• Heal: I’ve never really understood why Blizzard has chosen to make healing spells progress like this. We start with Lesser Heal, get Heal at 16, and get Greater Heal around 40 if I’m remembering correctly. Every time we go up a step, the previous step becomes useless (less healed for the same amount of mana). Mages don’t have Lesser Fireball, Fireball, and Greater Fireball; why are healing spells stacked this way? Regardless, it’s nice to see some more granularity in the healing spells available to level-capped priests.
• Mind Spike: You might remember a variant on this ability used by various voidwalkers and similarly-aspected creatures in Outland. (I’m thinking in particular about the voidwalkers around Oshu’gun in Nagrand.) This is useful for Shadow priests who – as they said – don’t have time to set up a rotation or who are locked out of Shadow spells (since it’s Shadowfrost, it won’t be stymied by school-lock mechanics). But as a baseline spell (it shows up at level 81 and they’ve said they’re not extending the talent trees beyond 51 points), it’ll also be useful to Disc and Holy priests in similar situations – it has a faster cast time than Mind Blast (and no cooldown) and no self-damage component like Shadow Word: Death, so we’ll be able to use it to DPS when we’ve been school-locked.
• Inner Will: This is going to be fabulous for raiding Disc priests. We’ll be much more mobile and we’ll have mana reductions on many of our key mitigation spells (PW:S and Pain Suppression, I’m looking at you). Based on this, I suspect that we’ll be seeing more talents and glyphs that remove the cast time of some our healing spells as well. (“When your Penance critically heals a friendly target, your next Heal has a chance to become instant-cast.”)
• Leap of Faith: It’s like Death Grip for friendlies. Here is where I’m going to deviate from the general healing population: if you are outright refusing to heal someone because they’re standing in a ground effect, you are a bad healer. Placing them lower on the priority list? Sure. It’s their responsibility to get out. But it’s your responsibility to heal the group. If you won’t do that, you shouldn’t be healing. We’ve come to a point in WOW where a lot of healers are saying “I’m just healing the tank, the DPS are on their own”, which is patently ridiculous. (Yes, I know I’ve been guilty of saying this myself sometimes. Shame on me.) Leap of Faith is a mitigation tool when someone’s standing in the fire; it’s like Power Word: Shield, except that it won’t run out. Added bonus: Leap of Faith + Inner Will = nobody ever has to do Frogger again.
• HOTs and DOTs will now benefit from haste and crit by default. This is cause for celebration, but I wonder: is this limited to priests, or is it a general change? And will Shadowform get a different bonus since it’s losing the haste/crit bonus?
• The changes to Spirit buffs – removing Divine Spirit, and making Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild not affect spirit – feel kludgy to me. Why not just drop Spirit entirely and go to straight MP5/HP5?
• “We want to improve Discipline’s single-target healing capacity.” Um. What does Blizzard know that I don’t about Disc priests’ ability to heal a single target well? “You’re awesome, and we want to make you totally awesome.”
• Power Word: Barrier: Finally. I’ve been waiting for this since the Wrath beta!
• Shadow Orbs (part of Shadow mastery): this looks like a cool mechanic. Wait for the minor Glyph to turn the orbs into ravens.

What are your thoughts? Leave me a note in the comments!

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3.3.3 changed the 4-piece set bonus for the Sanctified Crimson Acolyte’s Raiment, the healing priest Tier 10 set. Before the change, the set bonus was:

• (4) Set: Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

Now it’s:

• (4) Set: Increases the effect of Power Word: Shield by 5% and Circle of Healing by 10%.

This is a pretty significant change, and one which a lot of priests are bemoaning; where the old version rewarded tactical use of cooldowns and variety of spell use, the new bonus just provides a passive bonus, and rewards spamming.

