This is intended to be a comprehensive guide for Holy Priests (at level 80, healing). There’s a lot of flexibility in Holy, so instead of giving you stats and trees to aim for, I’ll try to explain the basics of the class and spec. Please ask questions or offer feedback as this is a work in progress.
If you’re looking for a more in-depth analysis of Holy Priests, you’re looking for the Elitist Jerks guide. That, and other resources linked at the end of this guide.
In WOTLK, Discipline healing is very viable, as either prevention or main tank healing. This guide,
however, will focus on Holy Priests.
There's a lot of information here, things are sectioned out so that you can find what you need
Contents:
Talents
Spells and Strategy
Gear
Glyphs
Interface
Resources
Talents
What talents you choose will depend a lot on your heal style. There are a few talents that you will want to pick up for sure, but I encourage you to play around with your spec, and see what works best. There’s a lot of options in your build. Recount (addon) has a nice feature that shows what heals you used during a fight, and how much they healed. If you see that you’re not using Greater Heal a lot, you might not want to spec in GH related talents. Renew is another spell that has a lot of talents associated with it.
If you just hit 80 and need a quick-and-dirty spec for 5-mans, I’ve made one here:
Molten World of Warcraft Armory - Priest Talent Calculator
This is NOT meant to be a raiding build, instead focusing on efficiency and maximizing heals so that you can find out what you like.
More of a raiding build would be:
Molten World of Warcraft Armory - Priest Talent Calculator
Assuming you use Renew a lot and not Greater Heal. If you're never going OOM, you can take some points out of regen talents (like Holy Concentration)
Please read up on the talents so that you know what you’re getting yourself into. (Minimum: tooltips)
Without further ado, specific talent discussion:
Note: Important talents are starred (*), feel free to skip other discussions unless you're curious.
Holy
Healing Focus: If you’re taking AoE damage, you’ll probably want this. Not required for all fights, but it definitely helps with Garfrost or Festergut, where the whole group is taking damage.
Holy Specialization: A lot of talents proc from crit, so this is a good choice. You could maybe steal a point or two from it, but only if you know what you’re doing.
Improved Renew, Improved Healing, Divine Fury: Note that Improved Healing and Divine Fury ONLY impact your Greater Heal. You may find that you aren’t using Greater Heal a lot, yet DF and IH require 8 talent points to fully spec. The same thing goes for Imp. Renew. Check your Recount to see what spells you are actually using.
* Inspiration: It’s not going to increase your healing amount, but get it. An extra 10% is a lot, especially on a tank.
Holy Reach: Holy Priests are primarily group healers, so get at least one point here. Two points isn’t a bad idea, especially for fights where people are spaced out (or in PuGs, where no one knows where they’re supposed to be).
Healing Prayers: Get it.
Spirit of Redemption: Can mean the different between a wipe and a kill. Also lets everyone know you died. If you’re dieing a lot, feel free to Glyph for SoR. As iceing on the cake, you get 5% more spirit, which helps out a lot of talents. It’s only one point, so you should probably get it.
Spiritual Guidance: A nice buff to your spellpower, and a lot of your gear is going to have spirit anyways. This is part of what makes spirit a preferred stat for priests.
Surge of Light: Free, instant cast flash heal. What’s not to love? You don’t have to put two points in this, depending on how useful these free heals are to you. Of course, you can always use the buff for casting a smite if no one needs a heal, but that won’t contribute to your Serendipity stacking.
Spiritual Healing: Get it.
Holy Concentration: Very helpful for mana regen, and you should have a fair amount of crit to proc it. NOTE: As of writing, this does not proc from Empowered Renew crits, this should be an easy fix, though.
Lightwell: If your guild knows how to use it, great. If you’re PuGing, no. Actually one of the best heals in the game, but most people don’t bother clicking it.
Note: Lightwell is not healing as much as it should as of 1/25, so not really worth the TP
Blessed Resilience: Yes, it’s a PvP talent, but if you almost NEVER cast greater heal, you’ll probably want to put points into this and Test of Faith.
Body and Soul: It’s fun, and it can get people out of trouble, fast. There’s not too many fights right now that really need it, though, and I’m not a fan of PW:S in raids anyways. Feel free to experiment though. (Speed is useless if the shielded aren’t [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMxW36WbW6M"]moving[/URL)
Empowered Healing: There’s some debate about this talent, as most of the benefit goes to Greater Heal. If you never use Greater Heal (and you might not use it much as a group healer), you might be better off with other talents. See: Blessed Resilience and Test of Faith.
