f13.net

Any suggestions?  I just started a new toon.  Am I doomed to a life of grouping?

You solo great. Go straight up the shadow tree. It will be even better post patch.

It's better with heirlooms.

Shadow is pretty fun for levelling, and the quality of life improvements for levelling toons that they keep adding just make the whole thing far more bearable.

You are doomed to healing 95% of the time past 80.  Leveling you just go straight shadow to get shadowform ASAP and Vampiric Touch, and your downtime is pretty much nothing.

Yeah, but any healing-capable hybrid is going to be stuck there.  Priest is nice in that you have two different healing styles, but Shadow is definitely solid and useful DPS if you hate healing-as-a-role.

I'm not sure why people even care about healing vs dps anymore with dual speccing so readily available at max level. That said, spriests are solid dps if they know what they're doing and i hardly ever see people turn one down.

At the moment, shadow priests are the hands-down worst DPS in the game for PVE.  Maybe subterfuge rogues are worse, but rogues have two trees that don't suck, so no-one cares.  They have some incoming buffs that'll hopefully remedy this, but there's no sense in putting lipstick on this pig.

Do their group mana and health regeneration still keep them popular?

Unless you're in a guild of skill capped players you are unlikely to be limited by your class.

The healing can be non-trivial but Replenishment is replicated by a ton of other classes.

What, no love for Disc Priests?  I have a 75 Disc and he heals and solo's very well.  Fun spec.  Plus the main spec for PvP if I'm not mistaken.
You have the strongest shield and when you put it up a talent speeds up spells like healing so you can get off Greater Heals and Group Heals fast.  Plus the wonderment that is Penance, your best nuke AND your best heal.

Plus the Priest is of course highly coveted for groups.  Probably a bit more downtime that Shadow, but Shadow is so hinkey.

I raided as a Disc Priest, and pre-dual-specs did a ton of quests as one.  It's an awesome spec in groups/raids if it's not pigeon-holed.  It's also not terrible for solo play but I wouldn't level as one if I had the choice.

Maybe in 25 man content, but in 10 man raids, you will almost always be bumped from the raid unless you heal.

Yeah, I'm not sure what you guys are smoking but at top end spriests are right up there.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-IBmEEqu39p9FN8Fl/

this is a breakdown of some guild attempts at algalon/mim hardmode and a full toc10 man hardmode.

I'm just going off of my experience.  Every shadowpriest I've ever run with has been down in the low 1500's for DPS, except one who tops out at 3500 in similar gear level as my mage that does 5k.  I don't doubt that they can be done well, but most people don't seem to be able to and quite a few raid leaders I know of won't bother giving them a chance.

Lakov you are wrong, Selby is right.

In end-game progression raiding, there is no reason to ever bring a shadow priest or a boomkin except for the buffs. They do terrible, terrible DPS compared to similar classes. And, unlike boomkin, they are a very difficult class to play. I'd say they are THE hardest; harder than affliction warlock. You get to juggle 3 dots and keep 2 spells on cooldown, and, if you aren't 100% uptime your DPS goes into the toilet. Plus, your rampup time means that you're terrible on dungeon trash and on any fights where the boss goes through phases, since you have to reapply all your dots. This doubletap of difficulty means that your average shadow priest is going to suck balls.

You can cherrypick fights where they are decent, of course, they are OK at yogg and any fights where you can dot up multiple guys, but, given equivalent gear and player skill, they are about 20% behind where they should be. Hence all the buffs in the next patch.

Look at the averages - they are pretty much on the bottom for most of the fights: http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/classrank/8


Yes, you can level up as a disc priest, just like you can level up as a prot warrior or a prot pally. It's simply not as efficient or fast.

Protection is arguably the best leveling spec for a warrior these days.

Agree, especially for Outland/Northrend levels. 90% of group quests are soloable as a tank, leveling up. Protection warriors do almost as much damage as Arms while leveling, and take much less damage.

It's not my fault shadow priests are hard to play or that a lot of bad players might bring the average down but that doesn't disprove my point. Played well, there's no reason shadow priests can't be top ten dps or higher in any 25man.

