by Bethany Myers

So you’re ready to venture into the thankless realm of healing? It’s not for the faint of heart. You will be begged to heal an instance you hate and blamed for deaths that aren’t your fault, only to lose gear upgrades to DPS — all in the same run! On the other hand, healing can be a nice diversion from faceroll macro-mashing, and it’s definitely nice to have instant dungeon queues.

Whether you’re changing specs at level 80 to help your guild progression, stepping into The Deadmines as a level 18 healer or twinking out a battleground medic — here are some helpful hints as you prepare to make those health bars greener.

5-man PvE
Regular dungeons, heroics and group quests in which you are the only healer
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by Dawn Moore

The following is meant to be an introductory guide to the priest holy tree. It is not going to tell you what to do step by step (at least not until you get to the enchants section) instead it intends to show you some options from which you can get started. If you’re already a veteran holy priest, feel free to add anything I left out in the comments so readers who use this column as a resource can get as much help as possible.

1. What is Holy?

Holy is one of a priest’s two healing specs. In raiding, it is most frequently used to fill a raid healing role, where as in 5-man dungeons it offers a diverse palette of abilities to keep any party alive.

2. Holy benefits

• Flexible to many different styles of play.
• Benefits from almost every caster stat and thus makes it easy to find gear upgrades.
• As a raid healer, holy offers excellent reactive and preemptive healing options.
• Provides a variety of utility spells to assist the raid.

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by @Dtotheug @ World of Matticus

What spec and glyphs should I should I use as a Holy Paladin for raiding?

That is a good question and really depends on how you want to play and what your role is in the raid. Currently there are two prevailing specs and each have their plus and minuses.

The first spec is the Flash of Light spec (51/5/15) which focuses on a bigger Flash of Light (FoL) heal, more mitigation via Sacred Shield (because Sacred Shield scales with Spell Power), increases the HoT effect of your Infusion of Light talent, and relies more on your healing spells to crit. The problem with this spec is that if you are not mostly using FoL you’re going to have to watch your mana pool closely because Holy Lights and Holy Shocks are going to eat through your mana pool.

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by Matt Low

Here’s a quick recap of what is known in the upcoming Priest changes for the 3.2 patch. There has not been a whole lot of changes to the Priest talent trees or to the talents themselves. But let’s go over what we know:

Healing

The signature group heal for Priests (Prayer of Healing) has been nerfed significantly. The spell power percentage has been lowered from 80.7% to 52.6%. Ouch. That’s a pretty strong blow. Prayer of Healing has helped me when I was participating in several of the Ulduar hard modes.

Discipline Priests are going to be annoyed since the cooldown of Penance has increased from 10 seconds to 12 seconds (thereby making the Glyph of Penance almost mandatory).

Lastly a change to Inspiration has it set so that when the buff is active, physical damage taken by targets is reduced by 3/7/10% instead of simply increasing the target’s armor. That may not be a lot, but at least it’s something positive.

Glyph of Power Word: Shield gains a minor change. It now has the ability to activate Divine Aegis.

Shadow

A cool change is that the cooldown on Dispersion has been reduced to 2 minutes (from 3 minutes). That should help Shadow Priests survive a little more whether they are raiding or hitting up battlegrounds.

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I’v noticed a lack of real Pvp tips from real pvpers, so i’v decided to type up this quick guide for how to PvP as aHoly Paladin. Befor I begin I just want to let you know I have gladiator rated teams, I am a arena master (all achs from S6 not no skill S5), I’m currently the top rated 3s for the alliance on my server, I’m currently the top rated holy paladin for the alliance on my server.(Here is my armory I’m affraid i’ll get banned so it’s a nameless armory, I know i’m dumn but i’m trying to be safe…If it’s really req i’ll post my actual one but till then here is My Armory )

I’ll start with some common specs and a little about them.

1. Holy Fusion
Adv: Flexable!, avg heals, avg mana pool, avg damage, easy to kite with, grate for possitioning!. (My fav :3)
DisAdv: None if played correctly!
Common partners(2v2): Dk, Warrior, Ret Paladin, Lock, Rogue, Feral Druid.
Common partners(3v3): Dk/Warrior, Shadow Cleave, Lock/Warrior, Hunter/DK

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by Wynthea

In 3.1, PvE Priests are in a good place. We have two distinct and raid-viable healing specs, and enough good places to put our talents that you can make arguments for several “cookie-cutter” builds.

