Priest is, in all honesty, my favorite class to play. I couldn't quite explain why, except to say that I've tried other classes and none of them resonate with me on the same level that Priests do. However, the class isn't perfect -- I've got to say that there are some legitimate concerns about the classes' abilities. So today we're going to discuss the Priest's top class concerns.
Healing ability and group utility
With the debate over Mages (who have long argued that they should be the top DPS class because their class description on the official web page suggested they were the best damage dealers), I think Blizzard has made it reasonably clear (by altering Mage text) that they don't want any single class to be the "best" at anything. However, with Shadow Priests getting raid slots over healing Priests, you have to wonder what's wrong with Priest healing that leaves them unable to compete with the other classes.
And it's a common concern that a raid only needs one Priest. After all, once you have one priest, what does a second or third bring to a raid -- besides healing ability that can be matched by other classes? An extra Druid will bring an extra Innervate and an extra Rebirth. An extra Paladin will allow every raid member to have an additional blessing. An extra Shaman can provide additional totem buffs. But a single Priest can fully buff a raid with Fortitude and Divine Spirit -- a second one doesn't bring anything new to the table.
Two talent trees for one purpose
For healing talents, Paladins have their Holy tree, Druids and Shamans have their Restoration tree. But to get all of the good healing talents, Priests have to invest in two talent trees -- Holy and Discipline. The same types of talents in the other classes' one healing tree are spread out across two Priest talent trees, neither of which have a clear direction. To be a good healer, a Priest can't just throw 41 points in Holy or 41 points in Discipline -- but needs a bit scattered between both.
While I'll be the first to admit that Lightwell has its uses -- I'm not going to say it has them often, and certainly not often enough to warrant spending 31 talent points on it. Points in both the Holy and Discipline trees are necessary to be a good healer, and yet throwing all of your points into healing talents in either or both trees won't make you any better of a healer than someone who needs only spend 41 points in a single tree -- and it won't give you the unique abilities that will encourage your guild to bring you above another healing class.
Confused talent trees
Not only do Priests need more talent points to get all of the useful healing talents, but the healing trees available to them are confused, with no clear purpose. Discipline gives a Priest reduced threat; additional mana and mana management tools; improved/additional buffs; some survivability; and some improved damage talents. Holy gives a Priest more powerful heals; improved holy damage talents; some survivability; and two additional healing spells that most Priests feel are quite situational. Shadow is the only one of the trees which seems to have a clear and defined purpose: it's a straight-up DPS tree.
But take a look at the high-end talents for Discipline and Holy. Discipline seems to be mana management and survivability until you get to 31 points -- Power Infusion, an ability to improve the damage or healing output of yourself or others. And at 41 points, there's Pain Suppression, which reduces damage taken and the chance for your buffs to be dispelled for 8 seconds. PvP survivability, perhaps?
And in Holy... at 21 points, we have Spirit of Redemption, which requires you to die before it helps you at all. At 31 points we have Lightwell, which has its uses, but is far too situational to make most people want to spend 31 points on it. And at 41 points, we've got Circle of Healing, a ranged AoE heal. Also useful, but again situational -- especially when we already have an AoE healing available to us. I know some people do, but I'm not spending 41 talent points to acquire a new version of a skill I already have, only with more flexible targeting capabilities.
What does Blizzard want Discipline and Holy Priests to do? I'm not entirely sure, because the talents are all over the map.
Sprit, anyone?
Spirit is, supposedly, the most important stat for a Priest. Priests can get extra damage and healing based on their spirit and they receive skills to buff their spirit. But the stat leaves something to be desired... in fact, it leaves a lot to be desired.
A Priest regenerates mana from spirit while out of combat (read: when the Priest has not cast anything for 5 seconds or longer) every two seconds (or "tick") based on the following formula:
Spirit/4 + 12.5
So, for every 100 spirit, you'll regenerate 37.5 mana every two seconds while out of combat. But in a fight, which is when you need every scrap of mana you can get, spirit doesn't do much for you, even with the Meditation talent that allows you to regenerate a portion of your mana in combat, as well. So what's a Priest to do? Until Spirit is modified to be more useful, stack Intellect and +mana per 5 gear!
