Apparently I’m slow.

When LFD first launched, I went PvE crazy and took a break from PvP. In fact, after gaining the Looking for Multitudes achievement, I took a break from my priest altogether to get my horde paladin up to 80 and gear her a bit.

Along the way I learned that there’s finally something valuable I can buy with the huge sum of Stone Keeper’s Shards I was swimming in: HONOR! There’s a good chance I’m the only person who didn’t realize it, but in case you don’t know, you can turn 30 Stone Keepers Shards in for a Wintergrasp Commendation. You can either use the Commendation, or mail it to an alt. Upon use, it grants 2,000 honor.

Zejus, my priest, was sitting on 1200 shards which translates to 80,000 honor. Since I was already at about 30,000 honor before realizing this, I bought an item and still have 80,000 honor and 50 Wintergrasp Marks to purchase PvP gear upgrades. After all is said and done, I’ll have about 1,040 resilience and 25k HP.

On a PvE note, I queued for a random heroic last night and got heroic Utgarde Keep. We breezed to the first boss, including killing the initial room in one pull. The boss frost-tombed me. I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and died encased in ice. We made it through, barely, but I was confused as to why NOT ONE player, including the ranged hunter, could leave the boss for a second and break the healer free. At this level of gear, it would have taken 3 shots for him to get me out. Instead, I have to pay a higher repair bill due to laziness.

Obviously the dungeon was a joke and we flew through in 20 minutes, but it bothers me that players are developing bad habits. There is no consequence, as of now, but if Blizzard ramps up the difficulty and requires party coordination in Cataclysm, it’s going to be weeks of blame and chaos until players remember how to play smart again.

I’m not great at PvP. I’ve played on an arena team with my brother, who plays a hunter, and we didn’t do great. But I’ve definitely improved and wanted to share a few things that I learned along the way. For the sake of me not sounding like a total moron due to lack of experience, I’ll be talking mostly about battlegrounds and Wintergrasp.

Stay Alive

If you’re queuing for battlegrounds, there’s a good chance that there aren’t many healers in your group. This makes your life extremely valuable. Keep yourself alive first and foremost. That rogue who’s ‘fan of knife’ing everyone may not get your healing love immediately if you’re busy trying to stay in the fight, but he won’t get heals at all if you’re dead.

Healers are tanks in PvP. We draw the most attention, and are (or at least SHOULD be) gunned down first. Prepare to use all of your defensive abilities at any moment. Also, make sure you pick up the Pain Suppression glyph, which allows it to be cast while stunned. This translates to: “take away some of the rape pains induced by rogues”. In PvP, you’ll become the healer and the tank. The situation is rarely a priest standing in the back while healing the warrior who’s taking damage in the melee pile, as you may be use to in PvE. It’s more often a priest dragging three enemy players in circles while the warrior hacks them down one at a time. Your effectiveness as a PvP healer greatly depends on your survivability.

The disc priest has a nice arsenal of insta-cast spells that will allow you to stay alive on the move:

• Prayer of Mending
• Renew
• Desperate Prayer (talented)
• Power Word: Shield.
• Pain Suppression
• Psychic Scream

Use them all.

Gear is important. If you’re just beginning your PvP career, you can find some half-decent blue gear with resilience on it in the auction house. Buy a lot of it. Gem/enchant for resilience and stamina in certain slots early on. If you walk into Warsong Gulch with PvE gear and 17k health, expect to spend a lot of time with the spirit rezzer.

Purchase a PvP trinket as soon as possible…one of those that, when used, removes all movement impairing effects. You’ll need it to survive stuns and to get you un-sheeped in order to heal your teammates.

Annoy

As a priest you have some great and annoying tools at your disposal. Not only are they effective, but they can be a lot of fun.

Mass Dispel removes beneficial abilities from enemy players and debuffs from your allies. It is of the AoE variety, so cast it over melee piles when you can.

Mana Burn is arguably the Disc priest’s signature PvP spell. Talented, you can reduce the cast time. Triggering Power Infusion will make the cast time even shorter which means a lot of enemy mana burned in a short period of time. I mana burn whenever no one needs healing. Just remember that it also costs mana to use, so don’t go overboard.

Psychic Scream is a lot of fun to use when clumps of healers are together.

