Which Glyphs for a Priest?

With patch 3.1 there are many priests who are dumping 1,000g into dual-spec’ing and may be unfamiliar with their secondary talent tree. This short post will focus on which glyphs are best for each of the two healing priest trees: Disc and Holy. You can find the entire listing of priest glyphs here: http://www.wowhead.com/?items=16.5

Lets start with the one glyph that is almost a requirement for either spec:

Glyph of Flash Heal – Flash heal has become an important spell for both specs since Wrath was released, albeit a little LESS useful for disc with patch 3.1. Also, since out-of-5-second-rule mana regeneration was nerfed along with , the extra 10% mana saved becomes even more important.

Holy

Glyph of Circle of Healing – If you are raiding, this is an important glyph. It makes your Circle of Healing hit an additional target, which *really* add up to a nasty amount of healing, not to mention save a life in times of massive AoE damage. However, if you’re focused on 5-mans and heroics, this glyph is worthless since there’s not more than 5 people in the group anyway : )

So with two slots already taken you’re left with a choice of three different glyphs for the third slot.

Glyph of Renew – I’ve always used this glyph despite the negative press it received. But now with patch 3.1 adding a) an instant heal as soon as Renew is cast, and b) the ability for Renew to crit, it has become a key spell again and worth glyphing for in my opinion. The glyph sounds confusing but what it does, basically, is reduce the amount of time that Renew takes to heal the target. It’ll tick for less time, but for more HP each tick.

or

Glyph of Guardian Spirit - I’m undecided about this glyph. It does this: If you cast your Guardian Spirit spell on a player and that player DOESN’T die during the duration that the GS is active then the cooldown is reset to 1-minute instead of 3-minutes.

I’m undecided about the glyph because I haven’t had to use GS all that much. I guess I could make it a point to use it more often even if the tank isn’t in danger of dying but if I time it wrong and I need it for a situation that the spell was designed for, I’m out of luck.

So basically it turns into a question of, are you willing to trade a spell that will save a tank from death every 3 minutes, for a trinket that will increase tank healing by 40% every other minute. Tough call.

or

Glyph of Prayer of Healing – The glyph puts a HoT on each target that was hit with the Prayer of Healing. Originally this glyph wasn’t a big seller with raiding priests due to PoH only being castable on party members…but with 3.1 we can cast it on any group in the raid.

My advice is, if you’re raid healing, take Glyph of Guardian Spirit (or Renew, or Prayer of Healing), Glyph of CoH, and Glyph of Flash Heal. If you’re doing mostly 5-mans, swap out CoH for Renew or PoH and keep Flash and Renew).

Discipline

Unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room with Disc glyphs.

Glyph of Penance -  Penance is Disc’s main heal. A powerful, channeled spell with a cheap mana cost. The only downside is the cooldown. With the talent “Aspiration”, you can get the CD down to 8 seconds, and with this glyph, down to 6 seconds. It is a MUST HAVE for disc priests.

With your last major glyph it will depend on if you’re tank healing in a raid setting, or 5-man healing heroics.

If you’re doing mostly heroics I highly recommend choosing a glyph that will help strengthen your AoE healing weakness:

Glyph of Holy Nova – Basically turns Holy Nova into a short-range CoH. It’s very helpful since a lot of fights cause you to group tightly together at some point or another.

or take Glyph of Prayer of Healing like we talked about in the above section.

If you’re doing raid tank healing then party healing isn’t your responsibility and you’re better off with taking Glyph of Renew in order to help pad damage.