First, let’s be honest: this is continuing in Blizzard’s current trend of making content accessible to more people. The people who like the old bonus and who are bemoaning the new one are the ones who would have gotten T10 first – but there are a whole lot of players who are going to be getting at least four pieces of T10 who don’t have the tactical skill to make good use of the original bonus. To them, the new version of the bonus is a better bonus, simply because it doesn’t require as much thought; they can put more of their attention toward healing the people who need healing (or shielding the people who need shielding), instead of having to worry about whether their 20% proc rate went off.

What’s curious to me about the bonus is that while Holy priests get a bonus to a spec-defining talent (Circle of Healing), Disc priests get a bonus to a baseline ability. Any priest can benefit from the bonus to Power Word: Shield; only Holy priests will benefit from the 10% COH buff. I suspect that’s why the PW:S buff is only half of the COH buff: it’s more generally usable. It’s also on a shorter cooldown than COH is – in fact, for Discipline priests, it’s on a global cooldown, which means that this buff is just promoting the view of Disc priests as bubble spammers.

Mostly I’m just disappointed in this change. I’ve long believed that tier gear should be the best gear available for a given class and spec (and I’m aware of the argument that “then we’d just have everyone of a given class looking the same”, to which I say: given the prevalence of players relying on Elitist Jerks and Best In Slot lists to tell them what they Have To Equip, we have that anyway). If tier gear were the best gear available, the set bonuses would be icing on the cake – and because they wouldn’t be necessary to entice characters to wear the gear, they could (and should) be interesting. In fact, tier gear used to be that way – check out the Vestments of Transcendence, the priest Tier 2 set, whose set bonuses included “When struck in melee there is a 50% chance you will Fade for 4 seconds”. By changing the T10 set bonus from an interesting bonus to a purely utilitarian bonus, Blizzard is sending a message that they don’t consider tier set bonuses to be icing on the tier-set cake; they’re a necessary part of the gear, and necessary to entice players to get the gear.

A Duct Tape post about gear wouldn’t be complete without some numbers, so here you go.

• Circle of Healing, without any other modifiers, heals for 958-1058 per target. Its spell power coefficient is 40.29%; I think 2800 spell power is a reasonable number to go with for a priest in T10, so that adds another 1128 (2800 * .4029) to the spell, giving us an average per-target heal of 2136. An additional 10% to that is about 2350 per target, for a gain of about 1068 healing every 6 seconds.
• Power Word: Shield, without any other modifiers, absorbs 2230 damage. Its coefficient is 80.57%; the aforementioned spell power adds another 2256 absorption, yielding an average per-target shield that absorbs 4486 damage. With the set bonus, that’s 4710 absorption, or an additional 224 every 4 seconds. Discipline priests, however, have not only a 15% bonus to PW:S but a shield that can be cast once per GCD – that is, once per second for a properly-hasted Disc priest. (This is, I admit, a little unfair to Holy priests, since I’m denying them the benefit of Divine Providence and other talents. The problem is that while Circle of Healing doesn’t have a prerequisite – only any other 40 points in Holy – Soul Warding, which gives the cooldown reduction to PW:S, requires Improved PW:S, which gives the +15% bonus. So I have to include Imp PW:S to get the once-per-GCD shield, but strictly speaking, it’s possible to have Circle of Healing without any talents that give it bonuses.) That 4486 damage absorbed becomes 5159 damage with the 15% bonus, and the tier bonus brings it up to 5417, or 258 extra absorption every second. If the priest is bubble spamming, that’s 1547 extra damage absorbed every 6 seconds.

In other words, even though the PW:S bonus is smaller, the actual effect – assuming that all you’re doing is casting PW:S every chance you get – is about 45% larger than the bonus Holy gets. If we assume that Blizzard wants the bonuses to even out, then we can safely guess that they think that Discipline priests are casting Power Word: Shield roughly once every other spell. That seems to match with the popular perception of Discipline priests, and therefore with how (we can assume) most of the non-high-end Discipline priests are playing – which again points to the conclusion that Blizzard is trying to open the tier gear up to less hardcore players.