Mind Control, while situational, can be a lot of fun; particularly in Alterac Valley on the bridge, or in Eye of the Storm near the flag. Most times it will be interrupted, as it requires a long casting time, and other times players will immediately trinket out of it. But when the stars align and you can control a player to make him jump to his own death, it’s freakin’ hilarious.

Fear Ward: While not necessarily annoying, it’s a great spell to cast on your teammate non-warrior (warriors can break fear without your help) melee classes, especially rogues. If I survive a stun from an enemy rogue, the first thing I do is bubble and then fear to get him off my ass. If he resists my fear, it’s game/set/match. So always keep it on CD. Cast it on melee who are out to terrorize enemy healers.

Heal

Healing is different in battlegrounds than it is in an instance or raid. There’s no telling who will take a massive amount of damage in a short period of time. Disc PvP healing is like tank-healing a raid that switches tanks mid-fight, unannounced. Sometimes more than one party member is taking critical damage. For this reason, your heals will have to be quick and explosive to match the damage. Penance is your best friend. With a shield/Penance you can combat just about all damage that a single target can inflict. Shield/PoM/Penance works even better at times.

I rarely bother with Greater Heal (see: never), since the cast time is too long. Chain-casting Flash Heal works much better for when Penance is on cooldown. Oh and use the Glyph of Penance.

Get the mod called Healbot. It shows a health bar for each party member in your raid, and will dim all of the bars belonging to members who are out of range of your heals. This way you’re able to determine who you can actually help, and not bother wasting time trying to heal someone who is on the other side of the map.

So there you have it. I don’t have any one-on-one strategies for countering other classes, and I’m far from a PvP expert but I hope these tips help some priests trying to find their way in battlegrounds or Wintergrasp. There are nights that I swear off PvP for life because I get sick of being chain-stunned and focus-fired down. But I enjoy the intensity of playing against another human player, the unpredictability of of it, and continue to have more fun as my gear improves.

I’m not a Naxx expert and have only killed Heigan six or seven times, but what I’ve noticed is that the reason raids have trouble downing him is because they try to do too much too soon; rather than be patient and stay alive. Here are my general guidelines for healers:

• Stay on the platform for phase 1. Clense the disease, and use your instants when inflicted with the spell casting debuff.
• Dive off of the platform at phase 2 and go to the first ‘dance’ spot.
• For the dance itself, do NOTHING else except stay alive until you’ve mastered it. No healing, no bubbles…just do your job to stay alive. If a party member dies during the dance it’s his own fault.
• Zoom your camera all the way out. At first, guilds may try assign a raid member for the rest of the party to follow. This works ok, but sometimes there is too much lag. I’ve found that a better way is for each member to pay attention to the ground in front of them. Wherever the flame just came out of in front of you, MOVE TO THAT SPOT. A flame won’t hit the same spot twice in a row. If you follow that guideline you’ll be in great shape.
• After the dance, start cleansing on your way back up to the alter.
• Rinse and repeat. It’s a long fight but you play it conservatively it’ll go quicker than it would losing 4 party members who are trying to do too much.

Well, Old Kingdom has its speed bumps. Heroic AN can be nightmarish without clensing for the final boss. Skadi the Ruthless in heroic UP can be an annoyance. But if I had to vote for the most challenging, difficult, and aggravating heroic dungeon in Wrath, I’d check the box next to heroic Oculus.

The instance begins with a few standard pulls with a mix of AoE and single targets. Simple enough.

At the end of the first path we are teleported to a platform. On the platform you’re asked to choose one of three different types of drakes to pilot. Each drake has different ‘abilities’ that allow it to excel at certain group roles. So there’s a healing drake, a dps drake, and a tank drake.

The goal is to fly on these things, use your drake’s abilities to kill other dragons, land on each platform, dismount, kill things on the platform, re-summon the drake, rinse and repeat.

The annoying part is that the enemy dragons can appear under or over-top of you without you noticing and can pick off a single party member before anybody can figure out where the hell it’s coming from. Oh, and if you’re the healing (emerald) dragon, you don’t even get a healing spell until the final boss which means that when a party member’s drake is low on health the party has to stand still until he regenerates. Lovely.

