CLASS: Priest guides

• How to group with a priest
  What's a player to do when they need a Priest's help? There's plenty to know about how to act in a group with a priest, and we're only going to scratch the surface.

• So you want to play a Priest?
  There are lots of reasons you might want to play a Priest. Perhaps you like the idea of smiting your enemies (sure, you can pick fights with any class, but you have to be a Priest to do any literal smiting). Perhaps you want to melt faces (no class does it better!). Perhaps you want to help your groupmates by providing healing (Vampiric Embrace is healing, right?). Or maybe you enjoy the god-like feeling of being completely in control of which members of your party live or die.
• Priestly racials
  Priests are an unusual class, because they're the only class in the game that has different skills available to them depending on their race. Each race gets two racial skills, most of which are minor, making minimal impact on your gameplay, but some of them are great skills that you'll find exceptionally helpful as you level up -- or at end game.
• Leveling your Priest
  This guide is for up and coming Priests or people who have been through one too many attempted instance runs that were abandoned after an hour of "need healer for Ramparts, PST!"
  One to five as a Priest
  I couldn't say why you rolled a Priest -- I'm only here to help you along the way. So read on as we discuss the journey from level 1 to level 5.

• Build Shop: Priest 14/0/47
  Wowhead co-founder Skosiris is getting his Shadow on with this solo/5-man oriented spec. He's a relatively casual player, having never raided, and doesn't have time to play tons.
• Fear Wards and spell haste for facemeleters
  The Fear Ward change, like I mentioned in my last post, is primarily a convenience change for PvE. Reupping Fear Ward every 3 minutes when you need to keep putting Shadowform back on afterwards is annoying, and a large mana drain over long encounters.... The Spell Haste change is what has me a little excited. I'll admit right away, I haven't crunched any numbers.
• Priest DPS flowchart
  The basic outline is keep VT up and pour on the shadow damage, but with all the cooldowns in Shadow Priests' spells, it becomes more of a "casting priority" thing, hence the flowchart
• The shadow diaries
  I've been Holy for quite some time (enough that it's starting to make me feel old), and I feel like I know the Holy game play style pretty well. I even leveled Holy from 60 to 70, shortly after Burning Crusade came out, and it was a blast. And I love healing. But lately I've been hearing the call of the dark side: I want to play Shadow.
  

• Know your heals
  Healing spells are to a Priest what fire spells are to a Mage -- so it comes as no surprise that we have quite a variety of heals.
• Threat and you
  Regardless of whether you're healing or flaying minds in a group encounter, you're cloth-wearer who can't take a lot of hits -- which means you need to know a little something about keeping monsters on your tank and off you.
• What kind of healer are you?
  Priests heal differently than Paladins, Druids, and Shamans -- but I can't honestly say they're bad healers. Before saying that one class is the best or worst at healing, I think we all have to ask ourselves what kind of healers we are.
• Is it "Circle of Healing" or "Circle of Terrible?"
  First Holy Nova. Then Lightwell. As of 2.0.1, Circle of Healing is the top-tier Holy talent for Priests. Notice a trend? All these talents have been considered...um..."less than optimal" by many vocal members of the priestly community.
• The great spirit debate
  In the course of emails around the WoW Insider bullpen, we noticed that there were some differing perspectives on the utility of Blizzard's favorite Priest stat, Spirit. So we decided to sit down and hash it out the old-fashioned way: an IM debate.
• Improved Divine Spirit by the numbers
  For my money, the big debate as far as healbot specs go right now is Improved Divine Spirit (IDS) -- that is, whether you'll be better off with 21/40/0 or 23/38/0. These builds differ by only two points: the first has no points in IDS and 5/5 Empowered Healing (EH), the second has 2/2 IDS and 3/5 EH.
• Build Shop: Priest 41/20/0
  This week we're checking out another Priest build, this one focusing on the much maligned Discipline tree. Though the tree is still an odd assortment of talents (some mana management, some damage improvement, some buffs for our buffs...) with no easy path to the top, it's slated for major improvements in the next expansion and is getting a bit of love in the upcoming patch 2.3...
• Build Shop: Priest 23/38/0
  My current build isn't really original; in fact, it's probably the most common PvE healing build for priests right now: 23/38/0.
• Build Shop: Pirest 35/5/21
  This week's build comes courtesy of Hamacus on Sen'jin, and it's an unconventional sort of Priest DPS build, which is why I picked it. Hamacus neglected to inform me as to his goals with the build (shame!) so I made some educated guesses. There's no kill count or arena teams on his Armory page, which means he has less than 1337 honor kills, and he skipped the common PvP talent Martyrdom, so I figured PvE is his focus. On the other hand, he does have full Blackout, so I could be wrong. More on that later. He's a Priest, so it's obviously not a solo build. That leaves group PvE.
• Raid RX: The need for speed, part 1, part 2, and part 3
  Today we're going to cover how to get around inherent casting latency and next week I'll assault you with so much info on how haste rating affects healing, you'll come back here to hide.

• Priest sets, part 1 and part 2
  Alright, I admit it. This post is just an excuse to look at all the pretty armor we Priests get. We'll start with the PvE sets prior to the Burning Crusade, and part two will take on the rest of them (including Arena gear).