I’m not really sure how I feel about that, in the end. Yes, I’d like the tier gear to be the best gear available. But since it’s not, there’s a significant part of me that’s pleased that a larger portion of the player base has access to it. After all, tier gear isn’t really a sign of elitism if the elitists are going to be wearing something else.

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• Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.

With my current haste rating, Penance has a 1.64-second channel, leaving me 6.36 seconds to cast Flash Heals before Penance’s cooldown is up. (I’m glyphed and have Aspiration.) Since my Flash Heal’s cast time is 1.31 seconds, I can cast it 4 times before Penance cools down, with 1.12s left over.

The math for determining how likely a percentage-based proc will go off is 1-[(1-proc chance)^(number of opportunities)]. (It seems unnecessarily complicated, but that’s how probability works.) In this case our proc chance is 0.15 (15%), and our number of opportunities is 4.

If I’m just spamming Flash Heal until Penance cools down – which I rarely am, but let’s assume it for the sake of a best possible scenario – then my chance to reduce Penance’s cooldown by at least 1 second is 1-[(1-0.15)^4], or 47.8%. Given that, roughly every other Penance cooldown will be shortened by at least 1 second.

(Without going into the math, the increased number of casts from dropping Glyph of Penance and Aspiration don’t justify the extension of the cooldown.)

For the record, if you’re just spamming Flash Heal after you use Penance (which I hope you’re not) and assuming 0 Haste (I hope you have some), you have 15% chance to reduce Penance’s cooldown by 4.5 seconds, 27.8% to reduce the cooldown by at least 3 seconds, and 38.5% to reduce the cooldown by at least 1.5 seconds. (Remember, the proc doesn’t go off until the Flash Heal spellcast does, so you have to let Penance cool down by at least 3.5 seconds – 2 seconds channeling Penance and then 1.5 seconds casting Flash Heal – before you can trigger the bonus at all.)

Incidentally, due to the nature of the problem, there is no point at which you’re guaranteed a proc. You get to 99.9% chance of having triggered the bonus at some point at about 27 Flash Heal casts, but it’s possible to beat probability and go forever without having triggered the bonus proc. That said, with no Haste, on average you’ll reduce the cooldown of your Penances by about 0.6 seconds. (If you have Haste, the average reduction is [0.6 * (1 + Haste %)].)

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It wasn’t. We had enough DPS from other sources to carry him, but he was barely pulling 700 DPS. Midway through the run, after Prince Keleseth hadn’t dropped anything useful for him, he asked the party, “My friend said I should get PVP gear to make me better. What’s the best way to do that?”

I don’t really remember what the rest of the group said to him; it was along the lines of “no, get boss drops in PVE”. It was pretty clear that he didn’t know what boss drops to be looking for, though, and I got the impression that the response confused him. So I sent him a whisper: “You can look at Wowhead to find out what items are best for you. Here’s a link:” And I pasted in the URL of a Wowhead filter that contained warrior-friendly gear in Northrend. (I think this was the link I gave him.) “You should also take a look at WOWWiki to see the kinds of things warriors want on gear.”

He asked for a minute to go AFK, and we proceeded without him for a minute or two. When he got back, he ran back to the group and whispered me back. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I never knew about those. I’m going to read them after we’re done.”

“No problem,” I replied. “You might also want to check out the talent calculator on Wowhead, and there are a couple blogs that are useful for warrior stuff.”

He thanked me again, we proceeded to take out the twins and Ingvar, and then he left the group. The next time I saw him, in Dalaran, he’d swapped out all of his warrior-unfriendly gear with warrior-statted heroic blues. I whispered him again. “It looks like you’re getting some better gear!”

“Yes, thank you! I didn’t even know what good warrior gear was. Wowhead helped a lot. Now I know what to look for.”

We have a problem, guys.

It’s certainly nothing life-shaking or insurmountable. We can work through it if we want to. But it does need to be addressed.

Here it is: our problem is that we think of players who don’t know what they’re doing as “bad”.