All of the bosses except the final boss are manageable and can be figured out quickly, but the final boss is a challenge.

Ley-Guardian Eregos

There are a few different combinations that apparently work for this boss, but after about 45 minutes of wiping with the standard 1 tank, 1 heal, 3 dps makeup we decided to switch to 2 healer drakes and 2 dps drakes. Here is the basic strategy that I recommend:

The boss will patrol the perimeter of his platform. Have the tank attack him when he’s furthest away from where the party is waiting.

There will be one tank healer who will also use the debuff tool, and one party healer who will heal everyone except the tank. It’s important for the second healer to remember to heal the other green drake because he/she will be hurting from debuffing the boss and constantly healing the tank. The two dps will do the damage and will alternate their ‘time stop’ abilities for when the boss periodically enrages. You’ll know he’s about to enrage because he says “Such insolence… such arrogance… must be PUNISHED!”

After a minute or so into the fight, he’ll go transparent and do a planar shift. When this happens Planar Anomaly sparks will appear and follow each player then eventually explode. The damage done by the explosion is most likely too much to handle and will eventually result in death. Luckily this maneuver is easy to handle. Just fly far away. Keep flying until the boss comes out of his planar shift and hurry back to him. When he does the planar shift again, flee the opposite way as to not reset the encounter with an evade bug from being too far from the platform.

Here’s a summary:

• Have the tank engage him when the boss is furthest from where the party is.
• 1 green healer debuffs the boss with “Touch the Nightmare” and heals the tank. The other healer heals the party except the tank (unless an emergency and you have the life to spare).
• The dps must time-stop immediately as the boss enrages.
• When the boss goes into his Planar Shift phase, run far away, then immediately run back when the boss becomes attackable

If the dps coordinates their “time stop” ability correctly, and everyone flees during Planar Shift, it should be a done deal. Good luck and feel free to leave your strategy/experiences in the comments section!

Prayer of Healing – Priest Guide

This post will cover the absolute basics of playing a healing priest in 5-man heroic/normal dungeons.  It will touch on the difference in Holy/Discipline talent trees, provide a ’shopping list’ of items you should bring to a dungeon run, a rundown of when to use each healing spell in our arsenal, and a refresher course on basic Warcraft group etiquette. So if you’re ready to spec out of “Improved Fade” and learn why to stop rolling Need on plate armor, lets go!

Two Perfectly Acceptable Talent Trees

Priests have two healing trees; Holy and Discipline.

Prior to Wrath of the Lich King, Disc healing was regarded as “the PvP healing spec” since it contained the majority of our damage mitigation talents. However, it received major changes with the expansion and is now a very effective option for PvE dungeon/raid healing.  While adequate for healing damage to more than one player at a time, Disc excels at single-target, or “tank” healing.

Holy is the traditional PvE healing spec and is known for its wide-array of spells that are able to accommodate almost any situation. Holy priests tend to land spells that heal for very large amounts, and possess talents that improve their AoE healing abilities.

Since this guide is about 5-mans, and not end-game raiding, my recommendation is for you to chose the spec that is the most fun for you. They’re both great, and unique. I have done every heroic as disc, and most as holy and can say that neither spec made dungeon runs easier or more difficult than the other. Play the one that you enjoy most.

Preparation

What you should bring to a dungeon run will depend on your character level, and the classes you’re grouped with. I chose to bring every consumable possible to a run, but some people don’t want to spend the gold on elixirs and scrolls. Bah-Humbug, I say to them.

If you’re level 80 and want to be fully prepared, here is your shopping list:

• Candles for Fortitude/Shadow Protection/Spirit buffs
• Mana Potions
• Elixirs
• Scrolls
• Food for buffs
• Water

If you want to go cheap-mode, you must at least bring these items along:

• Candles for Fortitude/Shadow Protection/Spirit buffs
• Mana Potions
• Water

Mods

I wrote a post on keybindings and mods that covers the topic in depth, but here are the two mods that are almost a necessity:

Clique: This mod allows you to bind spells to your mouse clicks. So now you can simply hover over party members’ portraits and right click on that portrait to cast Greater Heal, middle click the tank’s picture to shield him, move one portrait down and Shift-left click to Flash Heal a DPSer. It makes healing so much easier since you never have to take your eyes (or cursor) off of the health bars, which is what we healers are sentenced to do.

