Since the release of the expansion and the beginning of TBC raiding game it has slowly begun to dawn on people the inferiority of holy priests. It has been a slow realization by many because habits die hard and priests were the superior healers for a long long time. Not only that, but those of us on horde took time to get our Paladins to 70 and sufficiently geared. With the release of the Armory and subsequent scouring of the rosters for the top guilds, this inferiority has also been shown to not just be in theory but acted on practically by the guilds who have the most to gain by min/maxing.

In comparing the healing classes in utility and healing ability, we find the priest to be strictly inferior in nearly all capabilities. Not only does a priest provide very little utility, but even their healing is at best comparable to some of the other healers. In most cases the capabilities of the priest fall far short of every other healing class. Let's look at the various healing roles:

Multi-target healing: This is one of the strengths of the priest with Prayer of Healing. Druids and paladins lack multi-target healing (aside from tranquility). Shamans have an extremely strong multi-target heal with chain heal which is arguably a lot better than PoH since it is smart with its target selection. Its only weakness compared to PoH is that with PoH you know who you will be healing.

Single-target sustained healing (tank healing): Paladins excel at long-term sustained healing. Using Flash of Light with Blessing of Light on their target as their primary healing spell will net them almost twice the mana efficiency of the most mana efficient spells available to other classes while providing medium throughput. Priests, druids, and shaman have roughly equivalent large heals but druids come out on top with their plethora of HoTs to go along with their main heal. Shamans lose out here most likely with heals only comparable to the efficiency of druids and priests while having no enhanced while-casting mana regeneration.

Raid/spot healing: Paladins and druids both excel here in their own styles. Paladins have their super efficient flash heal with a reasonably efficient large heal that has a 2 second cast (talented). Druids have tree form and a large amount of HoTs to choose from, all being very powerful. Shaman have chain heal which is good for raid healing in any situations where lots of people are taking damage. Priests come in dead last here, with their best spot healing capabilities being a very inefficient fast heal and a sub par HoT as compared to anything a druid can provide.

After evaluating the various healing abilities each class provides, along with their mana efficiency and longevity, priests do not bring much if anything to the table that is more desirable than what another class brings. The one exception would be Prayer of Healing which is considered useful and is not quite replicated by the other classes.

Looking further, the utility of priests as compared to other healing classes is their biggest failing. Every class is asked to do things beyond their primary role. When evaluating what classes and specs to bring to your raid you have to ask: why should I bring this class/spec over another class/spec that can do a similar role? Let's evaluate what each healing class brings (this is as all-inclusive a list I could come up with a few minutes of research. I may have missed some abilities but the ones listed should cover all the key abilities):

Druid: Innervate, Rebirth, MotW, Tree of Life healing bonus, Tranquility (not counting this as a strictly healing ability because it falls outside of "normal" use and is used in emergencies)

Paladin: Blessings (more paladins = more blessings), Judgments (mainly JoW), Blessing of Protection, Auras, Lay on Hands, Consecration (does have quite a few uses), Hammer of Justice, Cleanse

Priest: Fortitude, Spirit, Shadow Protection, Shield, Dispel (defensive and offensive), Cure Disease, Shackle, Mind Control

Shaman: Totems (including the notably powerful ones such as Bloodlust and Mana Tide), Earth Shield, Earth Shock (spell interrupt), Purge

The comparable lengths of the list do not do any justice to the relative usefulness of each. Experienced raiders should be able to go down that list and see how big the difference in usefulness between each of those abilities. On top of that, much of the utility a priest provides is in buffs which can be done by a single priest in the raid. Assuming you bring your one token holy priest, the utility the rest of the holy priests provide is almost zero.

The final factor in comparing the healing classes is survivability. While this is a bigger issue in PvP, this is still a factor in raiding. Undoubtedly Paladins are the kings of healer survivability, with plate armor, blessing of protection, and divine shield. The other three classes all come in far behind. In theory, shamans have the highest survivability of the three and priests and druids have comparable survivability when factoring in bear form, shield, barkskin, and inner fire. In practice, at least in the current raiding environment, none except paladins last very long when the situation gets out of hand. Mobs hit so hard that the result is often a one or two shot with people dead before any chance of a heal landing. The result is mostly the same whether it be shaman, druid, or priest.

To summarize this analysis, we find that holy priests are inferior in almost all ways. Their healing on the whole is inferior to druids and paladins and comparable to shamans. Their utility is very limited, with most of it being covered by a single token improved divine spirit specced priest. Their survivability is on the low end of the spectrum and in practice priests have zero survivability in a chaotic situation.