They’re not, really. They just don’t know what they’re doing. They aren’t playing consciously – they’re just picking up gear and taking talents that look like they ought to be handy or cool. They’re warriors taking a +spell power mace because it has higher DPS; they’re Restoration druids in +hit gear, because if their offensive spells miss, their healing spells might too. But this isn’t about badness. It’s just about inexperience.

See, if you’re reading this blog, I can make a couple assumptions about you, the foremost being that you’re interested in how Discipline priests work. That is, after all, mostly what this blog is about. You wouldn’t be here looking for [redacted because I don't want to show up in Google searches for those things]. You’re probably aware that I’m not the only WOW blog on the planet. You probably know that there are official forums for World of Warcraft. You might have a Twitter account where you discuss WOW.

Now here’s the important part: because of the spotlight fallacy, we assume that in general, people are like us. (It’s a very focused spotlight in this case.) We assume that Discipline priests read the Discipline priest blogs, and read the official forums, and use Wowhead, and read up on boss fights in WOWWiki, because that’s what we do. So when we see other players in gear that isn’t itemized for their class, who have talents that we wouldn’t have chosen, who don’t know how the boss fight works, we assume that they’re just Bad Players – that they haven’t assimilated all the stuff they’ve been reading, or that they’re consciously ignoring it.

Sure, that’s true in some cases, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that 95% of the World of Warcraft player base doesn’t visit the forums on a regular basis, and that probably 50% of active players don’t even know that there are official forums. They’ve never heard of WOWWiki or Wowhead. They see the tooltip on Spirit that says that it helps health regeneration, and figure that sounds pretty good. They aren’t bad. They just don’t know about the resources.

Here’s an open request: the next time you see a “bad player”, send them a whisper. Say “hey, I see you’re wearing thus-and-such” – or have this talent, or whatnot – “that I wouldn’t expect a warrior” – or whatever the player’s class may be – “to wear. Why’d you pick that piece of gear?” Establish a dialogue, rather than just writing the player off as bad. If it turns out they’re one of the vast number of players who don’t know about gear itemization, Wowhead, and the link, give them links; help them educate themselves. If they’re trying out something different, talk to them about it and maybe you’ll learn something. And if they say “shut up, mind your own business”…

Well, then they’re probably a bad player.

Did you notice the most important clause in the previous section? Go back and look. See if you can figure out what it’s going to have been. (I love the pluperfect.) I’ll wait.

*dramatic pause*

It’s “help them educate themselves“.

See, all the websites in the world aren’t going to do an uneducated player a lick of good if all the player does is follow the advice of those websites blindly. They’re going to be just as uneducated, but now they’re letting someone else tell them what to do instead of picking it up piecemeal based on tooltips. They’re in a worse situation than they were before, because now they’re going to rely on what you’ve shown them. What happens when the site you’ve shown them is down? What happens if the game changes but the page doesn’t (as seems to be the case with much of WOWWiki at the moment)? They’ll be back to groping at tooltips to help them figure out what to do next.

I’m sure you know the expression about giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish. I don’t need to repeat it. But the lesson applies nonetheless: help uneducated players educate themselves. Don’t just say “you need strength gear”, explain what Strength does for a warrior and compare it to other stats. Don’t just rattle off a Best In Slot list (you’ll notice I haven’t updated my Naxx lists for Ulduar yet); help them figure out why each piece of gear is desirable. Perhaps most important, let them make their own decisions about gear; guide them, but don’t define for them. The goal is to have players be playing consciously.

And yes, “I like the way it looks” is, at its heart, a conscious decision. Just so we’re clear.

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1. You cast PW:S, and Borrowed Time takes effect as soon as you cast. The global cooldown triggered by PW:S is reduced to 1.2s (assuming no other haste effects).
2. You cast Penance, which is affected by Borrowed Time but does not consume it. The GCD triggered by Penance is 1.2s.
3. You cast Flash Heal, which has a 1.2s cast time. Since Borrowed Time doesn’t wear off until the spell is successfully cast, the GCD triggered by Flash Heal is 1.2s.
4. Borrowed Time wears off, and the GCD on the next spell you cast is back up to 1.5s – unless the next spell is PW:S, in which case GOTO 1.