Decursive: a mod that creates tiny boxes on your screen that represent your party members. If you’re in a 5-man group, you’ll have 5 small boxes. The boxes will illuminate if and only if someone in your party is infected with a magic/disease/poison/curse you can dispel. All that you have to do to dispel is click the box and the mod will automatically target and attempt to remove the debuff immediately.

The Healing Spells

Unlike tank and dps classes, healers don’t have a set rotation of spells. Healers generally react with different spells depending on the situation. As a priest, the beginning of each pulls starts the same (Prayer of Mending, Renew) but will almost always change as the encounter progresses. Here is a brief rundown of our toolbox:

Renew: If you’re Holy, chose the Improved Renew talent, and/or a glyph, it’s effective for throwing on party members when they take random damage. If you’re Disc, it’s more effective to use Flash Heal for random party damage. I always use Renew on the tank, especially in the beginning of the pull, regardless of the spec. Renew is very effective for fights when you know a stun/silence is coming, since the Renew still heals while you’re incapacitated.

Prayer of Mending: Use it as soon as the tank begins attacking and every time it’s available after. It’s a cheap spell in terms of mana, can crit, and can heal for a ton depending on how many ‘bounces’ you get from it. It is EXTREMELY effective for fights where the party will receive constant damage-over-time, like the statue room bosses in Utgarde Pinnacle; since the small damage from poison/bleeds will keep Prayer of Mending bouncing from player to player.

Flash Heal: Both Disc and Holy should use the Glyph of Flash heal, which reduces the mana cost by 10%.  Use it heal the random dpser, and to top off the tank. For Disc, use FH as your main healing spell if Penance is on cooldown.

Greater Heal: Our nuke-heal, especially for holy. If the tank has low health, but enough to survive the 2.x second cast time, nothing will bring him back to full health quicker than 2 or 3 consecutive GHs. Holy should use this if the tank is at 3/4 health or lower, Disc should use it only if they’re speced for it, and Penance is on cooldown.

Binding Heal: An underrated spell, Binding Heal is great for any time that you take damage. I hardly ever heal myself with anything besides Binding Heal since, chances are, somebody else in the party isn’t at full health so I might as well heal two players with one cast.

Holy Nova: An instant-cast AoE healing spell with a very small radius. It can be glyphed to increase its healing power to a substantial level, and can crit so it’s used as a quasi-replacement for Circle of Healing by Disc priests. Use it when the party is bunched together (Loken, in Halls of Lightning, as an example).

Prayer of Healing: An AoE healing spell with a 3 second cast. Heals for a very nice amount but comes with a high mana cost. This is a great spell to use when you KNOW AoE damage is coming. I recommend using ‘Inner Focus’ (which makes the next spell cast free and increases its chance to crit by %25) before this spell.  Since a Disc priest will not have Circle of Healing, Prayer of Healing will be the main spell to heal mass party damage.

Circle of Healing: Holy’s 41 point talent. Instant AoE spell that heals for a small/moderate amount. Use it when the party has taken damage. It’s normally followed up with a Prayer of Healing.

Penance: Disc’s 51 point talent. Channels 3 bolts of light that heal the target. The 3 bolts can crit seperately. Use it whenever you can, since the mana cost is very low and it heals for a substantial amount.

The basic idea for tank healing as holy is to keep Prayer of Mending on cool-down (meaning: always use it), try to keep Renew ticking. If the tank is taking too much damage for those two spells to heal, fill in the gap with Flash Heal/Greater Heal depending on the amount of damage…then cast PoM again.

For Disc, still keep PoM on cooldown, and again I recommend keeping renew ticking. Fill in the gaps with PW: Shield, Penance, and Flash Heal, if necessary.

When Shi….Stuff Hits the Fan

There will be times when the tank accidentally pulls too many adds, or you as a healer get stunned at a bad time. The most important thing to remember is: “Do whatever you can to keep the tank alive.” The famous saying amongst the Warcraft community is: “If the tank dies, it’s the healers fault. If the healer dies, it’s the tank’s fault. If the dps dies, it’s their own damn fault.” To a degree, it makes sense. You should be working on keeping the tank alive while the tank works on prying adds from you. Do this while the dps watches their aggro and doesn’t stand in black holes and you’d be surprised what kind of mess you can pull your group out of.