Survivability
Healers are always the first targets of the opposing faction in PvP, which is an issue for Priests, who wear lighter armor than any of the other healing classes. Oh, sure, Inner Fire gives us more armor (especially with the Improved Inner Fire talent), but with only 20 charges, that armor bonus is only there for a few seconds of combat with a Rogue.
Of course there's Pain Surpression and healing abilities to rely on -- but they're really only delaying the inevitable. And our ability to fear? With its long cooldown and ever-growing number of counters, it's becoming less helpful every day.
Now, is there hope for the class? Of course there is! While we do have some legitimate concerns about our abilities, there's nothing here that can't be fixed. Of course, Blizzard's recent handling of the class doesn't give me any warm fuzzy feelings: they continue to try to buff or fix Lightwell despite the fact that the entire concept of the spell makes it highly situational and the last official word from them on Priests was that they were fairly happy with our healing abilities. (Ouch!) But Blizzard has been known to change its mind on things before, and I won't try to predict what the future may hold for us.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-15-2007 @ 6:47PM
Vernia said...
There is a fantastic PVP build for a priest:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/priest/talents.html?500232013300000000000230550300300150501351000000000000000000000
I am taking advantage of the WSG week end to test it out.
This will give you the missing Survivability you are talking about for Arenas and WSG.
You sacrify the threat talents and some of the mana saving talents to get some received crits specific talents. I have 260 resilience on my PVP gear and I have to say the results are really good.
On this Friday, a Fury Warrior (friend) and myself faced 3 rogues and an elemental shaman.
We survived and got the 4 of them.
IMO, Priest is the most versatile class of WOW today.
People just don't dare enough to experiment original Talent trees and put themselves in risky situations.
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7-15-2007 @ 6:54PM
Junzim said...
Speaking from experience priests are actually incredibly hard to kill in PvP, we have more survivability than shamans, or paladins when you factor in the fact that both classes rely on defense mechanisms which can be easily dealt with by Purge, Dispel or Mass Dispel.
The problem is, in order to get this survivability we have to specc for it and get the right gear. While Paladins and Shamans can specc "healing" and simply gear differently for PvP, Priests must actively take up PvP speccs AND gear.
With my PvP specc there is no way I could heal most 25 man encounters. There is no decent PvP / PvE hybrid holy build in the same way that Paladin/Shamans enjoy (both classes can dump 61 points into one talent tree and come away with very workable healing builds for both PvP and PvE).
In my opinion we should have a PvP healing tree and PvE healing tree.
Right now having PvP talents at the high end of both trees as 'bonuses' for deep-speccers are irrelevant because PvE players still need to grab talents out of the other tree, they can't just snatch the PvP talents up on a whim because there are PvE centric talents they HAVE to take in other trees.
Holy has Blessed Resilience and Discipline has Pain Suppression both very deep into their trees, if you wanted to take all the good PvP healing talents you honestly couldn't. You can with a Paladin or a Shaman.
Holy and Discipline have NEVER been adequately distinguished because Blizzard has done its damndest to avoid the Holy Trinity but slipped up with Priests.
They provided Warriors with 3 distinct paths in their trees (Tanking, PvE DPS and PvP DPS), they provided Mages with 3 distinct paths, albeit slightly squiffily (Sustained Raid Damage, PvP Burst Damage and PvP survivability).
Priests have 3 distinct paths as I see it: Shadow DPS (works for PvP and PvE), Raid Healing and PvP Healing. Our trees however don't adequately support that and not since beta have they had any clear focus.
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7-15-2007 @ 6:55PM
Jengo said...
I roll with a 70 priest as my main, ranking decently in PvP (1800) and am just starting into SSC. While I agree with alot of your points, I would suggest the priests complaining about survivability are undergeared, underplayed, or just don't spec correctly. Blessed Resilience (found in the holy tree, which is a fairly odd place to put it) is one of the best survivability talents in the game, for any class. Paired up Blessed Recovery and Inspiration in the same tree, Priests can truly become a tank to be reckoned with in PvP.
That being said, I do see that holy/disc priests need more utilitarian value. In PvE situations, an ideal healing setup for a 10 man does in fact require only one priest. The devs response to this thusfar has been to nerf other classes healing , so we will have to see where they go with this in the future.
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7-15-2007 @ 6:59PM
Junzim said...
