Priest Build Advice ;o)

Hey there peeps ! Some of you may remember me, I was in the guild for a few weeks before I migrated servers to play with some RL friends and ex-LOTRO friends.

Anyway, I'm still loving my priest and am almost at L70. I also levelled a warlock gnome to L60 which was great fun, but have now jumped back onto my priest. I've been levelling shadow, but want to swop to Holy for end game raid healing. Since my guild are only just getting to the point where we're going to be raiding, I thought I would pick your brains about good holy priest specs for general raiding, since I know you have a lot of uber experienced priests in the guild ;o)

I'm more of less ok with talent builds (but any pointers to good talent specs would be most welcome), but I'm still a little confused about which stats/ attributes to prioritise, and also what add-ons to use for healing. Any suggestions are most welcome ! I've had a poke around the official WoW forums, but they're very heavy with spam and a lot of differenet opinions.

The main stats/ attributes I've been going for with shadow are: 1 intellect 2 spirit 3 spellpower 4 stamina. Some blogs and the like also say for end game healing, you need to think about spell crit and mp5. I confess I'm not sure what order to prioritise/ balance these stats in however.

Thanks in advance.

Bery.

p.s. Great to see you guys and girls are still having fun in WoW with Enthusiasm !

Hello Berylia

I guess the first thing to decide is, what flavour of holy priest are you going to be? You need to decide:

- are you going to use Renew or not?
- will you be using PW: Shield (ie, is there a disc priest with you in your raids)

The answers to these two questions will determine how you build your talent spec. You mention you're OK with speccing, so consider this just a reminder that if you're never going to use Renew, don't waste the points on all the talents that boost it, and if you have a disc priest, Body and Soul probably isn't worth having.

Renew style:

3/3 in Empowered Renew, 3/3 in Improved Renew - steal points from talents that boost flash heal if you find you're lacking a few.

Non Renew style:

Mostly looking to boost your CoH/PoH/FH type spells, although I'd always take 1/3 in Empowered Renew just because it can be handy if you're twiddling thumbs with nothing else to do (making Renew able to crit will help with the buffs you get when your spells crit) - you basically use Renew to proc some Surge of Lights.

Glyphs:

If you'll be raiding, then Glyph of Circle of Healing for the extra target is useful. Holy glyphs are pretty dull otherwise; take Renew if you use it, Guardian Spirit and Flash Heal are also worth a look.

Stats:

You mention that you're level 70 at the moment - so I shouldn't worry about hunting out specific stats until you're closer to 80. Any of the cloth drops in levelling dungeons will be fine for you to use. Keep an eye on your mana management while dungeoneering - if you're constantly oom then bear that in mind when choosing quest rewards/rolling for drops.

At 80, intellect is still marginally ahead of spirit for Holy priests, but the difference is small enough not to lose sleep over. Generally speaking, choose higher ilvl gear - a lot of your stuff will have both int and spirit on it anyway. Int will also give your crit rating a little boost, spirit will give your spellpower a nudge.

Spirit is better than mp5 for holy priests for regen.

Spellpower: if in doubt, whack a spellpower gem in. More seriously, spellpower is never a bad stat to go for, but you should always make sure you have longevity nailed before throughput.

Haste: omnomnom (dammit, my healing is resto shaman flavoured, so I can't get enough of that hasty goodness) - again, will probably be on your gear anyhow.

Crit: again, useful to have, but will turn up on gear anyway.

So I suppose you could say at lower gear levels, int > spirit = spellpower > haste = crit > mp5

It's kind of hard to give you a definitive 'these stats are best, shun the others, SHUUUNNN TTTHHHEEEEMMM' because a lot of your stat preferences will be down to your personal style of healing. For me, I'm all about haste and spellpower - I want to get those heals slammed in as fast as I can, fnarr, but I'm not a gambling girl, so I don't stack crit on purpose - I just take what comes naturally. You might get some useful info from this:

http://www.guildox.com/wr.asp?Cla=16&Art=8&Max=20&Gem=3&n1=1&n2=1&mh=0.3059&mp5=1&sta=0.2&mcr=0.3763&spd=0.6&Int=0.748&spi=0.6397&Ver=6

I would have thought you'd just roflstomp through heroics to gear up, but if you want a level 80 gear guide, you can look here for some very basic and probably outdated pointers:

http://www.worldofmatticus.com/2008/11/27/gearing-your-fresh-level-80-holy-priest-matts-recommendations/


Addons:

http://www.wow.com/2010/08/05/addon-spotlight-helpers-for-priest-healers/
http://www.wow.com/2010/08/26/addon-spotlight-batis-healer-grid-layouts/

And lastly, this is a good place to have a read:

http://bobturkey.wordpress.com/priestly-resources/

I hope that helps; I haven't played my priest for some time now and I was disc rather than holy, but perhaps there is some useful information still for you.

GL!

Rhizz

Brilliant stuff, thank you ! I'll have a good read through all of that later on ;o)