My Rules for Grouping

• As soon as you get into a group, get your ’shopping list’ items together and head to the instance. Don’t immediately ask for a summon so you can toy around at the Auction House. Your time is no more important than anybody else’s. If others happen to get to the stone first, great, but nothing bothers me more than having all 5 party members in Dalaraan and one idiot already asking for a summon.
• Remember to repair your gear before entering the instance.
• Buff everybody with Prayer of… buffs. Don’t ‘ghetto buff’ people just to save silver on reagents.
• Resurrecting after a wipe is a sticky situation. If the group dies, the group should run back to their corpse. If it’s the first wipe, and a player lies there waiting for me to resurrect him, I’ll let it slide. The second time I’m telling him to run back to his corpse. Not only is it principle, but it also delays the run because we have to waste mana and time that we could be eating/buffing.
• If a Bind on Pickup item drops and you can’t use it, pass on it. If you can use it, it’s nice to ask if you can ‘Need’ it, then click ‘Need’. If a Bind on Equip item drops and you need it, beg the group for it. If you don’t need it GREED it.

That about wraps up this guide. I hope it’s been helpful for a few beginners. Have fun! Oh and if you have questions about glyphs, I wrote a post that recommends glyphs for each of the two PvE healing specs and why I chose them. Check it out here.

Up until level 70 I used the mouse for everything…moving, turning, casting spells, targeting.  At the time, it was comfortable and all that I knew.  The only mod I used was KTM Threat Meter.

After a Kara run or two, I learned that something had to change. I would click a portrait, find the spell on my spell bar that suited the situation, then click the spell.  Click another portrait, find Binding Heal, click it. The lag from me having to drag my mouse from the portraits (left corner of the screen) to my toolbar, and to actually find the spell that I’m interested in casting was just painful and lead to unnecessary deaths.

That was then and this is now.

Currently I still do not use (or some might say “take advantage of”) many mods.  Here is my current set up which works wonderfully for me.

- Clique. It’s a lifesaver and I can’t imagine healing without it. Clique is a mod that allows me to set all of my mouse buttons to cast certain heals.  Right clicking a portrait casts Greater Heal, middle mouse button casts Renew, shift-right click casts Prayer of Mending, etc. So now I can keep my cursor near portraits and can click the button on my mouse that corresponds with the heal that I need.Some might argue that I should bind my heals to the number keys but I don’t agree. I’d still have to select a portrait, then press the number key. I’d rather just right click over a portrait and cast than click a portrait, THEN press a number.

- I move with S,D,F,E. I turn with my mouse. I plan to bind Prayer of Healing to a few different keys since we don’t have to target a party member in order to cast and it beats having to find it on the toolbar.

- HealBot. I use Healbot almost exclusively for battlegrounds. It displays all of the raid’s health bars and behaves similar to Clique in that you can set up your mouse buttons to trigger spells when clicked over a player’s health bar. HealBot is nice in battlegrounds because the health bars of targets that are out of range of a heal (which is most players in AV) won’t even appear. This means that you’ll only see health bars of players that you can actually help.A lot of healers use Healbot for raids but I haven’t been able to get use to gauging Healbot’s bars in relation to how bad they actually need a heal. I’m use to the default portrait health bars so if it’s a raid I prefer to drag raid frames out of the social tab, over using Healbot.

- Decursive. Decursive is a mod that creates tiny boxes on your screen that represent your party members. If you’re in a 5-man group, you’ll have 5 small boxes. The boxes will illuminate if and only if someone in your party is infected with a magic/disease/poison/curse you can dispel. All that you have to do to dispel is click the box and the mod will automatically target and attempt to remove the debuff immediately.  If your class is incapable of removing a certain debuff (for example, a curse if you’re a priest), the box will remain empty/unlit since there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.The mod is a HUGE help and just about necessary  for fights such as Maiden where her Holy Fire spell can burn people down in 3 ticks and needs to be removed immediately. It’s also helpful in PvP situations where Warlocks are DOT’ing up as many players as they can.