* Serendipity: A cornerstone of WOTLK healing. This will allow you to get off your Prayer of Healing and Greater Heals out in a reasonable amount of time. Note that you don’t have to use this buff if you have it - no need to waste mana on useless heals. A flash heal (even a free one from SoL) will renew the buff if you don’t want a 3x stack to expire. Binding heal will give you 2x this buff, but that’s probably a bug.
Don’t fret about casting PoH or Gheal without this buff either - they still heal for a lot, and it’s faster to start casting than to try to get stacks up.
If you want to go heavily into Renew, you could perhaps drop points from this, but beginning healers should spec this fully.
Empowered Renew: This one goes back to the whole do-you-renew thing - if you use Renew, get it. If not, save the points. Putting one point into it is probably a good idea, because this makes it an “instant” heal and therefore can crit and proc your talents (in theory, though there are bugs related to this here)
Circle of Healing: Need it. Still testing as to whether this is a “smart” heal here, but you can’t beat an instant 5-6 target heal. PoH still heals for more, though, so plan your heals accordingly.
Test of Faith: Heals more when you need to heal more. Renews cast below 50% retain this buff. You can put points into this if you don’t want as many Renew talents,
Divine Providence: Yep.
* Guardian Spirit: Get it. Glyphed, it’s a handy tool to increase your healing for a short amount of time. Also functions as an extremely cheap heal when proc’d, and will save whoever it is casted on most of the time. Be liberal with usage - it has a short CD. Don’t be afraid to cast it on yourself - who’s going to heal if you’re dead? Also great if a tank is getting low or you expect him to get low (I used this a lot for Tyrannus when I was grinding up).
Discipline
Twin Disciplines: Think Renew, Prayer of Mending, Circle of Healing. Unbreakable will is OK in some specific fights, but really a PvP talent. TD is almost always what you will use.
Imp. Inner Fire and Imp. Fortitude: Everyone loves more stamina, and Inner Fire buffs your SP. Plus the other talents suck.
* Meditation: This is why you spec into the Discipline tree. If you run out of mana, people will die, and you’re going to need all the regen you can get. Also makes spirit more useful than mp5 among other talents.
Spells and Strategy
What spells should you use? All of them, of course! Why else would you have them? Alright, so you don’t use every spell in the book, but the strength of Priests is that they have a spell for every situation. This also makes them the hardest to master, IMO. Get to know your spells and make an effort to use the best spell for the situation, not the easiest.
Healing:
Obviously, Lesser Heal and Heal are out. No reason to use them. Moving on:
Flash Heal: This is your default single-target heal. Gets Serendipity stacking, crits to proc other talents, etc. You should really start questioning whether you should be using this if more than three people need heals, or if you and someone else need a heal. (If you have a free Flash Heal for SoL, be more liberal with it)
Greater Heal: This is your bomb single-target heal. Note that there are about 8 talent points that directly relate to this spell and nothing else, so check your spec if you aren’t using it. Very nice with Serendipity, especially when dealing with over-buffed health pools. Of course, you probably don’t want to use a Serendipity stack for this when you could use PoH, but at the same you shouldn't use PoH if you don’t need it. If you cast this without the buff someone will probably land a heal before you, unless you’re in a 5-man.
Binding Heal: It’s like Flash heal, except you use it when you and someone else need a quick heal. This will proc Serindipity 2x, which is nice and probably a bug. If you don’t have enough time to get off a PoH and CoH isn’t enough, you can easily save 2-3 people by casting a Guardian on one person, then binding with as many people as you can to try to survive damage. Particularly useful when you’ve “almost” killed the boss.
Circle of Healing: Awesome. Not sure if the “smart heal” mechanic works here, but definitely one of your top heals. Probably your first choice for AoE damage mitigation, know when the CD is up (see addons).