@1 5/5 Spiritual Guidance?
In a Hybrid Specc sure but PvP? I have +17 Spirit in my PvP gear with 311 resilience (stupidly missed my gladiator helmet last week) and that's because I'm wearing a Violent Signet.
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7-15-2007 @ 7:04PM
Frodawg said...
I play a level 70 priest, and the '2 talent trees for one purpose' has always confused me...
Why not move (most of)the healing talents to holy? We have these 'prayers', i think it would be interesting to see the WHOLE of a priest's discipline branch revamped into sort of a buff bot role, something like a paladin's blessings, except that they would be short term. This would make raiding for priests easier, and, although i don't choose to pvp on my priest, i would think it would make priests more desirable in PvP
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7-15-2007 @ 7:55PM
chris poloncic said...
Anyone that says a priest has surivability than a shaman or a paladin doesn't know how to play or has never seen either. A resto shaman is mighty hard to kill, and a paladin is flat out the hardest class to kill. Even with pain supression and reflective shield, a priest is nowhere close to either.
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7-15-2007 @ 9:51PM
Chris Anthony said...
A quick comment - Spirit of Redemption /isn't/ only useful after you die. Although the Spirit Healer effect is fun, and certainly the most spectacular effect of the talent, arguably the most /important/ effect is hidden at the beginning: Spirit of Redemption increases your total Spirit by 5% - and in my experience (I may be wrong), it's the last bonus to be calculated. When you combine it with excellent +Spirit gear and Spirit Tap, you hit almost absurd levels of mana regen - when you're not casting, anyway.
On the other hand, you go on to say that Spirit isn't actually worth as much as it's supposed to be (and again, I disagree - but then, I'm not a raiding priest, and I spend a lot of my time grouping using my wand), so that might not be so much of a benefit to you. Still, it's not strictly accurate to say that SoR is only useful when you're dead.
-Chris A.
http://www.etherjammer.com/blog/
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7-15-2007 @ 10:19PM
Dietrich said...
How to fix priest talent trees:
Make discipline our crowd control tree. Mind sooth gets better, allowing you to split pulls rather than just lower the agro radius, the 31 point talent lets you go invisible or immune to AOE damage or something while mind controlling, and the 41 point talent is a AOE stun that resets threat.
Move the rest of the healing stuff to holy.
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7-16-2007 @ 1:25AM
Cassie said...
The Spiritual Guidance series of articles looked interesting, until I noticed that all these supposed priest experts are doing is parroting 90% of the nonsense that gets spouted off on the class forum (albeit with better writing).
Reader comments on this and prior articles have already pointed out a number of basic errors, so I won't repeat them here. Still, don't you think it would be a good idea to actually double-check the "facts" you're spouting off?
To say that priests aren't useful enough in raids as healers is just, frankly, QQ'ing, and shows a lack of understanding of the class. All the healing classes have different *styles* of healing that make them more suited to different situations. Paladins, for instance, are wonderful at healing through the small, constant amounts of damage that happen to the raid on trash pulls without running OOM. Druid HoT's are powerful and their large, instant heal can be a life-saver when fighting mobs that hit extremely hard. Priests? Oh, we just go forever! Our wide range of heals allows us to adapt to many different situations and do well. My own personal style of priesting lends itself to lengthy boss fights: stacking +healing, spirit (yes, spirit), and mp/5, in that order has basically ensured that I can keep up a tank on my own nearly indefinitely, with minimal potion use (Maybe one fel mana potion. Maybe.). Other priest specs, of course, have their uses as well.
In the end, the healers you bring to a raid should *compliment* each other, and take into account the differences in play style & spec between the lot of them. Could priests stand a buff? Well, who doesn't want a buff? ;-) Are they the deplorable bastard child of Blizzard people like Eliah & Elizabeth seem to think they are? No.
Also, Lightwell is useful. Go on, laugh, everyone does. But tell me this - would you rather cast five renews, or let the rogues, warlocks, and other bandage junkies click on the Lightwell while you use your GCD for something else?
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7-16-2007 @ 4:07AM
daniel said...
it took me a while to accept the fact that there are different roles of healing for which the healing classes are more or less suited, and that the priest is probably the most versatile in those roles. but the spirit/mp5 issue is the most annoying still, most epic gear at my level (kara, t4 and heroics) are usually lacking mp5 which requires us to gimp ourselves to keep our mana regen up.