The result of this is that if you investigate the top guilds in the world you'll find something that most would have thought unimaginable until recently: almost all the priests have gone shadow. Where holy priests lack, shadow priests make up for much of it. They do very good dps while providing extremely valuable utility and decent survivability. You'll also find these guilds using paladins, druids, and to a lesser extent shaman to build their healing core.

The real question here is not whether holy priests are viable enough to build your healing core with them, because they are most surely not. The question is: is the current situation the way its going to be? Is this what Blizzard intended, and if not, do they realize it and will they change it? Blizzard describes priests as "the masters of healing and preservation" yet this is most definitely not true at all currently, and in fact would be a much more accurate description applied to paladins. Should priests be angry that their role as the masters of healing has been co-opted and in fact completely usurped? Or should priests just be happy that they can do the mad dps now?

For my own part, I have gone shadow now as have the other priests in my guild besides one. Within a week of hard work to gear myself I have 973 shadow damage and I am near the top of the damage meters and being much more useful to my guild in raids than I was as holy. I also still find myself frustrated despite having an alternative to being inferior. I'm not burnt out on healing, I quite enjoy it. If I had a choice, over being shadow I'd either A.) be a paladin or b,) have the priest class brought up to par with the others. I don't have the willpower to level a paladin up to 70 so that's not an option at the moment. For now I'll continue to be a shadow priest and do my best to be useful to my guild and enjoy it as much as I can.

You are comparing a priest with 3 classes not one other class. You said shaman has multi-heal capability and paladin has good heal efficiency. Whitle true, note that no single other heal class "has it all".

It isn't as if one other heal class is superior to priest in every heal situation. While shaman may be good with multi-heal, it is not the best in effciency. While paladin is good at single target endurance heal, it has no multi-heal to speak of.

Priest in fact has the most versatile heal class. It has tool for every situation which makes it strong. In raid situation it is the only other class that can take advantage of blessing of light, thus improve heal effiency a lot. The class also comes with good multi-heal. Good emergency heal in terms of shield, only rivaled by paladin's blessing of protection.

In terms of utility, none of the other hybrid classes have good CC but a priest has one for undead. Many have said this makes it invaluable previously in Naxx and now in Karazhan too.

In terms of buff, fort is arguably the strongest of all the buffs.

Only issues I see are agro and survivability issues. Most of these are improved by gear and changing healing tactics. What you should have titled the thread is, "Obsolesence of Pre TBC healing styles and Holy Priests", I certainly wouldn't tag the spec obsolete.

You're completely overlooking Prayer of Mending. Despite the cooldown being added, the mana efficiency of Prayer of Mending (when used correctly) is amazing. This is in addition to the Misdirect-type threat caused (which only Druids can match with Lifebloom). I think you're also overlooking the cast time of Greater Heal (and the hp/sec healed) compared to Healing Touch. Often times, the tank will die in a Heroic mode if relying on Healing Touch, but would have lived with Greater Heal.

That said, I agree that holy priests need a buff. Druids and Paladins can both max their healing abilities with many talent points to spare (Druids can do it before hitting level 60 even). Priests on the other hand would love to have a few more points.

If there's one thing that'll make holy priests obsolete in my opinion it's the synergy between paladins and shadow priests. With a shadow priest feeding a paladin mana through vampiric touch and spiritual attunement the paladin has to work hard to run out of mana. If you've got a choice between a guy who can keep up 1500 hps indefinitely and a guy who needs to pots, oil, and whatnot on top of chain eating pots to do that, the choice is pretty easy to me.
The problem could easily be solved by retuning either spiritual purity or vampiric touch, but fiddling with spiritual purity would most likely remove the paladin's ability to tank anything but five man dungeons - pigeon holing the paladins. Taking some of the mana gain away from vampiric touch would make shadow priests less attractive in a raid setting, also effectively pigeon holing priests.

Very common problem. Grass seems greener on the other side when you don't know enough of "the other side".


New forum member, will get round to do it some time. Also for the record, I am a feral druid but have done enough healing to know the in and out of my class. I also have both a paladin and shaman at level 58.

New forum members are advised to fill out their profile before posting, as posting with an empty profile will make you loose your posting rights very quick here.