When I first started rooting around in the WoW-blogosphere, I came upon a post over at Dwarfpriest that laid out each talent and what it did – and it helped me understand so much about my class mechanics that I thought I’d borrow a page from her grimoire and go over the trees as they stand now. (However, while she included our shadowy brethren, I won’t. Sorry guys, it’s not that I don’t love your replenishment you, it’s just that I’m not going to claim to be knowledgeable about that strange tree of yours.)

After introducing each talent, I’ll spend some time showing how to actually make a build – by walking you through mine, as well as other examples.

A quick note on our beloved Disc tree: If you Google Priest Specs, you’ll likely find a lot of people talking about how Priests have “14 mandatory talent points.” (Sometimes they say 13.) What they really mean is that there are some talents in the Disc tree that are so universally outstanding that every Priest should take advantage of them – PvE, PvP, Holy, Disc, or Shadow. These talents are Twin Disciplines, Improved Inner Fire, and Meditation.  It takes 10 points in Discipline to get to Meditation and 3 to max it out. The 14th point is Inner Focus, which I agree should be considered mandatory. You can fool around a little in the 2nd tier with Improved Fort, Martyrdom, and Silent Resolve, but skipping those others will handicap any spec you try to put together.

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by Wynthea

So now that you know what each talent is, does, and have a basic idea of when it’s most effective, let’s take a look at how to build a spec:

Step 1:

To start, plug in those mandatory 14 points:

• Twin Disciplines – 5
• Improved Inner Fire – 3
• Improved Power Word: Fortitude – 2* **
• Meditation – 3
• Inner Focus – 1

*PvEers: If you are 100% certain that another Priest in your raid will have Imp:Fort, and not mind buffing, and you REALLY feel the need for threat reduction, you can move these two points into Silent Resolve. I don’t think it’s worth it, but it is an option.

**PvPers: Choose Martyrdom rather than Imp:Fort.

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I’v noticed a lack of real Pvp tips from real pvpers, so i’v decided to type up this quick guide for how to PvP as aHoly Paladin. Befor I begin I just want to let you know I have gladiator rated teams, I am a arena master (all achs from S6 not no skill S5), I’m currently the top rated 3s for the alliance on my server, I’m currently the top rated holy paladin for the alliance on my server.(Here is my armory I’m affraid i’ll get banned so it’s a nameless armory, I know i’m dumn but i’m trying to be safe…If it’s really req i’ll post my actual one but till then here is My Armory )

I’ll start with some common specs and a little about them.

1. Holy Fusion
Adv: Flexable!, avg heals, avg mana pool, avg damage, easy to kite with, grate for possitioning!. (My fav :3)
DisAdv: None if played correctly!
Common partners(2v2): Dk, Warrior, Ret Paladin, Lock, Rogue, Feral Druid.
Common partners(3v3): Dk/Warrior, Shadow Cleave, Lock/Warrior, Hunter/DK

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Posted by Kaniget

Holy Paladin PvE guide.

Wow! Thanks for the sticky! I hope to keep this guide updated throughout 3.1 and beyond. Thanks to everyone that gave me their input.

With the amount of questions, and the fact that people don’t like to follow links, I figured it was high time it was put together in one spot.

This guide is still evolving. There is a lot I want to add that I haven’t gotten to yet. You can check back for updates once in a while.

Constructive criticism appreciated.

Contents:
1.HPAL 101, intro to healadins
2.Holy talents batman!
3.From HL to SS; your arsenal
4.Addons, you know you want ‘em
5.Functionality; what stats do you need?
6.Fashion; what to wear, gems/chants
7. Advanced Techniques; Holy in raids
8. Best in Slot and further reading

This guide is primarily intended to help out with any questions a Holy paladin may have for PvE content, whether they are a fresh first time 80, or have been rocking their pally since Vanilla. Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, let me explain what this guide will NOT cover; PvP, Leveling, Tanking, Non-Holy healing builds, Shockadins, and DPS.

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