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7-16-2007 @ 5:40AM
Loomi said...
I'm a 5 man PvE and PvP specced healer and find Spirit of Redemption great for arenas as 15 secs of uninterrupted healing is great followed by PoM and renews on them at the very last second can really help out in 2v2 and 3v3. In 5v5 arenas If I am spotted I'm dead within a few seconds and am unsure how I can stop this.
As for spirit I love spirit more than mp5 but gear seems to tend towards mp5 since tbc. With a tick metre or mana tick displayer I found I am mostly out of the FSR (five second rule) when instancing as you can help yourself out of it using big heals, PoM and renews all the time. The more +healing you have the less spells you need to cast so the more you are out of the FSR so the more the spirit kicks in. With SoR, imp Divine Spirit, and Spiritual Guidance you get lots of extra +healing that really persuades me to go for spirit over mp5.
However in pvp it has to be +int :)
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7-16-2007 @ 7:36AM
Junzim said...
@6
It depends on the class beating on them. Paladins are hard to kill only if there isn't a priest with mass dispel. No instant cast heals in Arena and armour means nothing when you're being bursted down with spell damage. 1 affliction warlock can make a paladin's life a misery if there's a priest on standby to put the boot in when he bubbles.
As for Shamans, Nature's guardian is a great ability and Earthshield is fantastic. However earthshield is purgable/dispellable and at 900 mana a pop it's not exactly spammable. Shamans have no way to get people off their backs either (no CC) when Paladins at least have the lolhammer.
Nature's swiftness does make up for a lot of their survivability issues but the numbers in arena teams certainly make it pretty damn clear as to which class is the best PvP healer.
Also Pain Suppression is NOT the PvP priest build with the most survivability, although with its recent changes it's probably looking very juicy right now.
The real kicker is that priests can be more effective than any healer when taking a beating. Prayer of Mending can completely destroy a bad team and Binding Heal is the 2nd best heal in PvP, when Focused Mind kicks in you've got an endless flash heal stream on yourself that's also healing your teammates. Basically, priests can heal others whilst still taking care of themselves and I'd rather I did that with a cast time spell than with an easily purgable buff.
PvP healing teams tend to compliment each other so the weaknesses of either class are dealt with by their counterpart but as most shamans will confirm, a Resto Shaman vs Purge is not a pretty sight.
So yes, I know "How to play". My opinion just happens to be different from yours.
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7-16-2007 @ 12:52PM
Alkahn said...
@9 I agree with most of what you say, but 9 times out of ten, I'd rather cast 5 renews, because it doesn't break on damage and doesn't require the melee DPS to stop what they're doing long enough to walk over to the lightwell is (out of AOE, presumably), click it, and walk back.
And if there's random AOE and you ignore the melee DPS because you know there's a lightwell and they should fix themselves, there's a good chance they'll die.
It's my job to watch the green bars, not theirs. It's there job to watch the enemy green bar and make it shorter. Lightwell aids neither (except for lifetapping warlocks).
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7-16-2007 @ 3:02PM
Chrina said...
I have been playing a priest since closed beta and while it has gone through lots of changes it is still my favorite class to play. While I agree with your points I think the biggest problem that HOLY priests have right now is that when compared to what a Shadow Priest brings to a raid it just can't match up.
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7-19-2007 @ 3:46PM
Juliah said...
I particularly agree about the jumbled talent trees. I only hope that Blizzard is reading and paying attention.
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4-28-2008 @ 10:34AM
richard feldman said...
Rolled a 70 priest not long ago..Still trying to figure it out. Different heals for different situations I guess. I would be the first to admit I suck. I am basically using healing prayers in order to keep my group up in some instants ..I seen that you can put xtra points into it to reduce the mana cost. I may do that. My question is when your doing an instant like MgT and you got a lock with 6000 health how the heck are you suppose to heal him when he is taking as many hits as your Main Tank. I didnt know a lock could have so little life. Anyways we finally wipe on the pvp portion of it. Not to say we didnt wipe a few more times than that but thats how far I made it. How can i get heals out without using prayer of healing and using up so much mana..Maybe thats the way it suppose to be lol i dont know.
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