Good day to you, Elitist Jerks!

First of all I apologize if this is not the appropriate section for my questions, it mostly revolves around PvP, but I suppose you could cross it with public discussion and class theory crafting, moving on though I can actually start the post.

I have finally taken the time to create an account on these forums which I have been lurking on now for a long time, my main character is Nexi, a rogue on the Darksorrow EU server, which you could find out from my profile anyway, I come to you today though with questions on another class, the priest.

After a while of playing my rogue in arenas with my friends, both a warlock and a hunter I decided I would be much more useful and effective as a healer, paladin’s just didn’t feel ‘right’ for me, and I don’t like the idea of having a feral druid.

I’ve been hungry for damage for so long on my rogue, and satisfied myself, now I am going to fulfill another role on my priest, most seem to want to run as shadow, although I want to play as a full support healer, I don’t particularly care about damage or the like, since I rarely play solo and if I ever have money troubles I have my Rogue to grind for me.

However… after the short introduction I come to the main point now, I have no idea what-so-ever what I should look for in terms of gear, gems, talents and so on. I am not level 70 yet on my priest, far from it, I’m going to be shadow until 70 and then respec to fulfil my main purpose, grinding as anything other than shadow just doesn’t seem economical.

I don’t want to embarrass myself by posting a talent spec which I think would be effective, since I honestly have no clue, instead I will comment on some of the talents which I think would be important.

I’m assuming Disc/Holy would be the best PvP healer spec, leaving my priest somewhat durable, the talents improved PW:F and Unbreakable will being very important, wand spec isn’t useful for anything outside of grinding with spirit tap as far as I can tell. Mental Absolution and Mental Agility seem very important, any reduction in mana cost is probably worth it, considering it includes quite a few spells, Dispel Magic and so on being the main ones.

I would also include Divine spirit, improved divine spirit, meditation, mental strength for 10% more mana, after that point I am pretty much lost, I don’t know what to choose so if you could include a full spec to get my head straight that would be excellent!

Finally, since im still in work and cant spend much more time writing, I will ask if anyone can include basic strategies, any useful macros, or even gear lists, what stats should I be looking for?

Thank you in advance, please ask if you want any further details

Make sure you roll Dwarf if you're alliance. Other than that, go shadow for leveling and respec to holy/disc, or stay shadow, depending on your team makeup.

You can go browse armory to see some specs.

Draenei priests seem pretty effective as well... they also get fear ward in addition to a manaless HoT and a mana regen racial priest spell.

Alliance: Dwarf
Horde: Undead or Troll (mini MS)

Some form of Holy/Disc, like you said. Although it depends which bracket you want to focus on. Shadow is great with a UA Warlock in 2v2 and 3v3 play. Lots of great synergy there. But overall, you should lean toward healing gear with lots of stamina, resilience and even armor.

If you're making a new Priest, take my advice and grab this from ZG. It should only take you an hour or so to kill Hakkar, decimating his Priests along the way.

Zandalarian Hero Badge
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
Use: Increases your armor by 2000 and defense rating by 50 for 20 sec. Every time you take melee or ranged damage, this bonus is reduced by 200 armor and 5 defense rating.

Insanely good for healing Priests in arena PVP while being assisted.

Thank you for your helpful replies so far, although it makes me a bit sad having no mention of blood elves, ahem... well you can guess which race i picked!

I went for the whole fasion over function thing, i already had an undead and wanted to play another race, i would really have loved to be an UD but.. well, its just not as interesting to play the same race on every character.

Good call on the ZHM, wouldnt have thought of it in a million years but you are right its probably very, very helpful - i'll have to check it out when i get high enough for a guild boost ;p

Only level 25 at the moment, not too high to reroll i just dont particularly feel like it, i know the Befl racials arent too useful, the silence can be okay but.. meh ^^

Keep the advice coming, every little helps

Even better than that is Hazza'rah's Charm of Healing. Probably makes your Greater Heal a 1s cast with Heroism/Bloodlust and even faster with a Scarab of Infinite Cycle.

Ah, I assume you mean the haste rating changes? Good point, I forgot about that. They're basically halving all spell and melee haste derived from ratings, correct?

Ye well its being changed from a straight 40% reduction in greater heal cast time, to a haste rating (no idea what the rating actually is yet) which I assume will end up making the trinket with a 20% reduction in greater heal cast time (with scaling and haste changes)...while useful is not as overpowered as the trinket is right now.

EDIT:Just went on test and saw its 400 rating now, anyone have any idea what that is in % at lvl 70? Im horrible with ratings >.<

That Ratings Buster addon is a godsend for turning ratings into percentages. I personally can't say enough good things about the pvp trinkets though. Breaking a CC is clutch.

Under the current system, WoWwiki states a 10.5 to 1 rating-to-percent conversion. 400 rating => 38.1% haste.