Even at the lowest levels, I've been leveling a Prot Warrior as Prot since level 1, I can't say enough praise about Shield Spec. A amusing side effect due to leveling as Prot, is the best solo 'dps' gear is actually lowbie tank gear that no one ever wants normally. Same with talents, Anticipation is one of my best 'dps' talents, due to the extra rage generation.

Incite is another great lowbie talent, that's a HUGE amount of crit at a level range where 5-10% is the usual norm.

Once I got Revenge and Imp Revenge talent, I was laughing to the bank.

I just got high enough for Shield Slam recently, not too long till devestate either  :drill:

I told you, you are wrong. Given equivalent gear and player skill, they are 20% behind a warlock or a mage. The fact they are difficult to play on top of that is simply the nail in the coffin. I posted an average of the top 50 in that link, as you can see they are on or near the bottom of most of the fights. If you need even more proof you can look at any theorycraft website, they'll say the same thing.

I assume you're in a guild with a shadow priest who holds his own. Congratulate him; with his gear and skill, next patch, when they are finally equalized, he'll be on top. Yes, GOOD shadow priests can break top 10, but that's because even in high end guilds there is a skill and gear gradient.

Simulcraft, elitistjerks, rawr, shadowpriest.net, and various other websites back me up on this. I'm not just going by personal experience here.

Obligatory ontopicness: the first 20 levels are the worst part of leveling a priest (and to some extent, it is still pretty bad until you get to 40). Persevere, it gets a lot easier afterwards.

About spriest dps: pretty much what bhodi said. Anecdote time!

My shadow-offspecced priest is the best geared character of my 'stable' (which isn't much since I don't raid; but it's a full h-toc set with 2 pc healing t7.5, 2pc healing t8.5 and some i226 offpieces, all gemmed and enchanted to be useful for both specs; I only dps in heroics, and you don't really need too much +hit there), and I can only break 2.5k dps in a 5-man when mindsearing a ridiculous number of mobs. For comparison, my destro lock was invited to a normal TOC 5 minutes after hitting 80 (I haven't even trained my level 80 spells and was using a mish-mash of heirlooms, two blue instance drops and green quest rewards from sub-75 zones) and did 2.3k easy. After getting him a set of h-toc / toc gear, he's doing 3k+ by just pushing the same 4 buttons in a predictable rotation. My worse-geared unholy DK (still with a lot of blue gems, i200 gear with two pieces of t7.5 and the h-toc axe) can push 4k in a 5-man by me furiously rolling my face across the keyboard [granted, that's with some AOE abuse and/or cooldowns... but then, do spriests have cooldowns? fiend doesn't count :p]. So yeah, shadow needs some lovin', I hope next patch will be enough.

The doomsayers are correct. There's no reason to level a priest atm. You'll do less damage than a pure DPS class in almost every case, and you'll heal less than tree druids.  If you enjoy BGs you'll live longer as a tree.  Unless you happen to have a mage and rogue friend you want to do 3v3 arena with you're better off as a tree there too.

Equal gear/skill spriests are indeed behind. I'm not refuting that in the least and they do need a bump.  IMO locks need a nerf though because the one in my guild pulls way ahead of all the other 'pure' dps classes.

However did anyone bother looking at the logs I posted? Right now I'm pulling around 5k-5.5k dps on single target fights and beating similarly geared mages/moonkin fairely regularly.  While the buff is certainly needed, spriests are in now way gimp dps.

These situations are rarely constant though... in a few months time it could be the other way around.

If you wanna level a priest then surely that's enough reason. I play classes cos I like playing them, not cos they're the current top of whatevercharts. I lived through the Great Shaman Nerf and have always loved my shaman :)

Moonkin dps also sucks, beating them as a spriest doesn't win you any prizes.  If you are beating mages, get new mages.  There's zero reason you should ever beat a mage on single target dps.

Locks don't need a nerf, at least when it comes to sustained DPS.  Your other "pure" dps players need to play better.

Gear and skill are almost never actually equivalent so I tend to throw that out the window for anything but the most theoretical of discussions. For all of elemental shamans overall weakness on paper, when I actually bring mine to our raids I'm typically very competitive on dps, the same thing should apply to a well-played shadow priest.

