I have never played any healing class during Vanilla and now wonder to what extent each is viable outside raiding. I would love it if people who used to play:
could share their experience regarding: farming mats (Essence of Air in Silithius, Essence of Water in Felwood etc), pvp and questing outside raiding. If you used some hybrid spec or respecced between raids, I guess it doesn't count. I'm mostly interested in mainstream raiding healing specs.
Never played a healing class in vanilla so I don't have any anecdotal experiences to recount for you.
However if you take a look at Seebus' Holy Priest Guide he has a section on gold farming in Dire Maul with Holy Nova spec, which at least I hope answers one of your several questions here.
You can do the same DM:E Lashers farm with holy pala as well. I feel like it is kinda cliche to mention this farm spot but it rly is nice for gold income.
I used to do a lot of herb gathering and fishing/cooking for a lot of profit as well in addition.
I played a resto shaman in vanilla and imo it's the best specc, even for leveling. You get melee and spellhit, spellcrit for all nature spells, instant cast maker and the nice manatide totem. You can farm decently and its not a big difference to play full elemental.
Playing a holy paladin on ND atm and while they can aoe farm, especially with 30/21/0, I don't suggest playing paladin at all in vanilla because they feel so forced into a very limited playstyle ( single target healing / buffvendor ). Engineering is a mandatory pick for paladin's, and I don't like to be forced into tradeskills.
I have never played any healing class during Vanilla and now wonder to what extent each is viable outside raiding. I would love it if people who used to play:
could share their experience regarding: farming mats (Essence of Air in Silithius, Essence of Water in Felwood etc), pvp and questing outside raiding. If you used some hybrid spec or respecced between raids, I guess it doesn't count. I'm mostly interested in mainstream raiding healing specs.
I mained a holy priest throughout vanilla. The farming and questing is a bit slower than other classes and your ability to kill people solo is super limited if your opponent knows what they are doing. I would recommend swapping out to a DPS spec between raids or leaving the healer in raid spec and doing AoE farming with another person. Not to say it isn't still fun, you simply won't have very high efficiency in terms of kills/minute.
That being said I leveled as a twink'ed out shadow priest with engineering and it was to this day the most fun I've had leveling a character in wow.
I played a resto shaman in vanilla and imo it's the best specc, even for leveling. You get melee and spellhit, spellcrit for all nature spells, instant cast maker and the nice manatide totem. You can farm decently and its not a big difference to play full elemental.
That's what I thought but I had no experience. I was thinking that druid and shaman would be most viable for farming, etc as resto. Paladin can probably outlive anything but that will be a chore and time consuming. I had little hope for holy/disc priest.
I used to play resto sham in vanilla and never had trouble levelling. Resto has plenty of mana you can use for offensive spells, and you can also just pummel mobs with melee and keep yourself healed. You almost never die.
I played as a hybrid Disc-Holy Priest in Vanilla for all of my PVP and Raiding. I never really had any issues tunneling down mobs while leveling or (slowly) farming things. We dont have AOE capabilities outside of holy nova.
So it was a lot of "dot everything and spam smite while bubbling myself accordingly."
I enjoyed the playstyle of the Priest and will be going back to it upon the return of Classic WoW. (Was going to go UD-Warrior, but after a lot of consideration; Vanilla WoW was and will be Priest for me.)
I don't have personal experience but I knew a guy who leveled Resto druid on a private server. He hard-carried every dungeon with his healing efficiency.
He probably killed mobs more slowly, but he never died. Every healing spec is viable to solo level with. Hell, every class is viable to level without even spending any talent points. There are perks to leveling as a healer. There are some pretty juicy talents in healing trees that actually can help your damage, too.
As some have already mentioned, pseudo'Holy priest (more like a disc/holy hybrid) give good farming times on DM, I've spent more hours than I'm willing to confess in there. I haven't seen the guide linked there but if you have any doubt about how it works you can ask me specific questions.
I raided with a resto druid and when I wasn't raiding, I was on my Hunter or Warrior. I wasn't into respeccing every time I wanted to do something.