Prayer of Healing: Slow cast time, negated with Serendipity, this is your group bomb heal. Unlike CoH, this only heals the group it is cast on, so useful for raid-wide damage. Don’t be afraid to cast without Serendipity if you can, as it does heal the most of your simple group heals. CoH + Flash of Light and a binding heal is a quick way to build Serendipity if you want heals asap. Apart from the “smart” mechanic of CoH that might save people with low HP, you may want to cast this before CoH so that you can get the maximum amount of healing done/least overhealing and save the leftovers for CoH. Most expensive group heal (other than DH), so use sparingly if your mana reserves are low.
Guardian Spirit: As discussed in talents, a great way to save a tank or someone else critical (like you). If you glyph it, you can use it as a boost to your healing and not worry so much about wasting it.
Lightwell: You can cast this at the beginning of an encounter to get the most from the CD. A very mana-efficient heal - actually the best healing spell in the game. Requires DPS to think though, which is hard for some. If you’re in a guild, probably not a bad choice if they learn how to use it.
Note: Lightwell is not healing as much as it should as of 1/25, so not really worth the TP.
Holy Nova: The forgotten brother of group heals, Holy Nova is seldom useful in raids (only works on your party), and situational in 5-mans. It’s instant, though, and spammable, so if you’re taking constant damage it can be useful. Cheapest group heal you have, also least amount of healing.
Prayer of Mending: Set it on someone you know will take damage, and let it go. It can only be on one target at a time, so don’t bother casting it at every CD. If it lands on you, you can cast a SW: D to get it off. Keep one bouncing around at all times, usually.
Power Word: Shield: Not as efficient as flash heal, the only thing this spell has going for it is that it’s instant and preventative. Useful if you know that you won’t get a heal off in time and your PoM is on CD. If there’s a Discipline Spec’d priest in your raid, you have no business casting this because their shields are more awesome than yours, and you will create a debuff that doesn’t let them use theirs. Other spells will "heal" for more if you have time.
Renew: Your only HoT: Heal over time. It’s pretty good though, especially with talents. Note, though, that if you’re always keeping people topped off, this spell isn’t doing much good. Let it do its job and try not to cast on top of it unless you need to. Very efficient, not a bad idea to keep one on the tank.
Divine Hymn: Kinda like an “oh s**t” button, a group heal on steroids. Cast it when you’re in trouble, and note you’ll probably only get one use per boss. I’m not sure how the smart heal part of this works on Molten, as I haven’t had a chance to really study the mechanics here. Very expensive, but cast Inner Focus and it’s free - not a bad idea to macro the two together.
Note: Bugged here, so doesn't heal nearly as much as it should.
Regen:
Once you hit about 30% mana, you should start looking into your regen options unless the boss is almost dead.
Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend: If you have time to cast this, great. This will increase your mana pool for a while and because Shadowfiend works off the size of your pool, it’s a good idea to cast the two at the same time. Otherwise, Shadowfiend is an instant cast that you can easily get off between heals.
Potions: One per fight, no reason not to have one. Instant mana gain too, in case you forgot to regen earlier
Inner Focus: If you have this, a great way to buy time and get some regen in. Divine Hymn will get you the most bang for your buck here. PoH isn't bad either.
FSR: The five second rule. If you stop casting for 5 seconds, your mana regen from spirit is 100% instead of 50%. Not as useful in fights now, where people will probably die if you do this and you don’t get a whole lot of mana out of the FSR. Still, if you notice you’re low a lot, try to space out your heals or stop casting to stay OOFSR.
Aggro
Fade: Aggro dump spell - use it if you get aggro. Aggro should be restored after it runs out, not sure how that works here, but make sure the tank gets on the mob that attacked you so it doesn’t come back.
Psychic Scream: You probably don’t want to use this, as it can cause more chaos than it is worth. Useful in some fights with adds, and can be used as an absolute last resort if mobs are going to kill you and they won’t find any friends when they are feared.
Basic Healing Strategy
Default to Flash and Binding Heal to build Serendipity if no other spells would be useful. Keep a PoM up at all times if possible. If groups are “bombed”, use PoH if you have time and cast CoH to finish them off. CoH if more than 3 people have damage. Know when CoH CD is up.
Cast renew on damaged targets not needing immediate heals. Use FoL procs to heal or as smite if all are topped off and Serendipity is full.
Greater Heal if a single target is being bombed and other healers need help.
If someone is about to die, your best option is Guardian, PoM and Shielding are also instant protections that may help.
Divine Hymn + Inner Focus is a raid-wide “oh s**t” button.
Look into your regen options before you hit 30% mana.
