Originally posted here on 9/13/08.

I love priest healing in World of Warcraft. I’ve tried healing as each of the other healing classes (paladin, druid, shaman) and it’s just not as fun for me. I have a pair of healing specs that work very well for me; one is for leveling and soloing, and the other is a more healing-oriented spec. They differ by only a few talent points.

Here’s how I recommend you distribute your points, level by level. This is an odd sequence, because while it’s a Holy build, you won’t put any points into Holy talents until level 20, and you’ll be piecemealing between Holy and Discipline the whole way up.

10. Spirit Tap 1/5. (Shadow) Spirit Tap doubles your Spirit for 15 seconds after you deal the killing blow to a creature or player that yields XP or honor, and allows 50% of your mana regeneration to continue during casting for those same 15 seconds. Each point in the talent gives you a 20% chance to proc the buff. Spirit Tap is strictly a soloing talent for Holy priests; in groups, you’ll almost never get the killing blow, and so you’ll never have the buff.
11. Spirit Tap 2/5
12. Spirit Tap 3/5
13. Spirit Tap 4/5
14. Spirit Tap 5/5
15. Wand Specialization 1/5. (Discipline) Again, this is largely a soloing talent. Since you want to conserve mana as a priest, you’ll be using your wand a lot. Each point in this talent gives you +5% wand damage, and increasing your wand damage means that mobs will go down that much faster.
16. Wand Specialization 2/5
17. Wand Specialization 3/5
18. Wand Specialization 4/5
19. Wand Specialization 5/5
20. Healing Focus 1/2. (Holy) Finally the Holy tree. Healing Focus prevents spell pushback on your healing spells, which is great either soloing or in groups. Each point you put into this gives you 35% chance to resist spell pushback.
21. Healing Focus 2/2
22. Improved Renew 1/3. (Holy) Each point in Improved Renew increases the healing effect of your Renew spell by 5%. Renew is going to be your bread and butter, in instances and soloing, since it’s instant-cast and has a great health-per-mana ratio.
23. Improved Renew 2/3
24. Improved Renew 3/3
25. Improved Power Word: Fortitude 1/2. (Discipline) Improved PW:F increases the Stamina bonus from PW:F by 15% per point. Nobody in the game will ever turn down extra Stamina.
26. Improved PW:F 2/2
27. Improved Power Word: Shield 1/3. (Discipline) I don’t actually like to use Power Word: Shield very much, especially with Improved Renew. However, it’s a decent emergency button, and Power Word: Shield suffers from very poor scaling in the levels leading up to a new rank of the spell, so anything that improves its absorption – which this talent does, at +5% per point – is a blessing.
28. Improved PW:S 2/3
29. Improved PW:S 3/3

At this point, your choice of talent priority is going to depend on whether you’re doing more soloing or group healing. If you solo more; take the Holy talent first; if you’re healing more, take the Discipline talents first.

30. Spell Warding 1/5 (holy) or Meditation 1/3 (discipline). Spell Warding reduces the spell damage you take by 2% per point; Meditation allows 10% of your mana regeneration to continue while you cast spells. Note that Meditation does stack with Spirit Tap, so while Spirit Tap is active, 50% + 10% per level of Meditation of your mana regeneration continues while you cast.
31. Spell Warding 2/5 or Meditation 2/3
32. Spell Warding 3/5 or Meditation 3/3
33. Spell Warding 4/5 or Silent Resolve 1/5 (discipline). Silent Resolve reduces the threat from your Holy and Discipline spells, and the chance that your spells will resist being dispelled, by 4% per talent point.
34. Spell Warding 5/5 or Silent Resolve 2/5

If you took the Holy talent from 30-34, take the Discipline talent from 35-39, and vice versa.

35. Meditation 1/3 or Spell Warding 1/5
36. Meditation 2/3 or Spell Warding 2/5
37. Meditation 3/3 or Spell Warding 3/5
38. Silent Resolve 1/5 or Spell Warding 4/5
39. Silent Resolve 2/5 or Spell Warding 5/5
40. Inspiration 1/3. (Holy) When you get a crit on any of your direct heals that have a non-instant cast time – in other words, anything but Renew and Lightwell – your target gets +8% armor per talent point (25% at 3/3) for 15 seconds. Tanks will love you for this talent alone.
41. Inspiration 2/3
42. Inspiration 3/3
43. Mental Agility 1/5. (Discipline) Reduces the mana cost of your instant-cast spells by 2% per talent point. This improves the health-to-mana ratio of your Renew even farther, and gives you a much-needed reduction to the cost of your buff spells. (Admittedly, the cost is much less these days, but…)
44. Mental Agility 2/5
45. Mental Agility 3/5
46. Mental Agility 4/5
47. Mental Agility 5/5
48. Divine Spirit 1/1. (Discipline) Divine Spirit is a counterpart to Power Word: Fortitude, and increases Spirit the same way PW:F increases Stamina. Since higher Spirit corresponds directly to higher mana regeneration, this is very useful to priests on its own – but it gets even better with further talents. (Spirit also increases health regeneration, so don’t hesitate to cast Divine Spirit on non-mana classes.)
49. Improved Divine Spirit 1/2. (Discipline) With this talent, when you cast Divine Spirit on someone, their healing and spell damage increase by 5% per point in Improved DS. Caster classes of all stripes will love you for this buff, just like tanks love you for Inspiration.
50. Improved DS 2/2.

