by Mathew McCurley

Healer priests, this one’s for you.

Guardian Spirited

Guardian Spirit is one of those spells in the priest’s arsenal that is just plain sexy. Tanks simply love Guardian Spirit, and it really gives the priest something that stands out as an awesome priestly ability. Save your life? Yes, please.

Guardian Spirited is a neat little addon that is designed to announce to your channels of choice when your Guardian Spirit is activated, on which target and whether the spell has saved your target’s life or the duration ran out with no need to activate. Simple, straightforward options allow you to customize which channels get the messages, but the defaults are tuned to your party or raid — while in raids, the addon defaults to announcing in /ra, for instance.

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by Dawn Moore

So here’s the situation: you’re putting together a raid and either your normal pally is absent, for some reason (read: debauchery), or you’re in a pug and there are no paladins to be found in ye ol’ trade chat. What do you do? Can your other healers handle the tanks or are you doomed to a wipe fest?

Holy paladins are probably the most influential healers a raid team has because what they do for the raid is so important. That role is, of course, healing the tanks.

But don’t think that a healadin’s influence is just the result of what he does and not what he is; holy paladins heal the tanks because they’re very good at it. They are designed for single target healing, and have been that way for a very long time. Currently, a paladin’s bread and butter spell, Holy Light, is the strongest single target heal (not on a long cooldown) around. Paired up with Beacon of a Light and you have to wonder why they think they can’t raid heal you’ve got more single-target fire power than a disc priest can produce in twice the time, and that’s counting the absorbs.

So here’s the big question: do you really need a holy paladin to raid?

The answer is no.

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by Dawn Moore

It’s time for the second installment of my holy and discipline healing guide. Let’s get started.

Choosing your character’s race

Priest racial abilities disappeared way back when, so there really is no reason to try and argue that certain character races make for a better priest than another these days. You should pick a race that you’re going to be happy with for the days and nights you want to put into this character.

That said, I’m going to give you some food for thought in case you’re open to any of the races. I’ll be looking at it from the perspective of “if you’re going to be doing this, you might want to show this race.” Obviously if your personal preferences direct you elsewhere, you should do that.

Alliance

Draenei The most influential racial ability of the Draenei is Heroic Presence, their 1% hit bonus to party or raid group. As a healer, the hit won’t do much for you, but if you look at the big picture, the hit is really nice if you want to support a shadow off spec later. Passively, the hit is a kind benefit to your party and raid, and Alliance raid leaders will usually arrange groups so that there is a draenei aura for everyone.

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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

I have a 6140 gear score.

Don’t get excited though; I just said that to rile some of you up. I loathe the concept of the gear score addon, and I actually had to look it up just to know what mine was.

The real reason I bring up my gear score is to give you, my fair readers, an idea of what kind of gear I typically work with as a player. If you have no idea what that number translates to, it is full 264 item level gear with a few 277 level items sprinkled in. So for the most part I have a fantastic set of gear. If I walk into a PUG 5-man, most players will glance me over and immediately feel at ease about their fate for the next 15 to 20 minutes. This is ironic though, because despite the quality of my gear being well above average, I am currently rocking a gear set far worse for healing heroic dungeons than I was 3 tiers ago.

Why, pray tell, is that? Because my guild and I have spent the last three weeks working on the heroic Lich King encounter and I’ve been slowly optimizing my gear for the past month in preparation for this one, single fight. How’s my mana regeneration? Pathetic: I get all of my mana return not from trinkets, flasks or mustache-twirling meta gems, but from carefully timed Power Word: Shields and the Rapture trick.

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by Dawn Moore

This week we’ll discuss a style of priest healing that is becoming popular among raiders: discipline raid healing. Though the concepts behind it are extremely simple to understand and execute, this style of play seems to have slipped under the radar of many players despite its amazing potential. Tag along with me after the jump and I’ll fill you in on the basics and benefits of disc raid healing. Holy priests, I’m talking to you, too.

Unfortunately for the average discipline priest, there were quick and inappropriate assessments made early in Wrath of the Lich King which tagged discipline as a “tank healing” spec. While I do agree that discipline’s burst response and damage mitigation lend themselves extremely well to healing a tank, there is a great deal of potential that will go untapped if a discipline priest never ventures outside of a little bit of cross healing. Take note – discipline priest are single target healers, not tank healers!

Disclaimer: In the hardest of progression content, I do not encourage cross healing! Remember: “Honor and shame from no condition rise; act well your part, there all the honor lies.” Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man. Do your job, and trust your fellow healers to do theirs. Staying on your target will make it easier to identify where a healing problem is, and that’s the first step to correcting it. If you’re in farm content, however, go nuts – actually, go shadow.

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found this by LoSing a priest >.> it’s pretty cool.

Start by heading to the underbelly of dalaran:

Move to around the boxes here

Stand here as in the picture, and get feared =D:

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As every good priest knew in season 6, you could buff Divine Spirit rank 6 and 5, and they would count as 2 buffs, without the spirit itself stacking. That way you would have that bit more dispel/purge protection on your important buffs, which might just be giving you the edge you need to pull off a win.

This was nerfed a while ago, but ive now found a new way!

Buff Prayer of Spirit rank 2! (not max rank), and then Divine Spirit rank 6 (max rank).
Same effect, and not that noticeable by others as its 2 different icons

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by Wynthea

This installment will review my Discipline spec, which is NOT a cookie-cutter build.

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.

Step 2:

Decide whether this is a Holy build, or a Discipline build. For this example, I’ll walk you through my Disc spec and my reasons for each point. This will be a bit different: because I usually raid Holy, my Holy build is very utilitarian. My Disc build, on the other hand, is specifically for General Vezax Hardmode – the only 25-man fight where I use it. (I do use it in 10 man content for things like Iron Council hardmode, but due to gearing levels, the spec doesn’t need to be perfect to handle the fight.)

Step 3:

Because this is a Disc build, and Disc builds focus on single target or tank healing, after plugging in the mandatory points in the Disc tree, we should flip over to Holy, since we KNOW that we will want Inspiration, and get those points out of the way. This will give a better idea of how many points we have to work with when we are making either-or decisions deep in the Disc tree itself.

The first step is to max out Holy Specialization – I do this in Holy to allow more Haste on my gear, but in Discipline because of how Crit is heavily favored by deeper Discipline talents. Next, because I personally use Renew rather heavily to even out spiking tank damage, I max out Improved Renew.

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