This feature of Borrowed Time, in fact, makes its effect on the GCD particularly easy to test for yourself. Cast PW:S on yourself and then cast Flash Heal; since FH’s cast time is normally 1.5s, and the GCD is normally 1.5s, Flash Heal’s cast time should end just as the GCD does no matter how much haste you have.

As always, if I’ve done something wrong or you have a different experience, let me know.

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Here’s my talent spec, which I think is pretty standard for Discipline priests. I specced into Desperate Prayer because it was recommended to me, but honestly I never use the spell, so the point would probably be better spent in Healing Focus or Unbreakable Will. You’ll notice that I have Glyph of Dispel Magic; this is because I haven’t been able to find a Glyph of Penance!

Comments and questions are welcome, but to reiterate, “you’re doing it wrong” isn’t welcome here.

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Post tags: Armory, Priest, Talents

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Since priest talents are changing significantly in Wrath of the Lich King – as was pointed out on WOW Insider – I figured I’d rework my talent recommendations to take the LK talent spreads into account.

NB: I’m not in the beta. Some of these talents may have play implications that I’m not familiar with.

10. Spirit Tap 1/3 (Shadow). This is an unbeatable leveling talent; it gives you +100% Spirit and +50% mana regeneration during casting for 15 seconds after you get the killing blow on a target that gives you XP or honor. The more mana you regenerate, the less downtime you’ll have. When you’re healing, though, this talent is next to useless, since you’ll almost never be getting the killing blow.
11. Spirit Tap 2/3.
12. Spirit Tap 3/3.
13. Twin Disciplines 1/5 (Discipline). This replaces Wand Specialization in the Discipline Tree. It grants +1% spell damage and healing per talent point to all of the instant-cast spells in your repertoire. I’m not sure if this includes spells whose durations are reduced to instant.
14. Twin Disciplines 2/5.
15. Twin Disciplines 3/5.
16. Twin Disciplines 4/5.
17. Twin Disciplines 5/5.
18. Healing Focus 1/2 (Holy). Healing Focus prevents spell pushback, giving you a 35% chance per point to resist pushback from damage while you cast any healing spell. Great for soloing (since you can get that heal off while the mob’s hitting you) and essential for grouping (since you can cast through AOE and the occasional accidental add).
19. Healing Focus 2/2.
20. Improved Power Word: Fortitude 1/2 (Discipline). Increases the Stamina bonus from PW:F by 30% per talent point. PW:F is the buff you’ll cast most often, and improving it can only help matters.
21. Improved PW:F 2/2.
22. Improved Renew 1/3 (Holy). Increases the amount healed by your Renew spell by 5% per point. Renew is probably the spell you’ll cast most as a priest; between this and Twin Disciplines, your Renew will heal for 25% more than its tooltip value, making it invaluable as a Band-Aid spell.
23. Improved Renew 2/3.
24. Improved Renew 3/3.
25. Silent Resolve 1/3 (Discipline). Each point in this talent reduces the threat that your Holy and Discipline spells generate by 7% (up to 20% at 3 points) and reduces the chance your spells will be dispelled by 10%. This is pretty much a grouping and PVP talent, but it’s still handy to have.
