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I had a priest get to level 35 in order to disenchant Outland stuff, and was the third priest I had leveled. I found that Spirit Tap was not always useful in the low teens due to the overpoweredness of spirit at low levels to begin with (assuming you stack spirit) and I was wanding a great deal, making me wish I hadn't tried without wand spec at all. However, I wanted to get Mind Flay asap. This was also a mistake. Rank 1 Mind Flay is utter crap and only does damage comparable to wanding. Thus I would go with the common enlightened wisdom of taking 10-14 Wand Spec and 15-19 Spirit Tap. Improved SWP I found to only really help when fighting multiple mobs, but it's a really good use. Shadow Weaving is utter crap for leveling, but I find that even though VE does very little healing off-the-bat, it costs nearly no mana and becomes a very very cheap (and somewhat weak) renew. You don't need it every mob either, and if you're strafing away once you open, you should normally be waiting for the mob to get into Mind Flay range regardless.
Now, after I decided to level my priest beyond 35 (mainly to learn the next enchanting rank), I found that I was basically not wanding because of all the new greens that were added that had spell damage (both world drops and quests). You don't have to scour the auction house for +shadow or get twinked to get a good amount of +dmg in the 40-50 region. Just don't fight mobs higher level than you, and you'll not need more than 2 wand shots. Thus I would put points down towards VT and not have to respec out of Wand Spec again at 50.
10-14 Wand Spec
15-19 Spirit Tap
20-21 Imp SWP
22-24 Shadow Focus
Mind Flay sucks until 28. The enchanting wand you can equip at level 26 does more DPS than rank 1 Mind Flay - the wand you have is likely not far behind MF in damage. Skip it until 28 when you can learn Rank 2.
25-26 Improved Psychic Scream - because you'll want Silence eventually and need filler
27 Improved Mind Blast or Shadow Focus - this much in Shadow Focus is mainly useless, and more than one Mind Blast per fight is very rare, so this is filler
28 Mind Flay
29 Imp MB/SF see 27
30-31 Shadow Reach
32-34 Shadow Weaving (it might suck, but its better than the alternatives)
35-39 VE, Silence, and Focused Mind. I don't know whether to favor the efficiency talent or the new abilities. Silence is helpful, but a long cooldown, and VE helps efficiency at some minor rate comparable to Focused Mind (maybe?).
Respec at 40, dropping Wand Spec for Darkness
40 Shadowform
41-44 Shadow Weaving and Imp VE - neither are stellar, but the alternatives are nearly useless
45-49 Misery
50 Vampiric Touch
From here go down to Inner Focus and Meditation, then fill in the raid-centric PvE talents in shadow or respec healing. You'll probably end up moving the 3 points out of Silence to fill them all in.
Now my original priest leveled 60-70 as disc/holy, and could heal instances with only 15-20 points in holy. In grinding, I 'd go holy fire, SWP, Smite until almost dead then wand. I kept PWS on all the time because I took Reflective shield - a rather awesome grinding talent. I normally pre-cast it, but there came times I would be refreshing it mid-battle for a few mobs, before it would last the entire time again. I don't recommend doing Smite leveling unless you have people to heal on a regular basis.
On that note, I found leveling a paladin to be quite boring as Ret when I did it like two years ago or something. I got to 35ish and quit. I rolled a Blood Elf paladin recently and went straight prot. I probably would have been better off Ret for the first 30 levels, and definitely would go that way if I rolled again. But I went prot overall because it allowed me to quest reasonably effectively and not be useless for tanking. I had too many bad experiences leveling where ret pallies in dungeons were plain useless.
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