sadistic

I know there is a similar thread here, but that thread was not really touching the issues i want illuminated.

My main question is regarding the specc. It seems uncontested that a variation of 28/33 specc is the best.

Atleast in my eyes, what immediately lights up as a "ohshit" talent better then most early disc talents is CoH. Your getting assisted, youve tossed up your shield, your renew, your pom and new if, then basically just spam CoH until you are in the clear (or dead). I should help your survivability some shouldnt it?
Or is really the 10% less mana cost on all isnta spells actually gonna help? I always reckon ill be the first target to get ganged and thus not be able to use half my manapool anyways.

The other thing I wanted to know was from experienced pvp healers. Are you target#1 hands down usually? I've been thinking about staying on mount and just keeping ppl from getting to you as much as you can until ppl settle for other targets.
Im a pretty undergeared priest in a decent 5v5 team (2067 rating) and what I was hoping for was that on those lvls the average healer survivability was so high that people focus on other targets. Is there anything to this, or are we still getting the focusraep as we always have?

 

◊ Merple

Is 10% less mana on instants going to help? Hell yes. 90% of the spells I use in PvP are instants, because it prevents you from being shut down.

My most used spells from most to least are:

Renew
Shield
PoM
Dispel
Inner Fire
SW:P

and then the rare "I don't have a felhunter on my ass and I can't see a mage around" spells

Mana Burn
Flash Heal

Over the course of most fights, where I'm generally fighting OOM anyway, that's a ton of mana.

My gear's pretty bad, but I've never run into a position where I think COH would save me. I'm either incapacitated while I die, or I'm out of mana.

But that's just me.

 

sadistic

ye, im aware of those spells, but if your getting assisted 10secs after doors open you will die with 80% mana, easy. And there maybe coh could help

 

◊ Merple

Well, I mean like I said, I generally don't die unless I'm incapacitated. If I'm assisted 10 seconds out of the gate, I should be on the receiving end of a BoP. And if that fails, I'm spamming Holy Nova anyway, again, an instant.

 

• frmorrison

CoH is a bad spell and having it will not help you survive if you are being assisted down. It simply does not heal enough to warrant triggering the global cooldown.

In the Arenas, what will help you survive is your team should be helping you out via BoP, heals, CCing/killing the people hitting you.


Now, perhaps is CoH scaled that would be a different answer, but it has not been relooked at.

 

Vazu

Priests aren't primary healers in arenas for 5v5 play. The bulk of healing is done by highly armored classes like Paladins and to a lesser extent, Shaman. So! Your best bet is to stack survivability. Turn yourself into a tank. Throw out Renews, Mana Burn when possible. Your primary role is to burn opponents mana pools before you die, not spam heals. Get your team to protect you with snares and such. Live as long as possible! Forget about stupid +heal trinkets and even a PVP trinket, IMO. I'm seriously considering not even using my Medallion come 2.1.0. If I was serious about 5v5 play on a Priest,

Trinket 1:

Zandalarian Hero Badge
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.

Trinket 2:

Adamantine Figurine
Trinket
Requires Level 68
Equip: Increases defense rating by 32.
Use: Increases armor by 1280 for 20 sec.

..and honestly? I'd ditch both of my healing rings and cloak for the new buffed armor rings from Violet Eye and heroic badge turnins. Snag a high armor cloak +enchant from Mechanar and you're set. Inner Fire + this gear setup and you're looking at almost 4000 armor WITHOUT using any of the "Use" trinket effects. Now throw those into the mix and imagine a Priest with 5-6k armor on demand twice/battle. There's just no reason at all to stack 100+ healing on a Priest when you could stack 1200 armor from 3 items.

My 2C, and I'm doing something similar with my gear setup for arenas post 2.1.0.

 

◊ Merple

The problem with your idea vazu is that if you spec _that_ far to the tank side of things, you're really gimping your healing.

Your shield is weaker, your renews tick for much less and your PoM ACTUALLY does 800 instead of 1200-1500. In other words, you've now completely passed the healing duties on to your paladin.

what happens if your paladin is FF'd by a good team? He gets a (maybe) 1.5 second bubble, and is then burst into the ground. They won't bother hammering on you more than once. As much as people would like to say that priests are completely useless for healing in arenas, the healing burden IS shared, even if the paladin is forced to do the majority of it.