Edit- I believe the 2.1.0 patch will change the conversion rate to ~20:1, so, assuming that trinket keeps the 400 rating, it should get about 20% spell haste with the 20:1 conversion ratio.

Next question here, while it has been noted HP is important on a priests arnea set, i wont be doing arena exclusively of course.

Would it be worth getting the Primal Mooncloth and Whitemend sets? Both offer excellent healing power, but leads me along the lines of 'glass cannon' although with healing.

It just seems like a set too good to pass up, my rogue is already transmuting primal mights every day regardless, just want to know whether i should keep them for the sake of these sets

I would probably use +12stam and +18healing gems, compared to the epic gems with 6stam and 11 healing each, i lose 4 healing, which isnt anything really..

Thanks!

Primal Mooncloth + Battlecast? ;p

As a priest in arena you're going to have to be able to take a punch, so getting stam + resilience gear should be your first priority. Luckily, the PVP and gladiator gear focuses on those stats so you will concerning yourself with farming honor when you're not doing arena. As a healing priest, you shouldn't have any trouble getting into organized BG groups, and this should help you gear up. If you can't get into a premade, AV.

As far as spec goes, the most popular spec for PVP healing priests right now is 28 disc 33 holy. If you're not familiar with Blessed Resilience, it is a new priest talent in holy that makes you immune to critical strikes for 6 seconds after being the victim of a critical strike. This ability also procs off of crits converted into normal hits by resilience. This ability alone will do wonders for you when being attacked by warriors and rogues.

You're also going to want to get improved mana burn. When you're not healing you should be either dispelling or mana burning, although this will depend on whether or not you are being assist trained.

I'm in pretty much the same boat as you, I rolled a priest a few months back specifically for the purpose of PVP healing, although my priest is almost done leveling. I can say that as a warrior who plays arena in both the 3v3 and 2v2 brackets, the priest is still a very attractive first target and you'll probably find yourself just struggling to stay alive most of the time.

Just wanted to clarify something: Critical Hits, whether reduced by the resilience stat or not, only have a 20/40/60% chance of making the priest crit immune. It's still luck based, and should receive treatment similar to the paladin's Imp Conc Aura. Reduces chance to be critically hit by 20/40/60% after being crit, allowing guaranteed crit talents to work, but removing randomness from the talent.

You gave two meanings to blessed resilience, first is right, second is wrong. A cold blood attack on a priest with BR up will not crit.

Whoops, sorry about that. Yea, I forgot that BR only give's you a 60% chance to become crit immune, it doesn't proc every time. Still a great talent though.

Just to clarify... after testing this (albeit not completely, but enough I think) this is how the "crit converted to hit" proc really works:

Every time you are hit (not crit) you have a X% chance of proccing each of your crit-talents, where X is the amount of -crit chance you have from resilience.

In other words: You are hit 1000 times. You have -5% crit chance from resilience. You can expect to have 50 blessed recovery procs, 50 martyrdom procs, and 30 (50*.60) blessed resilience procs. This is in addition to all the times you are CRIT (not hit).

I play a draenei shaman, and Gift of Naaru sucks, mainly because the HP healed is low. A 1.5sec cast time for such a weak heal doesn't help either. The only reason I find the spell useful is that it gives me a healing spell to cast (holy) when my nature school gets counterspelled.

I suspect a priest or paladin wouldn't even find that bit of utility.


IMO, dwarf is a much stronger choice. Desperate prayer is arguably better than fear ward, and stoneform counters one of priest's major weaknesses: poison.

Is it really that bad? I've barely PVP'd at all, but I find Gift of the Naaru pretty useful for PvE. At least it benefits from +healing gear. I can see how it wouldn't help much in PVP though.

Did you happen to see multiple talent procs off of a normal hit? That's definitely interesting.

**Edit: This would also lead me to believe that it would be possible to have an on crit talent proc while blessed resilience is active, unless it supresses them.

Yeah I agree completely, I couldn't imagine running arenas without Stoneform.

Definately dwarf for alliance, desperate prayer (dwarf/human priest racial, instacast mana free heal on 10 minute cd, heals for 3-5k at level 70), stoneform (gets you out of blind, crippling poison, wound poison, bleeds), and fear ward alltogether make dwarf a foolproof choice. I don't know about gift of naaru, my highest draenei is like level 30 and it ticks for a lot, but I just don't see it standing up to desperate prayer in arenas even if it's self only. Stoneform just puts it over the top. It's a great racial for a nonhealing class like mage or warrior though.

e: For horde, if you want to do 5s you'll hate yourself for not rolling UD. If you want to go smaller troll is a fine option, shadowguard + blackout is as royally annoying as it sounds. BE might be useful in 2s I imagine.