fraction of that. Now, those prices have crashed and it’s way cheaper to make those same items.
I don’t recall which spells you get when, but I believe you have Power Word: Shield (henceforth PW:S) and Shadow Word: Pain (SW:P). Try this strategy:
Put up PW:S before the fight. Pop a SW:P on the mob at max distance and then hit him with something else as he runs toward you (later, you’ll use Mind Flay here, as it slows him down). If you pull more than one, focus on the first one until he’s dead. Don’t get distracted by the other(s). The faster the first one dies, the sooner he’ll stop hitting you. I don’t think you’ll get Inner Fire for another few levels, but once you have it, don’t ever let it drop. Ditto Power Word: Fortitude.
When you’re face-to-face with the mob, make sure you’ve right-clicked on him so you’ll be automatically meleeing with your mace (or whatever) between spells. Remember, you can also use wands at point-blank, and those will generally do more damage than the maces.
If you’re hurting for mana and one mob is almost dead, make sure he has SW:P on him and switch to the other. The DoT will kill the first while you work on the second. When you’re about to completely run out of mana, try to save enough to get a Renew on yourself before the PW:S fails.
Mana potions and health potions at your level really aren’t very expensive. Keep some in your bags at all times. Also, take up first aid. When you’ve pulled two mobs and things are tough, you’ll often have time after the first one dies to pop up your PW:S and bandage yourself. It uses no mana and lets you start the 2nd fight with (hopefully) full health.
My main is a frost mage, so when I started a priest I found myself dying a lot because I didn’t have all the slowing/freezing spells. I made a point of practicing taking down two or three mobs at a time. I started by attacking things a few levels lower than me, and slowly worked up. Unless the mobs have some kind of stun, fear, knockdown, spell interrupt, or self-heal, you should be able to take down two mobs your own level consistently. Three may be a close call, but if you’re starting with full health and full mana, it should be possible most of the time, although it may require a potion.
Also, keep your eyes open for deals on the AH on buff foods and scrolls. Even a couple of points of stamina at your level can easily make the difference between living and dying, and a lot of the buff foods are +stamina and +spirit (which helps you gain mana and health faster).
If you don’t have any gear with bonuses, check the AH periodically or ask guildies. Low-level priests run out of mana a lot. Getting some gear with +intelligence will deepen your mana pool considerably.
If you’re really having trouble with multi-mobs, have a friend or guild member that plays a priest sit in on a few of your fights. They may be able to give you tips. That’s what guildies are for!
Aw, seriously? 
That’s what I get for not playing most of my alts since Wrath.
I got applauded once on my Night Elf priest for taking on three of the Augur furbolgs in the chamber with the Druid’s spirit in the barrow den on Teldrassil solo. There was a group of toons that had come up the bridge behind me while I was in the middle of the fight, and when I finally downed the last one (with something like 10 HP left), I heard clapping, turned around and there were three other newb toons! I couldn’t give a play-by-play of the fight, but it was intense enough that I hadn’t even noticed them.
Priests start out a bit painful to play at the very low levels, but for me personally, they got a lot more fun after 10, and I played a holy priest all the way up to 70.
I generally reapplied shadow word: pain if it expired while the target still had a lot of HP and as a priest when fighting multiple foes, you can keep yourself alive by healing and continuing to wand and use dots.
I have survived some truly incredible fights, like facing 3 +1 mobs in Hellfire, or taking on an elite tiger in Stranglethorn, where I just kept using those dots and wand and being very cautious on my attack spells, preserving mana for healing, and just outlasting the foes. Difficult situations as a priest (at least a holy priest) often revolve around out surviving the enemy.
So, even though I wasn’t the fastest soloer, I appreciated being able to survive some difficulties, and not needing to buy food.
Mind Control is a lot of fun as well, and I’ve completed some Group Quests that I shouldn’t have been able to do solo by Mind Controlling the right mobs.
Of course, any sane person would probably solo a priest using Shadow Spec, so I can’t give my advice much weight, but I stayed in Holy because I was part of a roleplaying guild while I was levelling up, and I didn’t want to abandon the characterization I had developed for my priest.
Soloing as the spec you eventually intend to play has its advantages, too. My Warrior main was Prot all the way from her first talent point at level 10, and while it meant I leveled a lot slower, I got a lot of experience tanking as I came up, rather than having to learn how to do the whole thing at cap.
As a Holy Priest, you could probably level mostly through healing instances, if you really wanted to.