Just as he's supposed to keep you up, you've got the same responsibility to him, and with 200 +healing on your tank set, you're not going to help him much.

It's an issue of balance. Yes, you need to stack resilience and stamina. You also need to stack int and +healing. You'll be tanking a lot of damage, but if you go too far, they'll just start ignoring/CCing you.

 

Vazu

How much healing do you give up by sacrificing say,

Cloak (50?)
2 Rings (100?)
1 Trinket (50-70?)

Let's throw the Adamantine Figurine out the window and say you only used a ZHM.

Now make your decision.

Let's assume 1300 base armor + 1738 (Imp. IF) = 3038 Armor. Would you rather have that, or 4200 Armor and lose 200 healing? Ask yourself, how long are you surviving in these arenas? Priests w/o serious gear don't last long in highly rated 5v5 play. Are you getting Imp. IF stripped anyway? Most good teams who have offensive dispelling (and aren't retards) will spam Dispel / Purge until they're sure a Priest doesn't have IF up. So now you're looking at 1300 armor with up to 2 melee beating on you. Which costs you and your team more mana. Which means you can't survive as long if the fight ends up being a mana war. So now what's your decision? 200 healing or + 1300 armor (Giving you 2600 base)

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Vazu listed four slots for armor items. You can still easily get around +1000 healing while wearing that.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

• Karakas

+heal is really overrated for arena play.


The most important statistics for priests are probably:

sta
resilience
int
AC (if your arena metagame targets you a lot, some teams don't target priests first because they do gear so much for tanking)
+heal
+mp/5
+spirit

 

◊ Anias

I'd rate +dmg above +heal for use activated effects simply to provide more punch to opportunistic mana burn moments. Your mileage may vary of course.

 

Vitae

Unless they changed something since TBC came out, mana burn does not benefit from +damage.

 

Thezilch

Nothing has changed.

 

Pwny

-Imo AC is pretty overrated for a priest, sure it was nice back in pre tbc where you could get to around 4k armour with inner fire, but these days getting an extra 300-400 armour is so little because of the tbc armour calculation, it comes out to be an extra 0.5-1% less damage reduced, while you lose crazy amounts of int and less importantaly +heal. If you give up 2 rings which both have +20 int on them thats 750-825 mana depending on talents, which can certainly go along way, since I find biggest problem for my priest in 5v5 is mana problems. Your 12k+ hp pool and 250+ resilience will be fine most of the time. Not to mention you cant wear both trinkets at the same time, since you pretty much require a pvp trinket. I also dont rate improved inner fire talent useful because of the armour scaling issues as stated above, plus other talents in the tree are simply better (especially considering focused will revamp coming up).

-And while +heal is certainly not as useful to a priest as a paladin, it is fairly decent since in certain circumstances you will be healing, and if you've got 400 +heal or something there is no way you will overcome the mortal strike debuff. Id say good figure to aim for is 900-1000+heal.

-+damage is kinda useless imo, only really shadow word death has any use from it imo, since that + manaburn is the only damage dealing spell I normally cast.

-COH is totally useless imo, with mortal strike on you it will be healing for 300 or something, total waste of mana and global cooldowns.

-I recommend wearing 1-2+hit as well (depending if you have a draenei shaman or whatever in your group) since these will reduce the resists on mana burn and dispel nicely imo.

 

Oren

I'd tend to agree with that point on the whole. Having been someone who utilized and enjoyed armor enhancements pre-bc, the gain is significantly reduced now on two fronts:
1) Armor value scaling has changed enough so that the amount needed to be effective comes at too high a cost. That is, the stamina and resilience that can otherwise be gained will net better results.
2) We simply can't get enough of it(If you payed attention, we've lost around 10%ish physical mitigation by comparison to level 60 values). I used to love my zhb, but at 70, a couple thousand armor just isn't as much mitigation as it once was.

Now, I'm not saying its useless, nor am I saying we shouldn't pay attention to ac values, keeping IF up, etc. However, I don't think it a stat we can prioritize over others anymore. In terms of comparing something more similar, I would for instance probably lean toward the dodge trinket from moroes, more so than an activated armor trinket.