Also, shadow priests are useful to have around for a variety of reasons - stamina buff + replenishment on a single character is a really nice thing to have available in 10 mans, where you can't be assured that there's one of everything, same goes double for stuff like heroics. It doesn't sound like Cheddar is going to be diving headfirst into raiding or anything like that, too, so there's really no reason that a theoretical lack of bleeding edge endgame dps from the spec should stop him from rolling it.

And no, you won't be forced to heal. That's people'e experience from 2006 talking. It isn't like that anymore, unless you're on a weak server/side.

No, sorry. You do one thing, keep lava burst dot up and spam lightning bolt. With the proper gear and low latency, you can do very well. You aren't even in the same category as moonkin/spriest, either in terms of playing difficulty (which makes it easier to be competitive while there's shit flying around) or in terms of raw DPS.

This has very little to do with what I was talking about, but ok.

Average position of priests on those charts you yourself linked: 8.4th
Average position of shamans: 8.6th

Yes, I realize that includes enhance shamans, but neither shaman spec is in a particularly good place for endgame dps. And yes shadow priests are probably overall worse, they're only ahead of shamans because they're so much better on the heavy AE fights. But I don't think this is supposed to be some kind of "OMG I'M WORSE" anti-epeen fight.

Shaman AoE is notoriously bad. Any fight that has any sort of AoE component will have you sucking wind on the meters regardless of spec. Single target fights without a lot of bullshit distractions will have (enhance at least) near the top of the meters--for what they're worth. Normally, I'm usually in the top 5 in 25s and always in the top 10, unless there's something really weird about the encounter. My gear isn't exceptional, either.

Our screwy itemization works against us (as opposed to rogues, magelings, or dps warriors), but we're always solid in damage output. Most galling is the lack of decent weapon upgrades in reasonable boss progressions, despite Ghostwolf's crap about adding axes to rogues helping us out (quite the opposite, really). Last Uld/TC run we ended up sharding like 4 swords. Yeah, lots better for shaman. Luckily, the Grinder finally dropped in ToC, but it's just illustrutive of the hassles with enhance weapons.

Also I'm not sure people realize it but priests actually have the best aoe in the game stat-wise.  Mindsear is basically a channeled seed or corruption with a high spellpower coeff and chance to crit per pulse and per mob. Any fight where a shadow priest gets to aoe they should be number 1 on the meters or they're doing something very wrong.

Back when I was actually raiding, a SPriest friend of mine continually topped the charts in Naxx because of all of the trash packs.

edit: Him being competent in a guild of idiots helped some also.

Hmm, I don't even know what my SPriest's dps is because I'm playing a video game, as opposed to whatever contest everyone else seems to be involved in. I can only imagine that Blizzard is giving away $1,000,000 to the most anal retentive douchebag.  It does allow for people to be dicks to everyone they meet, though.

I actually saw some fucktard saying they were checking Achievements for a 10 man ToC, or perhaps TToC.  Achievements?  For real?  What the fuck is wrong with people anymore?  All wrapped up in .0001 co-efficients, and other stupid bullshit, rather than just having fun.

Roll a priest, spec it however the hell you like, and if anyone gives you grief, tell them to eat a dick if they're not funding your sub.

Look, I'm as annoyed by constant epeen waving as anyone else but this is a thread specifically about priests, levelling, dps etc.  Now you can play the game however you want and that's fine.  There are however people out there who enjoy being good at what they do. Whether that be baseball, running or sitting on their asses tanking/healing or dps'ing. 

For some people, doing the most you can with a character IS the fun part so can we please get rid of the whole "you should be having fun X way" argument? it's stupid no matter who tries to push it.

Nah, Druids have been outperforming priests in healing for a long, long time - since at least early BC.  The only time priests begin to catch up is when CoH is bumped.. which gets nerfed to hell in the update patches following.   With all the toys buffs and removal of penalties being thrown at druids you'd think they were grossly unpopular.

Sadly, in the PvE healing arena right now it's

Paladin > Druid >> Priest > Shaman

The PoH coefficient nerf, the inclusion of a CoH cooldown (admittedly needed) and the holy concentration rework really REALLY hurt priests.

The additon of the beacon of light and the holy light splash glyph (even nerfed) means that a paladin can basically do double or tripple of what a shaman or priest can do on a target heal, as they get to heal two targets at the same time for 10-15k. Druids are reigning kings of HoTs and none of the other healers even come close. They can keep rejuv consistently on 5-10 people and are critically needed for smoothing out damage spikes on tanks.

