Surviving as a Priest
 

This thread is dedicated to strategy and discussion regarding Priests in Arena.

Drop Blessed Recovery in my opinion. It will proc over Blessed Resilience which is a far more powerful talent.

Also keep your shield on yourself at all times, before the warrior even gets to you. If he can't generate rage then he can't do much but hope for a mace proc.

Hope this helps a bit.

There isn't much you can do, but here are a couple of tactics I have found that have prolonged the fight.

- Kite him as long as possible before he can get his charge off(works best in blades edge)
- When he uses his intercept, trinket out of it as it will remove the stun and hamstring you most likely have on you, and kite him again. Most warriors dont expect that you will move after their intercept stun so it catches them offguard.
- Shield as much as possible + keep renew up all the time(shields dont give them rage)
- One thing that works sometimes, is when you're at full HP(or close to it) cast a heal to draw their pummel and then MC them. This doesnt always work because sometimes the warrior will be attacking so fast it take a good 5 seconds before the MC goes off. But with a well timed shield, you can gain a good 10 seconds from MC.
- Of course fear when they dont have Death Wish up(although if a mace spec warrior doesnt kill me in 30 seconds I consider him a failure).

I mostly 2v2 with a rogue partner, and the only time we have won against pally/war teams is when the warrior didn't have mace, or the pally didn't react fast enough to my mana burns and he was oom before he could move outta LOS.

Also to the other priests out there that have problems against warriors, would you favor resil gems over stam gems or vice-versa?

Could you please elaborate on this, what do you mean by "proc over Blessed Resilience"? Does it override Blessed Resilience when it procs?

Since they can't proc at the same time there is a random (I believe it's random) chance to proc either, so yes, technically one is overwritten by the other.

Also, If a warrior MS crits you for 2500 and then white crits you for 1k the white crit will override the MS crit (therefore healing for less) and reset the healing timer as well.

This talent is just a disaster all around in my personal opinion.

As for the kiting thing, put up rank 1 SWP on your bars and hit him with it when he gets in range before he charges you and force him to switch to berserker and intercept. Then he's out of distance closing options for 20+ seconds (and as the person above mentioned, trinket out of the stun and hamstring and you've got a head start).

I'd rather use SW: D to get the warrior in combat, because forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesnt SW:P have to tick before it will get the warrior in combat?

I had no idea about that, thank you very much for pointing it out. That surely would explain the crit chains that I take.

What do you guys think of Silent Resolve? I've heard its bugged somehow, but not sure how. Does it work on Blessed Resilience? Or is it only spells you physically "cast"?

Personally I'm thinking of stacking Armor items and effects, such as ZG tanking trinket, and perhaps the Violet eye Tanking ring and an Armor cloak. I'm leaning towards armor items over Resilence, as it seems it provides higher mitigation, even on crits.

If you go the normal 28/33 blessed resil build, getting Silent Resolve will be a matter of playstyle. If you are an offensive dispeller in most of your groups, I'd rather get its mana cost reduced by 15%. It can also depend on which arena you plan on doing. For 2v2(my choice for arena's) the only team that gives us a problem is warr/pally and since none of them have an offensive dispell the points used in Silent Resolve would be a waste.

I also had no idea that blessed recovery/resilience will not proc at the same time. I'm sure I've seen the timers for both on my buffmod, but I definately need to do some testing tonight as a respec may be in order.

I'm almost hoping it's as you say, since more BR uptime would be nice. I was aware of the 'crits overwriting crits' problem, but always figured that any passive healing adds to my survival.

I've been meaning to pose this question, and now seems a valid time to do it since it's a choice that seems even more baffling to me now. I've peeped at a -lot- of high rated priest's specs over arena s1/2, and I've noticed a lot of them had 1/3 in both inspiration and blessed recovery. Is there anything obvious I'm missing which would make that a wise choice during the normal course of things? I'm pretty certain these are pure pvp specs, and under normal circumstances I'd say those are 2 wasted points which could have been dropped into crit or something.

Here's a quick example of what I'm on about.

I'm almost 100% positive that one of the more reliable priests on the Wow-Priests forum did a lot of testing at some point and basically showed that the two "BR" talents conflict. This was a few months ago so perhaps it has been fixed by now.

More buffs = more things to purge/dispell. Getting these makes it so that they cover more important buffs such as a BoP or a Blessing or a PoM. At leasts that's the way I see it.

The best way to stay alive against a warrior is to have your teammates save you. In 2v2 with a warrior partner a tactic we've been trying and having some success with is getting the warrior in combat and running away, forcing him to intercept me. When he does this I have my warrior intercept and hamstring him in return and I run off, free from damage for 15+ seconds. With a frost mage it's even better, if I'm the one getting targetted he'll sheep and nova the warrior for me when possible. We're still working on our teamwork in this regard, and our mage only just respecced to water elemental which should make it even easier, but my survivability has gone way up already. When I 2v2 with an elemental shaman (no more!) I just get ripped apart by a geared warrior because a shaman can't CC to help me.

This is a common misconception due to like you said, all the testing that made it look like this is how it works, but we now know it doesn't work like this. If you get crit all of your "on being crit" abilities will proc. The only problem is that the more resiliance you get the less likely you are to crit and so the less powerful these talents are. To counteract this Blizzard put in a system where you have a % chance to proc an "on being crit" talent on normal hits, based on your resilience (I believe it is equal to the crit reduction you get from resilience). For this type of proc WoW rolls for each ability seperately. Now you're looking at only 10% chance to proc each ability so it's fairly rare to get all 3 up at once from a normal hit, hence the myth that you can only proc 1 or 2 on being crit abilities when not being crit.

There was a blue post on this and a couple threads running calculations but the forums are running slow right now so I can't find them.

No, just having a hostile ability used on you puts you in combat, but of course lag can have him charge you right before the server sees him get in comabt even though he should be from your end.

Aha, I knew there was something funky about it. I guess I was thinking of before they changed it so you could get the "on being crit" bonuses from a crit that has been reduced to a hit by resilience.

I still think Blessed Recovery isn't great as new procs will overwrite old ones and reset the heal timer. It's not quite as bad as I had originally heard though.

[Edit, beaten]

Could someone post some solid evidence that both BR procs can't happen at the same time? I'm concerned that the testers may be confused when they try this, because resilience means each *hit* has a small chance to proc one (or more) of your defensive abilities (see Drysc's explanation of resilience and proc interaction: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...10541937&sid=1). The chance that both abilities proc off of the same hit is small. That could result in people seeing the two abilities proc independently of each other and assuming that they don't stack. Crits should still proc both. Could we see some instances of crits procing only one or the other?

Well that certainly makes me a sad panda. They originally claimed they would make it so everything procced off a crit-reduced-to-hit by resilience. Sorry for the confusion all.