I have a lvl 60 Holy Priest and he's been holy all the way. Sure it may have been a little diffacult to keep up with my mage and warlock friends but more times than not, I had to go <DND> cuz i was trying to lvl and quest but people kept askin me to run instances. Plus, when you get to 70 you actually have healing practice and you're not gonna find yourself in some raid group as the healer and not know what to do. As far as stats are concerned, get as much intallect and stamina as you can. Every point of intallect inceases mana by 15 and you need as much of that as you can get when you're healing and every point of stamina increases health by 10 and you already have a buff for that but the more the better. As of the last patch, anything that did +healing now does +spell damage but if you can find some stuff that does + a lot of spell damage, go ahead and get if. It'll come in handy.

I'm sure a shadow priest can heal instances up to a certain point but the Holy tree allows for a LOT of bonus healing making it way easier to keep up and not ending up spamming flash heal.

As far as soloing quests, as long as you keep renew and bubble shield on you as much as possible, you should be alright. Make sure you have lots of mana regenerating products (perks to having 2 mage friends) cuz i've found out that you can only kill about 2 things around the same level as you and if you're lucky you won't run outta mana and have to use a potion or wand the guy to death. Also keep SW Pain on them. It's really helpful if you do run out of mana cuz it keeps right on goin.

Thanks. I've found the WoW Vault calculator pretty useful also. Seeing what builds work best. I'm thinking of being straight Holy with possibly a few lower level Shadow damage spells for good measure. Don't get me wrong, Holy is great (you do get hit up a lot for instances and partying) but I need to have some spells that damage when I have to solo. Mobbing monsters and not having things like Rogue's Flash powder or anything to really reduce aggro sucks.

Psychic Scream + Fade will give you time to escape a lot of bad situations.  Enchanting your boots for speed helps as well.

To the original poster:  For solo and PvP builds I recommend going down the DSC tree far enough to get Imp Shield, Imp Fort, and wand specialization.  A few points spent to improve the damage of your SW:P/mind blast are well spent too in the early to mid lvls.  Then start down the holy tree. When you respec in your 60's you can drop the shadow points all together to get a bit deeper in the holy tree, or pick up a bit of survivability.  Your choice there will be determined on whether your holy priest does more raid healing or PvPing.  I'd spec more heavily in disc for PvP and more holy for raiding.

Just my 2 coppers :)

Best of luck!

What are you smoking?  Priests make great healers and great single target DPSers, but they're lacking in two key areas: crowd control, and tanking.  Sure, we have silence and shackle undead, but those are situationally useful, where as a Hunter, Mage, Rogue have CC that is much more usable.  Second, we have NO armor.  Even if you were in shadow form, wearing lots of stam and pvp gear, a priest would still get owned easily in almost any instance he doesn't have well out-leveled.

Druids could pull this off, Paladins too, and maybe Shamans, but you can forget about a group of priests pulling it off.

I guess your right cause priest are realy for backup, revival and protection, how ever..priest can do great damage and shield themselves and they have at level 30 and up the spell to control minds. That power is best for having time to run away and make enemies fight each other and kill themselves. My point is that priest are powerful and good, they just need alot of mana...but your right a team of priest would be a bad idea and since they cant handle as muct damage as the other classes.

when you're soloing, Fade does nothing. zero. zip. zilch. if you are the only one on the mob's aggro table, dropping 20% does nothing.

diffIcult and intEllect. if spelling is such a problem for you please, please get firefox and it's built in spellchecker. your is NOT the same as you're.

There's a law on a message board I frequent that states that anyone who makes a post correcting someone else's spelling or grammar will inevitably make an error of their own.  In your case, the spelling is fine, but the capitalization and punctuation are atrocious.  Keep this in mind next time you feel like being a spelling or grammar Nazi.

[quote]
when you're soloing, Fade does nothing. zero. zip. zilch. if you are the only one on the mob's aggro table, dropping 20% does nothing.[/quote]

Actually it does.  It lowers your body aggro so you do not pull as many mobs as you otherwise would during your hasty retreat. 

This is not true.  It reduces your threat, it does not reduce your aggro radius.  The spell that reduces aggro radius is Mind Soothe and you cast it on mobs, not yourself.

FWIW, I HAVE experimented with this, and I would hope you would do the same.  Find a mob, prox aggro it, run away.  Wait for it to reset, fade, and prox aggro it again.  You will not get any closer the second time.

[quote]
This is not true.  It reduces your threat, it does not reduce your aggro radius.  The spell that reduces aggro radius is Mind Soothe and you cast it on mobs, not yourself.

FWIW, I HAVE experimented with this, and I would hope you would do the same.  Find a mob, prox aggro it, run away.  Wait for it to reset, fade, and prox aggro it again.  You will not get any closer the second time.[/quote]

In the Gruul pull I have faded and run to the spot we want the mage tank to run to at the pull (just slightly in front of the steam vent on the right side).  I don't pull aggro.  The mage tank, however, if he runs up there a fraction of a second before the pull, gets pwned when he aggros the whole mob. 

I suppose it is possible that it is the subetly to my cloak reducing my aggro radius and not fade?  Though I wouldn't think a 2% subtractive would be sufficient.