26. Silent Resolve 2/3.
27. Silent Resolve 3/3.
28. Meditation 1/3 (Discipline). Allows 10% per point of your mana regeneration to continue while you cast. Normally, when you successfully cast a spell – that is, when you pay the mana cost of the spell, even if it’s reduced to 0 – your mana regeneration stops entirely for five seconds; this is the much-referenced Five Second Rule, or 5SR. With this talent, you can get up to 30% of your mana regeneration to continue while the 5SR is in effect – or up to 80% while Spirit Tap is active. As above, the more mana you regenerate in combat, the less downtime you’ll have, and the better the chance that you’ll survive the combat.
29. Meditation 2/3.
30. Meditation 3/3.
31. Spell Warding 1/5 (Holy). Reduces the spell damage you take by 2% per point. This is a straight-up survival talent; it’s not worth much against melee opponents, but casters will have that much more trouble taking you down – and in later instances, this will be invaluable in surviving AOE or multiple-target attacks.
32. Spell Warding 2/5.
33. Spell Warding 3/5.
34. Spell Warding 4/5.
35. Spell Warding 5/5.
36. Improved Power Word: Shield 1/3 (Discipline). I’m not a big fan of Power Word: Shield; it’s essentially my “oh crap” button, and its job is to keep the target alive until I can get a heal off. It has its proponents in solo play, but to me it’s just another way to spend mana, and when I’m soloing I want to conserve mana as much as possible. (Besides, ideally I’ll be wanding by the time the mob gets to me, and Renew will heal more damage than PW:S can prevent for less mana.) However, we need to put two talent points somewhere, and one of the noted flaws of PW:S is that it gets markedly less effective in the levels leading up to the next rank of the spell, so we’ll put two points here and increase PW:S’s damage absorption by 5% per point.
37. Improved PW:S 2/3.
38. Mental Agility 1/5 (Discipline). This talent reduces the mana cost of your instant spells by 2% per point. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m a big proponent of Renew, and reducing its mana cost just makes it that much more efficient. At this point you have +25% to Renew’s healing and -10% to its mana cost; in other words, according to the tooltip, the spell heals 400 health and costs 19% of base mana, but for you, it heals 500 health and costs 17.1% of base mana.
39. Mental Agility 2/5.
40. Mental Agility 3/5.
41. Mental Agility 4/5.
42. Mental Agility 5/5.
43. Divine Spirit 1/1 (Discipline). This is the zenith of the Discipline tree, as far as this build is concerned. Divine Spirit is a buff spell like Power Word: Fortitude; it grants a bonus to Spirit. At the moment, Spirit just increases your mana regeneration, but stick around for the next few talents; it’s about to get a lot more powerful.
44. Improved Divine Spirit 1/2 (Discipline). This talent adds to the buff that Divine Spirit provides. In addition to the Spirit boost, your Divine Spirit will now increase the recipient’s spell damage and healing by 3% of their total Spirit for each point you take in the talent.
45. Improved Divine Spirit 2/2.