Other way around, if you lower Spiritual Attunement's return then paladins can't tank anything but raid bosses (at least not without drinking a lot). If you rework SA so that instead of 10% of all healing, it's 20% of effective healing, that would change a lot. It removes most of the ridiculous synergy between shadow priests and paladins, and also makes them more effective tanks in five-mans (if I bring a solo healer, I tend to wear most of my mitigation gear, leading to mana starvation at the end of a pull).

Nah, it'd be easy to tune. Just tie in spiritual purity to righteous defense. And while you're at it, let them take normal aggro from healing - at this point in the game, it won't break anything if paladins want to get healing aggro to tank with, tanking paladins already have some of the best aggro generation in the game.

I really think that paladins are too strong in support right now. They need a tune to their passive mana regen when not tanking, a boost to their non healing trees, and to get more healing aggro. You know something's out of whack when loads of priests reroll paladins because they want to heal. Shadow priests are fine.

Having said all that, the sky isn't falling. Priests are great and versatile healers and can fill in for any of the other classes if they need to. Just because one high end raiding guild has all their priests go shadow is a single data point.

Yes, I compared priests to three other classes. Through those three classes, almost all the job can do can be done better by one of those other classes. The one exception, as I stated, being Prayed of Healing. All the healing classes can do most of the roles so this isn't really a case of "jack of all trades, master of none" for the priest class. Truthfully it is: priests are inferior to bringing the other classes because priests don't offer enough to want them over another class.

Priests are in no way more versatile than any of the other healers. I wouldn't say they are less versatile either, each healing class has a similar amount of healing tools to work with. Once again it all comes back to PoH which is the one thing that priests do have to offer over other classes. However you have to ask, is it worth bringing a priest over say a paladin simply for PoH? There aren't many who would say yes.

Unless I'm mistaken, Blessing of Light only applies to Flash of Light and Holy Light. It only improves paladin healing. This serves to make paladins even stronger healers and widen the gap between them and priests.

I won't deny the usefulness of shackle in current raid content. However, it becomes null and void on any content without undead. Not only that but this role is just as served by a shadow priest. If this is your only argument that holy priests have good utility, then I think even you see how thin the veil is.


In talking about Circle of Healing, one of my arguments against it and why it is so useless is that there is always a better tool for the job. There's PoH, renew, flash heal, etc. Circle of healing is never the right tool because has too many limitations and is simply inferior to the other options. This description aptly describes holy priests as a whole. There is always a better option. Priests don't offer anything that would make them more valuable to bring over another healing class. They simply don't. Nearly everything they do can be done at least equally as good if not better by another class, with that other class also offering more utility to boot. So why bring a holy priest?

I said nothing about the grass being greener for Druid or Shaman healers, which is where I noted that I lacked experience (actually I have a 60 Druid with ~tier 2 gear, but I'm not ignorant enough to think that knowledge is worth much with how drastically the raid game has changed). In fact, you'll note that I made the explicit point that perhaps Druid/Shaman healing isn't on par with Paladin healing as well. I do, however, have a decent amount of experience on Paladin healing in TBC, though I won't claim to be an expert.

Unless of course, you were using a quip I made to argue against the original poster instead of actually debating his content. In which case, well, I think the ridiculousness of that stands for itself.

For the record, I agree, Priests are not obsolete by any means. I don't think the original poster believes they are either, by the technical definition of the word. Priests, do however, have a few very visible shortcomings that need to be addressed. For example: despite all our versatility, what's something that makes you go, gee, I wish a Priest were here; I think they tried to do this with talents like Circle of Healing and Lightwell, but obviously they didn't quite hit the mark. Furthermore, Priests have two trees dedicated to healing (though with slightly different focuses), but neither (especially Holy) really have talents at the end of the tree that make you salivate; adding a decent talent or two and swapping a few talents around more obviously specialize the trees would go a long way to fixing the problems with the class/spec (23/38 builds are dumb, especially since Priests intentionally skip their 31 point Holy talent when speccing this way -- I don't believe many other classes do this).

Edit: On Spiritual Attunement: this would be a sizable nerf, I suppose, but why not make Spiritual Attunement a Protection talent (perhaps not so deep that a hybrid build couldn't pick it up)? I agree the tree could also use some other buffs, but not many Druids do tanking while resto/balance specced. Warriors can pull it off, but I think this comes as a utility of the Warrior class. I also like the solution of overheal not contributing to the mana returned. And also, I agree Paladins should have their healing threat changed to normal values. This is a decent buff to any raid group I think, if someone's going to pull healing agro, it might as well be the Paladin. And as someone hinted at, I don't think Paladins are going to be solo healing *and* tanking any instances that people care about.