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.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Getting the pvp trinket is good too. You get from the Wintergrasp vendor. If I remember correctly it costs 25 marks. It’s on a 2 minute cooldown. For my Holy Priest I chose the Titan Forgee Rune of Audacity. It has some nice stats too; +111 spell power.
When a rogue comes at me, I wait to use the trinket, I shield myself, pop a renew on myself, wait a few seconds then hit Psychic scream. I also set my shadow fiend on him, bubble again (talented to Body & Soul) which increases my run speed by 60% for 6 seconds DOT them with Shadow Word: Pain, or Mindblast and get the hell out of there.
Lightwell is also used. I drop it when we are facing massive attacks, people actually use it and it has turned the tide in some of the BG”s I’ve been in.
I flask for resilience, also have the +35 spell penetration on my PvP cloak, and I’ve gemmed for that too. My Spell penetration is at 50. My resilience is 420 atm. The ideal amount is 850. I’m hard to kill in BG’s and do well when my teammates are on my back. Even when pulled out I can normally hang on long enough to get away.
Don’t forget if a DK sends it’s pet after you ’shackle undead’. I’ve faced way too many DK’s that relied heavily on their ghoul once the ghoul was on lockdown. I happily stomped all over their ass.
I opted for the +95 critical strike rating trinket, since I PvP in my Disc spec. I also have the +resilience trinket with a random spell power (or haste, can’t remember) proc. But the +111 spell power trinket is another fantastic item that is easy to get and can be used for both PvP and PvE.
The pain in the ass thing about rogues is that you rarely see a rogue coming at you. It’s usually just suddenly witnessing your toolbar items go gray, using Pain Suppression (if you’re disc) and praying that you get lucky and can survive the first stun. I’ve read that, if you live, he’ll try to stun again and THAT’s the one you should trinket out of.
Great idea about shackling the ghoul! I never thought about that.
Yep with Rogues I wait for the first stun, which is why I wait a few seconds, they try to shut you down fast. Trinket, run towards them which makes some use their trinket, then hit PS, Body & Soul, and get out of their fast…
Oh by the way, I PvP’d earlier today as Disc, fun but still getting used to the keybindings/spells so for the moment I’m slow to react, I just put the bindings up a a few hours ago, so it will take a few BG’s before I’m automatically hitting the right keybinds. However there is a difference; As Discipline I can take more abuse up front whereas as Holy I’m getting the heck out of their as fast as possible. I wore down a DK, Pally, and Shadow Priest in BG’s today. I shielded and had some fun. Yes the DK sent in his pet
, popped his magic shield which I naturally ran out of, after it wore off it was over. He did try to run when his health ran out, Shadow Fiend stopped that from happening.
Still, lots to get used to but Disc looks as though it will be fun to PvP with too. Interesting that you wrote about PvP. I wrote a tiny blurb about it earlier today and decided to pop on your website to see whether you had updated, and low and behold you have a post about Disc PvP. I’ve been looking for information on that, so thanks!