 

sadistic

Thanks alot for your input, I'm abit curious to see how much they will boost CoH with at the end, but lets be honest, it prolly wont be enough.
I'll prolly cave in and do 28/33 and rather take it from there. Having my first fights tomorrow.

Have anyone else tried the mounting tactic? I use it very much in 3v3/2v2 and it is extremely nice in some cases, though im unsure of how it will work versus skilled opponents.

 

• syeren

It's fairly safe to say that you should equip your priest with your Battlegroup's Meta-Game in mind, not just some default template that you find on some forums. For instance, in my battlegroup, I basically never get targeted unless one of our DPS dies, and at that point we've pretty much lost anyways, so it would be pointless for me to stack a crap load of armor for those situations.

I did used to play a armor set up for when people used to think targeting priests without dispelling or purging them was a good idea, which was before Xahlior's video was release, so yeah, it's a long time ago.

Hit as previously mentioned by Pwny is a very important stat for a priest these days due to defensive spell resists being in the game now, and of course it helps offensively dispel and mana burn. It's not really hard to get either; just get the Shat'ar Helm enchant, the glove enchant, and then pick up Sash from Steamvaults, and Lamp from Black Morass, and you're sitting on 3/4 spell hit

As for buffing COH, it doesn't really matter at this point due to the fact that you'd have to give up mental agility or improved mana burn, which would be a huge loss for how priests are forced to play in 5v5

Just remember to equip yourself for your meta-game and not some guides

 

sadistic

sound advice, ill chat some to the priests in other 5v5 teams in my bg.
This shift from healers to dps reminds me of daoc tbh, when ppl started ignoring healers and just plowing down the dps. crazy days but well cast-interrupts was perverse there.

 

crimsonsentinel

I wonder how many priests will spec discipline with the new changes to focused power and pain supression. I personally don't think those changes are nearly enough to offset the benefit from blessed resil. I'd like to see enlightenment be changed to at least 10% stam to provide at least some non-gimmicky incentive to spec disc (10% spirit would be nice too for PVE priests, although 10% int might be overdoing it since it stacks with mental strength).

 

Vazu

Ausmara, you probably never get targeted because you aren't on any arena teams.

http://armory.wow-europe.com/?#chara...targ&n=Ausmara

People who don't assist cloth right away are pretty much exclusively part of low rated arena teams. Priests = Mana Burn. They die fast and are 2nd only to (UA) Warlocks on the assist-train. This isn't rocket science. The Warrior in plate armor doesn't go down as quickly as the Priest in cloth. Unless we're talking about a heavy magic DPS gib team. Those are fairly uncommon though, at the top.

I could actually buy anything you wrote above if I saw you as part of a 2k+ rated team.. you know.. in any bracket.

 

• syeren

Me being on no arena teams according to the armory has absolutely nothing to do with me moving Ausmara across accounts last week at all now does it? Oh wait. Now let's move on to phase 2.

Priests are a primary target for interruption and being controlled when they're playing the mana burn (especially so if you play with Heroism / Bloodlust, into which it is fatal to leave them alone for even a few seconds,) but I wouldn't say trying to gib the priest down is very advisable when we're against a gib team into which we have to keep the mage / X Dps under control in order to relieve the pressure of our Paladin.

It's incredibly easy to control a priest if they not Dwarf or Undead in a team with only 2 healers, the same cannot be said when your DPS is trying to kill the priest when they're being locked down by the other team's DPS.

But like previously mentioned, it's entirely dependent on your Battlegroups Meta-Game, I just know that priests like vhell or Panda basically never get assisted on in theirs anymore (I would attempt to have them post on here, but vhell is back from China, while Panda appears to be AFK at the moment.)

 

vhell

You do still get assisted on, but resilience affects both types of damage (spell/melee) a whole hell of a lot more than stacking armor.

 

◊ Shadowed

Priests are an incredible pain to kill first, the ones who have Blessed Resilience and Gladiator gear take a long time to burn down that you may as well be trying to kill a Warrior, especially with a Paladin due to BoP and Warriors rage generation is terrible against the well geared Priests.

I can only recall one or two teams that we really need to focus on the Priest first, it's just not realistic and wastes a lot of time when you have more squishy players...unless the Priest is undergeared, but that doesn't really matter.

 

Vazu