Once upon a time I was a hardcore raider in World of Warcraft. That turned into casual raiding, then casual dungeoneering, until at some point I lost interest in group content. I tried different classes and roles, but it turned out that I was at best mediocre as a tank or damage dealer, while I had a knack for raid / dungeon healing. So while my warrior was the first character I created on the European servers, my priest was for the longest time my "main". And I hated it when a new expansion came out, because I hated leveling him. In many expansions leveling as holy simply wasn't feasible, so I always leveled in shadow spec until the level cap, and then switched to holy for the raid content. And I don't like shadow spec very much.

In Legion at the start I didn't even try to level my priest. I hadn't done much group content in the previous couple of expansions, so I didn't really see the need for a healer. But while I leveled my warrior and mage to 110, I reluctantly did some dungeon content for quests, and found that the dungeons in Legion are fun. So I started to consider the priest as third character to level up. Now as I said before, I don't consider Legion to be very alt-friendly. Every character goes through the same four zones while leveling up, and while you can choose the order, you still need to do every zone until you gain friendly reputation in order to unlock world quests.

And then of course I still didn't like shadow spec very much. And because in Legion you early on need to decide your spec for your artifact weapon, and it takes some time before you get an artifact weapon for a second spec, I didn't want to choose shadow and then be unable to do holy for several levels. So I was wondering whether it was feasible to level in Legion with holy spec, mostly doing dungeons. And it turns out that works better than expected. One big plus was the quest you have to do to gain your first artifact weapon (and you can't do Legion dungeons without doing that): For the holy spec the scenario in which you get your artifact is very much based around you healing a group of NPCs. At some points you need to deal damage yourself, but mostly it is about healing, and that is a nice change from the artifact weapon scenarios I did up to now.

Then I started to join dungeon groups using the looking for group dungeon finder. One thing hasn't changed in WoW: There are too many DPS and too few healers. So the dungeon finder in which my DPS characters had to wait up to half an hour to get a group provided a group for my healer within a couple of minutes every time. At level 100 the dungeon loot is iLevel 700, which isn't great. But half a dozen dungeons later I was level 101, at which point your order hall really starts working and you can get better gear by various ways, including crafting.

Now for crafting I had to do some quests in the Legion zones and couldn't just stay in dungeons. And that turned out to be a big surprise: Provided you take Censure and Surge of Light as talents, leveling a holy priest in Legion through quests is also perfectly viable. I'd even say that the holy priest is performing much better than my frost mage. The frost mage is more fun, with more buttons to press, and more movement. But the holy priest is the epitome of the principle that if you don't lose, you'll eventually win. Between Renew and the occasional instant Flash of Light provided by Surge of Light, the priest is basically unkillable. I even fought gold border elites with barely a scratch, it just takes forever. Even tactics that really, really shouldn't work, like running through a murloc village spamming Holy Nova, work perfectly well for the holy priest. In spite of wearing the same cloth armor as the mage, the priest feels much less like a glass cannon, and much more like the plate-armored warrior. The disadvantage is only that the priest mostly spams three button, Smite, Holy Fire, and Chastise, and that there is very little interactivity in that. Works great, just sometimes feels a bit grindy.

Nevertheless I still think I'll stick to my original idea and level the priest mostly by doing dungeon content. The obvious downside of that strategy is that he'll end up being level 110 one day with no reputation with the various factions, and thus far away from being able to do world quests. But I do think there could be some advantage to putting him on ice for some time at that point, patiently collecting artifact knowledge for several weeks, before going out with him doing quests for reputation. And I can probably gear him up using heroic dungeons, unless those turn out to be populated with unpleasant "go, go, go" types that stand in the fire and then blame the healer.