At this point we’re done in Discipline and Shadow. All the rest of your points will be going into the Holy tree.

51. Holy Nova 1/1. (Holy) Holy Nova is a highly-situational spell; it doesn’t do enough healing to be a truly effective AOE heal, and it doesn’t do enough damage to be a good damage spell. But it does have its uses, and it is a good emergency button. It’s also the only AOE spell in the game that generates no threat.
52. Blessed Recovery 1/3. (Holy) Blessed Recovery heals 8% per talent point of the damage you take from any critical hit you receive in combat. It’s not as good as a straight-up damage reduction, but at 3/3 it reduces the effect of any crit that doesn’t kill you by nearly 50%.
53. Blessed Recovery 2/3
54. Blessed Recovery 3/3
55. Improved Healing 1/3. (Holy) This is a straight-up mana cost reduction; your major heals (Lesser Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal) have their mana cost reduced by 5% per talent point. I’m sure you can see the benefit of reduced-cost heals; the less mana you spend, the less you have to regenerate.
56. Improved Healing 2/3
57. Improved Healing 3/3
58. Spirit of Redemption 1/1. (Holy) This is a two-pronged talent, each of which is very simple but has impressive effects. The first is that when you die, you get to stay up for fifteen seconds, invulnerable to damage or effects, and can cast any healing spell in your arsenal at no mana cost (although you still have to spend the cast time). This alone can turn a wipe into just you running back (or nobody, if you’re lucky and have a paladin tank). The second effect is that you gain a straight-up 5% bonus to your total Spirit. As far as I can tell, this is calculated last – so any buffs that increase your Spirit are increased by 5% as well.
59. Spiritual Guidance 1/5. (Holy) Increases your spell damage and healing by 5% per talent point of your total Spirit. This talent is where Spirit comes into its own with priests. With 5/5 of Spiritual Guidance, you gain 25% of your Spirit, modified by healing coefficients, to all of your healing spells. This is calculated on the fly, using your total Spirit, including the effects of buffs like Divine Spirit and talents like Spirit of Redemption.
60. Spiritual Guidance 2/5
61. Spiritual Guidance 3/5
62. Spiritual Guidance 4/5
63. Spiritual Guidance 5/5
64. Spiritual Healing 1/5. (Holy) A straight-up bonus to your healing spells. All of your healing spells’ effects are increased by 2% per talent point.
65. Spiritual Healing 2/5
66. Spiritual Healing 3/5
67. Spiritual Healing 4/5
68. Spiritual Healing 5/5
69. Healing Prayers 1/2. (Holy) Another mana reduction, this time 10% per talent point to Prayer of Healing and Prayer of Mending. Prayer of Healing is your group-wide heal, and Prayer of Mending is the Healing Frisbee, a heal that waits until the target is damaged before it heals up and moves on to another player – and generates threat for the target, not for the caster. (Tanks love Prayer of Mending.) Especially in raids, you’re going to be casting these spells a lot – and, as above, any mana you don’t spend is mana you don’t have to regenerate.
70. Finally, Lightwell 1/1. (Holy) Lightwell is a much-maligned spell, but I love it. Casting this spell generates a Lightwell that players can click to give them a heal-over-time effect. The effect is cancelled on damage, but it’s still great for DPSers that are fleeing close damage or healers who are recovering from an AOE without wanting to spend the time casting a heal on themselves. And since the effect apparently doesn’t cancel on damage in the beta, it’ll be great for tanks and melee DPS in a pinch, too.

This is the final build. It leaves you balanced for soloing or instancing. If you reach level 70 and realize that you’re going to be strictly instancing, you can get rid of Spirit Tap and Wand Specialization altogether. Of the ten points that frees up, put two points in Holy Reach 2/2 (important to you is that it increases the radius of Prayer of Healing and Holy Nova by 10% per talent point), another point into Healing Prayers (making it 2/2), 2/5 into Empowered Healing (increasing your two most-used heals, Greater Heal and Flash Heal, by 4% and 2% per talent point respectively), and five points into Unbreakable Will 5/5 (increases your chance to resist Stun, Fear, and Silence effects by 3% per point), bringing this to a full healing build.

Related posts:

1. New T10 Priest set bonuses Blizzard has updated the Tier 10 set bonuses for healing...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.