Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. This week Matticus is going to look at the final 5 levels from 75 to 80!

When I finished off Grizzly Hills, I was a few bars into 75. To be fair, I did run a few normal instances to knock out the quests that were within them. In this week's post, I'll give you a quick glance of the last areas and what you can start working on once you reach 80 (such as instances and gearing for raids).

Sources are saying that a new Alpha build showed up on the WoTLK Alpha servers yesterday, featuring a few interesting changes. Kalgan's promised spellpower change we have mentioned, and it now appears to be on the Alpha servers. In addition, it looks like the dev team is working on consolidating even more stats. As of the latest build, all instances of haste rating, hit rating, and critical strike rating on gear will now modify both physical attacks and spells at the same time.

If you've ever taken the time to peak on the official forums, you've probably noticed more than a few complaints about Priest healing ability and viability. And you have to admit that when one of the game's top guilds tells us that they bring priests to their raids for DPS, something must be wrong with the class that Blizzard calls "the masters of healing." However, I take the opinion that there's nothing wrong with the priest's healing abilities -- except that perhaps Blizzard's raiding strategy (or players' drive to min/max to beat it). 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.

[Image via the On Notice Board Generator]

Every Sunday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!

The archaic stuff out of the way, in part two of this two-part series we turn to the hot new stuff: the Priest sets from the Burning Crusade. BC made one tremendous improvement in the way class sets were handled: raid gear for off-specs. For us men and women of the cloth, that means Tier 4, 5, and 6, as well as Arena gear, are available in versions befitting both healing and shadow priests.
As before, I'll start with the epic raid gear, T4, T5, and T6, pictured above from left to right. They really went crazy with the shoulders, didn't they?

Every Saturday (usually), Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!

Healing spells are to a priest what fire spells are to a mage. Other schools tend to be more efficient in raids (shadow for priests, frost for mages) and are generally thought superior for leveling, but when you think of a priest, you probably think of heals first, just like when I think of a mage, the first thing I think of is a nice fat pyroblast headed right for me. So it comes as no surprise that we have quite a variety of heals.

This post may not be terribly useful to old-school Priests -- it's 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!" (That's the reason I decided to roll my first Priest -- we could never find healers for our groups!) And, while I'm certainly a fan of the class, I'll be the first to say that they aren't the easiest class to level. But there are some tricks and talents that can make the process easier for you -- and, since I'm in the middle of leveling up my third Priest, that's what we're going to talk about today.

Every Saturday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!

Priests always seems to be in demand. Exploring or questing in any area of the game, at any level, whether Horde or Alliance, a Priest player can expect to be pestered with whispers for instance runs. Some polite, some demanding, some who need to be put on our ignore lists, and some who don't make any sense at all, but seem to be asking for something. What's a Priest to do when being asked to go here, there, or elsewhere? And what's a player to do when they need a Priest's help? Well, I'm going to try to explain here, in something of a how-to guide for grouping, for the Priests and non-Priests among us. So whether this is your first time partying with a Priest or your hundredth -- keep reading. There's plenty to know about how to act in a group, and we're only going to scratch the surface.

Whenever a patch is released, there are cries of "nerf" on all sides - because regardless of the change, it's probably negative to some.  And while some so-called nerfs will be found in the patch notes, others are conspicuously absent, leaving players in the dark about whether new game behavior is an intentional change or a mistake of some sort.

While many of these complaints spring up before and after every patch, one in particular has caught my eye.  The recent revamp of priest talents includes a new talent called Spiritual Guidance - which can increase damage and healing spells by up to 25% of the priest's total spirit.  This sounds like a nice buff to spirit for a priest, but in patch 1.10, spirit itemization seems to have been changed.  A number of high spirit items have had their spirit stat significantly reduced while the devout set has had its spirit bonus removed.  As priests copy over to the test server, they're realizing that their total spirit has dropped significantly - and thinking Spiritual Guidance might not be as good as they thought.

Hopefully this is a mistaken case of Blizzard's itemization department not talking to the class department.  Or perhaps there are new spirit items to replace the ones that are about to become not so good.  We'll only know for certain when 1.10 hits the live servers.