Your goal is to kill the boss, not keeping everyone alive. That’s certainly a secondary goal, but sometimes you need to save mana so that you can heal everyone else. Usually the tank isn’t expendable unless the boss is very near dead or if you have an OT ready. You are somewhat expendable because you can go into SoR for 15 seconds when you die.
It’s not about the meters and sniping heals from others, it’s about killing the boss.
Gear
Deciding on gear is less of an issue for beginning priests, as you’ll probably be going straight from green to blue to purple (or green to purple). Still, it’s a good idea to know what you need. A rule of thumb is to gear, gem and enchant to get enough mana or regen to heal an entire fight, then look into increasing your HPS (heals per second)
Keep in mind that regen is computed by:
MP5 = 3 * (0.001 + sqrt(Int) * Spirit * 0.005575)
so Intellect is also an OK stat for getting regen up.
Stats
Haste: Gets your heals out faster. If you have a lot of mana left over at the end of fights, you probably need more haste.
Crit: A lot of talents proc on crits, so not a bad stat either. Balance with haste.
Spirit: More spellpower, more regen. This is one of the best stats to get when you're starting out, as it gives you the most regen while buffing SP at the same time.
Intellect: Intellect is probably the best stat to get if you’re running OOM because it gives you both a bigger pool and contributes to regen. Regen stats have been nerfed a bit, hence the need for a larger pool as well as additional regen.
Spellpower: Increases the size of your heals, thus giving you more bang for your buck. Get this more once you’ve got enough mana for a fight.
MP5: Not as useful as spirit or int as a regen stat, but still gives you some.
Hit: Heals always hit, give pieces with +Hit to casters. No use for this.
Stamina: You need to stay alive for the fights, but your gear should have enough stamina on it in most cases.
Because you’ll be competing with all the caster classes for gear, you’ll probably end up with spirit gear, which isn’t really a bad thing - you can use spirit. If a piece doesn’t have +hit on it or any other obvious DPS stats, it should be fair game.
Glyphs
Major Glyphs
Pick three, depending on your style.
Circle of Healing: Very good for raiding, free 6th heal. Useless in 5 mans.
Flash Heal: If you’re going OOM, get this. Good for starting out with.
Prayer of Healing: Makes your bomb heal even more bomb, adding a HoT
Lightwell: If you use lightwell, perhaps.
Renew: Helps to make renew more useful by making it heal faster
Spirit of Redemption: If you die a lot, this give you almost 21 seconds of free heal time, which is a lot.
Minor Glyphs
Less critical, get whatever you want.
Levitate: A lot of fun
Shadowfiend: Cheap insurance
Shadow Protection: Makes life easier
Interface
There’s no way to get around it: Without a click-to-heal addon, you’re not healing to your full potential. If you’re selecting your targets then casting, there’s going to be a delay, probably the equivalent of at least 200 haste. A tenth of a second can mean the difference between life and death, so there’s no excuse to not have a click-to-heal addon (you could do the same things with macros if you really wanted, but addons make this a lot easier to configue)
Also, the Blizzard raid frames suck. Pick up some new raid frames and customize them so that you can see debuffs easily (magic, disease), HoTs, and whatever else you need to know for each fight.
An addon to help you keep track of your cooldowns is also useful.
Here’s a few useful addons. Make sure you download the 3.3.5a version, see the guide for addons if you need help finding something
Healbot. A good starting point, lacks some customization but really easy to get started. Click to heal and frames all-in-one.
Grid. Simple raid frames. A little hard to configure, but lots of options.
Clique. Click-to-heal addon. Use with raid frames of your choice
Power Auras. A good way to keep track of your CDs.
Forte. Awesome CD tracker bar.
Quartz. Very informative castbar.
Recount, Omen, Gearscore. General raid addons. Don't bother with Gearscore if you're in a guild, because it sucks. I mention it only because it can give you some general information about gear that is only a small part of what potential a player has.
Cooldowns. Cooldown timers on Blizz action bars.
Also, invest in a 5 or more button mouse if you can. Binding heals to all those keys makes them available right at your fingertips, increasing reaction time.
I've included all the 3.3.5a versions of these addons here:
2shared - download Priest Addons.zip
Remember to pick and choose, Grid+Healbot is just going to give you two sets of raid frames.
Member
Quote