Thanks for the grats, guys. Given that I’m already at 60, being able to check out all the instances is going to send me well on my way to 70 (running BRD 3-4x got me a ton of xp), so near-level is the best I’m going to be able to muster until I can haul my retadin over there (she’s currently 37).
I just noticed that WI profiled the guild Vanilla of BT, which only lets in capped-60 accounts. So I may see if the interested members in my guild are interested in pugging with them sometime for the bigger instances. It’s ironic – last night the GM and I were pondering doing exactly that for our guild (advertising that we do old world content), and then this morning I see WI profiling Vanilla. 
I suspect that we probably won’t do the capped-60 thing, given that the Battle Chest already comes with BC, but we can at least work on getting to where we can run old world content on a regular schedule, which would be a reasonable balance between old and new world content. Judging from previously profiled-on-WI guilds and the fact that I still see Onyxia’s head in Org from time to time, it sounds like there’s a measurable amount of interest in running said old content, which is a good sign.
Thoughts?
That said, I second the pain factor in leveling a priest. My holy priest is now L27, which levelled about 2-3x slower than my main/alts to the same level. I came here with the same complaints about dying. 
If you look back, you’ll see the same responses. Stay at range, hit mob with SW:P, Smite, Shield, Smite, wand em to death, drink. Oh - something that might also help is throwing Renew on yourself if you have free mana since it’s a HoT and may give you that much more of an edge in longer fights.
Find a good wand, plus a mace that helps with spell damage. And see if you can get a tome or other offhand that has +spell from either an inscription guildie or the AH. Very nice, that.
It might be a bit early for talents atm, but I definitely recommend sticking 1 point into Spirit Tap for the mana regen regardless of your tree. I’m finding that to be really nice.
Whoever asked about inscription, level it! You get spell tomes, which are awesome for casters as offhands (see above). You also can make Darkmoon Faire cards and glyphs. Awesomesauce. Nom nom.
It’s not so much that the price is higher (it isn’t always), it’s that they’re just more likely to sell. I’d much rather spend an hour mining a stack of 20 Mithril Ores that sells within 24 hours than 30 minutes on a stack of Fel Iron that I then have to repost to the AH 3 times before it finally sells 5-6 days later.
Of course, this has been mitigated somewhat now that I’ve finally started using a bank alt so I don’t have to keep going back and forth between Northrend and Stormwind.
Not really a sign of anything since she can be soloed at lvl 80.
The Darkmoon cards are like playing the lottery, if you get a nobles card you win, otherwise you lose. The offhands and glyphs are all boe and can be found on the ah.
The real reason you want inscription is that it is to easy level, and here’s the really good part, you get a good shoulder enchant without having to grind exalted rep with the Sons of Hodir.
What you quoted there wasn’t from me, Rik.
As a side note, though, on my server, Azeroth ores like Mithril, Silver, and Gold are selling for a lot more than Outland ores and even more than some Northrend ores.
Even iron is selling for a bit more than fel iron. That just seems wrong to me.
I haven’t read that article yet (can’t get to WI from work, unfortunately, which I am mildly amused to type, as I am in WI), but if they’re specifically a Vanilla-WoW guild, they might not even run with people who are 61+ or have any gear or chants from BC or later.
A lot of that is going to be people going after old-world content solo or in small groups for the achievements, I’m afraid. (Or for mount drops–my pocket healer and I run two ZG bosses and the first boss of Kara every raid reset.) However, my current guild does a vanilla-WoW fun-run raid at the end of every month, and people enjoy burning through old endgame content. For those of us who didn’t start playing before the first xpac, it’s a great way to see some of the really amazing old-world raids. (I get a little tear in my eye every time I go into Blackrock Mountain–the entrance to its instances is just amazing.) The problem with doing old-world raids on a regular basis in a non-vanilla guild is that the rewards just aren’t good enough. In most cases, you’ll get much better upgrades running regular BC quests and instances. I got to experience the same thing with the transition from BC to Wrath–you’d get to the point where you were replacing epics with greens.
True enough – a bunch of us have lower level alts who could be ground up to within the capped-60 range, which was what I was vaguely thinking of. I have a habit of typing as I think things out, and going back to edit later or not at all.
I wish there were better ways that didn’t require as much compromise to see the old endgame content as it’s sounding like there is, which is discouraging for players like me who’ve just started out in WoW. I do take your point about the regular schedule, though. I definitely don’t think anything like weekly, monthly does sound more like it.