This is as far as we’re going to go in the Discipline tree. From here on out, it’s all Holy.

46. Holy Nova 1/1. This is the Holy priest’s only AOE spell. It damages all enemies within 10 yards, and heals all party members within the same radius. It doesn’t have great damage or healing per mana, and it takes a lot of mana, but it’s instant-cast, it’ll hit as many enemies as you can pack in a circle with a 10-yard radius, and it doesn’t generate any threat. To be honest, the best uses I’ve found for Holy Nova is to kill a lot of small enemies at once (the parasites in the treants in the Bone Wastes of Terokkar are a good example) and to run lower-level instances quickly.
47. Inspiration 1/3. This is the talent that will make tanks fall in love with you all over again. Inspiration grants +8% armor per talent point to your target every time one of your major heals crits, up to 25% at 3 points. Tanks love healing; tanks love armor. It’s a match made in heaven.
48. Inspiration 2/3.
49. Inspiration 3/3.
50. Holy Specialization 1/5. Increases the crit chance of your Holy spells by 1% per point. Paired with Inspiration, this will make tanks love you even more. (Unfortunately, people love to yell at priests for overhealing, and the more crits you get, the higher your overhealing will be. So be prepared to get yelled at.)
51. Holy Specialization 2/5.
52. Holy Specialization 3/5.
53. Improved Healing 1/3. Reduces the mana cost of your Lesser Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal spells by 5% per talent point. (Penance, too, but you won’t have that.) Naturally, the less mana you spend, the more you’ll have left over.
54. Improved Healing 2/3.
55. Improved Healing 3/3.
56. Spirit of Redemption. This talent has two features. First, it increases your total Spirit by 5% – and my tests indicate that this is calculated last, so that it includes buffs like Divine Spirit. Second, this talent keeps you up for 15 seconds when you die; while you’re in this state (and look like a Spirit Healer, which is cool by itself), you can cast any heal in your repertoire at no mana cost, and you can’t be targeted by attacks, spells, or effects. This talent alone can turn a wipe into a one-death fight, and the point you’ve spent will be worth it the second you’re the only one who has to run back (or, better yet, another rezzer brings you back up.
57. Spiritual Guidance 1/5. Here’s the other talent that buffs Spirit beyond the realm of mortal man. For every point you put into this talent, you get 5% of your Spirit added to your spell power (which is Lich King’s replacement for “damage and healing”). The higher your Spirit, the better you heal. That’s all there is to it.
58. Spiritual Guidance 2/5.
59. Spiritual Guidance 3/5.
60. Spiritual Guidance 4/5.
61. Spiritual Guidance 5/5.
62. Spiritual Healing 1/5. This is a straight-up healing boost: your healing spells heal 2% more per point in this talent.
63. Spiritual Healing 2/5.
64. Spiritual Healing 3/5.
65. Spiritual Healing 4/5.
66. Spiritual Healing 5/5.
67. Lightwell 1/1. This spell has been buffed from its Burning Crusade incarnation. It still creates a Lightwell, which individual party members can click to give themselves a heal-over-time. However, instead of disappearing on any damage, the buff is only cancelled when the character takes damage equal to 30% of his total health. That change alone turns Lightwell from a borderline case into a great set-and-forget healing spell.
68. Healing Prayers 1/2. Reduces the mana cost of your Prayer of Healing and Prayer of Mending by 10% per point. Like Improved Healing for the Heal spells, this spell means that you don’t have to worry as much about the mana cost of Prayer of Healing, and you can practically throw your Healing Frisbee with impunity.
69. Healing Prayers 2/2.
70. Holy Specialization 4/5. It seems odd to be going back to a first-tier talent, but we need to hit 35 points in Holy and none of the untaken talents are really as good as +1% Holy spell crit.
71. Empowered Healing 1/5. For every point you put into this spell, Greater Heal gets an additional 8% of your bonus healing and Flash Heal and Binding Heal get an additional 4%. Again, this will trend toward overhealing, but it’s worth it to have the additional healing.
72. Empowered Healing 2/5.
73. Empowered Healing 3/5.
74. Empowered Healing 4/5.
75. Empowered Healing 5/5.
76. Test of Faith 1/3. If someone healed by you is at or below 50% health, they get an additional 2% healing on that heal, and that heal has an additional 2% crit chance, both of those per point in the talent. It would be nice if this talent scaled depending on how low the target’s health was, but we can’t have everything!
77. Test of Faith 2/3.
78. Test of Faith 3/3.
79. Serendipity 1/3. You’re refunded 8% per point of the mana cost of a Greater Heal or Flash Heal that overheals. This counterbalances the talents that give you a larger chance to overheal your target.
80. Serendipity 2/3.

    There you have it: a 23/45/3 Holy talent spec that’ll work equally well for solo play and healing in a group. If you decide that all you’re going to be doing is grouping, get rid of Spirit Tap. Of the three points you’ve freed up, put one in Serendipity 3/3, and put the other two in Mental Strength 2/5 (Discipline), which increases your total mana by 3% per point, yielding this spec. If you’re feeling saucy, take the points out of Serendipity altogether; put one more in Mental Strength 3/5 and the other two in Focused Power 2/2 (Discipline), which increases your total spell damage and healing by 2% per point, and reduces the cast time of Mass Dispel by half a second per point. This is your final “saucy” grouping spec, at 28/45/0.

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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.

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