Priest Guide: Basics | Playing a Priest | Quests | Weapons and Armor | Spells, Talents, and Talent Builds | Trainers | Where to Adventure | Priest Forums Sub-Spec Guides: Healing (Pre 3.0.2), Shadow (Pre 3.0.2)

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Priests have tons of unique skills and abilities. In World of Warcraft (WoW) every class can access their non-talent based skills whenever they meet the requirement for them. Usually it's a level, but sometimes it can be a quest or a skill obtained from an old tome of knowledge. The spells that Priests have access to come from three different schools of magic. They are Holy, Discipline, and Shadow.

A Priest is probably best know for their healing spells, of which they have many to choose from. Priests have everything from large slow heals, small fast heals and heals over time. This makes choosing the right heal for the right situation very important.

Greater Heal - This is your slow casting large heal spell. If you need to heal someone a large amount this is the spell to use.

Flash Heal - This is your fast casting heal that is used when you need to heal someone quickly.

Prayer of Healing - This heals all of your party members within range for a mid-level heal.

Renew - This is an instant cast heal over time spell that helps keep someone at full health that is taking constant damage.

Priests also have several great spells referred to as buffs, or group benefits, that they can cast on themselves and other players. The main buffs that a Priest has are Power Word: Fortitude which adds health to a player, Shadow Protection which reduces shadow damage to the affected players, and potentially even Divine Spirit which boosts players spirit stat.

In addition to the great healing and buff abilities that Priests have the also have many damage causing abilities. While most of these are shadow based is at least one Holy based spell that causes damage called Smite. The main damage spells that a Priest has access to are as listed below. There are more however they are mainly talent based.

Smite - A holy damage spell that hits an enemy with Holy damage.

Mind Blast - This spell hits the enemy with shadow damage and causes high threat.

Mana Burn - This drains mana from the target while causing damage as well.

Shadow Word: Pain - This is a damage over time spell that causes shadow damage.

Shadow Word: Death - This is an instant spell that does shadow damage and is very similar to Mind Blast. However if it does not kill it's target, you also take damage.

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Talents for any class are important but for a Priest, since they can be played as a Hybrid class they are more critical than most. As a potential hybrid class how you place your talent points determines what you can do, unlike a single purpose class like a rogue who no mater how they place their talent points they still are just there for damage. That just is not the case for a Priest. You have two very viable options when playing a priest, you can either heal as either Holy or Discipline, or do damage with Shadow. These are the three different talent trees that a priest has available to them. Holy focuses heavily on large mana efficient heals. Discipline focuses on mana, buffs, and survivability and is considered by many the PvP healing tree. Lastly Shadow focuses on death and destruction, allowing you to do damage instead of heal.

A very important thing to note about talents is that you can unlearn them if you need to. This allows you to build your character one way for early levels and then change mid-way or even late game to a different style. This is a general tip and works for all classes not just paladins.

To unlearn all your talents, the first time only costs 1 gold, the second time only costs five gold, and it increments from there. This is a very nice bonus, it means you do not have to play your end-build from level 1 (well.. 10). Not many argue that a Shadow Priest is the fastest fay to level until you start doing more instances than soloing. This means that until at least level 40 and potentially even level 70 or 80, your best bet is to play a Shadow Priest. Once you have reached the level where you find you are grouping and healing, then pay for a respec and change over to Holy or Discipline.



Plan on using the re-specs, the first few don't cost that much. Do not use them as an excuse to just throw points anywhere, as that would waste your re-specializations and make you spend much more money, but rather take advantage of your ability to switch between proven existing builds at certain levels.



It may seem obvious to some, but we see people running around in the 20s doing things that are not really optimized, and they know it, but they always do it because they think it will be 'better in the end'. Well, in this game, you can wait until 'the end' to do that if you wanted.

A complete talent calculator can be found on the official World of Warcraft site here.

It is a great place to start exploring the Priest class as once you understand the talents that you can gain you are a lot closer to understanding the class itself.

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The following are various tried, true, and tested builds that are very good at doing what they are designed to do. No specialization is ever perfect to each and every player though. Personal preferences, play style, etc will dictate what works best for you as a player. These are all good starts though and should be viewed as a baseline to work from. Find one that suits your style and tailor it to your exact play style.

A note on the builds, they are all built for a level 80 Priest and show an end state talent tree. It is important to remember that when placing your talent points when leveling, where they go is not critical. It is important however to keep moving your way down the talent tree as quickly as possible to gain new abilities. This means that initially you can skip many of the talents on your way down the tree until you have either reached the bottom or have to place more at a higher level to keep moving down.

Priest builds are usually described as two different main types even though they have three different talent trees. They are referred to as healing or DPS builds. This is due to the fact that Healing builds tend to draw from both the Holy and Discipline trees in varying amounts depending on what you are looking to heal for.

Healing Builds

Holy Build - This build focuses heavily in the Holy tree just dipping into the Discipline tree for a few abilities. It picks up all the standard healing abilities like those that reduce casting time, allow mana regeneration, bigger heals and improved death. It also takes the very situational Lightwell, which many players still dislike but for a single point is generally worth taking.

This build also grabs the core group and raid healing abilities such as Circle of Healing for AoE fights, and Serendipity for mana return on over heals. Lastly it takes the 51 point talent for Healing Spirit to allow even bigger heals on a target under heavy pressure. You can find the build here: Holy Group Healer.

Discipline Build - This build focuses heavily in the Discipline tree to make it a super effective single target healer. It is able to protect the person with strong shields and use pain suppression to reduce incoming damage as well. While overall healing will not be as high as a Holy priest, there is no other healer that can keep a single target alive as well. You can find the build here: Discipline Healer.

Damage Builds

Shadow Leveling Build - This build is one that many players use while leveling, it combines survivability and damage output. It takes such key talents as Spirit Tap and Vampiric Embrace while looking for anything that helps you survive or gain mana back. It also grabs the staple abilities such as Mind Flay that help slow down players and keep them at distance. This build gets you to the middle 50's and then you can move to another build after that. You can find this build here: Shadow Leveling Build.

Shadow Group Build - This build is meant to get the most damage and benefit from the Shadow tree as possible. It's aim is to put out the most damage possible while in a group, while still providing the most benefit back through Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch. While you take Improved Psychic Scream you are really taking it to access silence for pulling casters. You can find the build here: Shadow PvE Build.

Have comments or suggestions? Thought of something that has been missed? Found an error? I would love to hear from you! Please post in our Priest Class guide forum or email me at [email protected]