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 on a 2v2 arena team with my brother who is a hunter.  Neither one of us have exceptional gear, nor are we very skilled in arena, but we enjoy the competitive nature and thus take a few hours a week and try our luck.

Our rating is a poor mid-1400’s, typically.  Right now we’re sitting lower at 1405. We seem to have a few great matches, but then get our asses handed to us, most of the time by 2 dps classed teams. At week’s end our record is usually 5-5.

Last night we had a good chance at going 7-3.  One match I made the terrible mistake of trying to take iceblock off of the almost-dead mage and let my team mate die in the process. The other match my brother couldn’t target a rogue properly and wound up getting killed in a 1v1 situation. It’s a fight that we both know he should have won.  But we’ll chalk it up to experience.

Right now I’m running with a disc build and about 320 resilience. Tomorrow I’m going to purchase the blue arena/honor gloves which gives +30 resilience, plus a gem slot where I can add +20 more resilience, plus a 2-piece set bonus which offers ANOTHER +50 resilience. With one piece of gear I’m upgraded by 100 resilience and a bit of stamina. If I keep grinding honor I should be able to nab the ring or necklace by next weekend.