The 2pc T10 set bonus which gives a HoT component to all flash heal crits may give priests a much needed boost.

I dunno WTF about shaman except they've got one chain heal thing they use and it's fairly effective but must be god awful boring to play (just like paladins).


Healing classes in general are seeing a steady and consistent decline; not many folks are playing them (or want to play them). It's extremely stressful and boring at the same time; blink, turn your head, get a drink for one second and you may have wiped the raid.. you don't get to look at all the pretty scenery because your eyes are fixed on your grid/healbot/whatever. Plus, it almost requires loads of addons to be effective.

Druids and Holy Paladins are going to out-HPS both Priests specs any day of the week.  Since the current meta-game is to minimize the amount of healers you bring and stick them in strict assignments Priests are just designed "wrong".

That said, I had a blast raiding Wrath content as a Disc Priest and it was probably the most fun I've had healing PvE MMO content.  Shield spam, Penance, and BT are just worlds more interesting than what I got from my Holy Paladin (or Resto Druid way-back-in-the-day).

I guess second place is still competitive   :grin:


/rawrhoot

For what it is worth, I have lvl 80 chars in all healing classes and have done it with all of them.  By far, Disc Priest is the most fun to heal with given all the tricks they have that aren't just direct healing.  They may not top the charts for healing, but that is misleading.  A good DPriest will be using shields to prevent damage on non-tanks mostly, but sometimes tanks if there is time.  They can stick and move and still do Hots, shield, bounce an autohealer around the room, etc.  Their buffs aren't anything to laugh at either.  I like to hit the BGs sometimes and just go nuts healing everyone.  It is amazing how you can turn the tide of any fight.

SPriest is fine, but as said here, not the best DPS class.  I'm sure that will change again.  They will be melting faces once more soon.  For PvP?  Get to know mana burn...

HPriest are great healers, but not the best and that style is almost as boring as Pally healing.  Pally healing is so much better, might as well roll Pally if you want that route.  They get 5x the good drops in raids anyway it seems like.  My main is a Pally, so I should know (it is sick sometimes.)

As somone looking to make a healer when I get the heirlooms items, which class is best for PvE and PvP? 

Druid, hands down (right now).

For reference, I played a shaman and priest at 80, I played a holy paladin extensively at 70, and I'm leveling a druid atm.

There's no "best", really, though druids come close  :awesome_for_real:. Here's my impression of the classes:
- Paladins and druids can offspec to tank, if you want to switch it up in pve (healer/tank dual spec = never spend more than 2 seconds looking for a group)
- Shamans are typically rare (less loot competition + my shaman got into pug raids WAY easier than my priest)
- Priests have two heal trees with fundamentally different healing styles; of the 2, only one is viable for pvp (you do have to make some pretty big talent sacrifices for a pvp spec for all 4 classes, but competitive pvp as a holy priest... yeah, no)
- Healing styles: shamans have a passive HOT, a weak-ish instant heal, and some casted heals; paladins have a stronger instant heal, but use cast-time heals almost exclusively; druids have eleventy billion HOTs and a decent single target heal; priests have everything, but not as "optimized" as any of the other healers
- Do NOT roll a priest if you like to pvp and are alliance, since half of the horde has an I WIN button against your only escape ability
- Druids are very powerful in pvp now, paladins are annoying and good if you support melee damage-dealers, but they have some severe weaknesses; shamans are kinda eh in pvp, and disc priests are decent, but need good gear.
- Damage offspecs: shadow priests are pretty bad (as you can see from this thread), elemental shamans are boring but good ranged damage, enhancement shamans are more involved and melee, ret paladins are also kinda boring and melee, ferals can sorta tank and dps with the same spec (for some loss in efficiency), moonkins are sort of like elemental shamans with less burst and more cc; ret and feral are probably the best for pvp out of all the off specs (yeah, this is very subjective - I know elemental shaman can blow people up in 2 spells)
- Leveling speed is comparable as long as you level as a damage spec; ret paladins are much easier / quickier than the others in my experience though

Heirlooms: if you're undecided and want to see for yourself, you can get away with a 1h spellpower mace, cloth shoulders + chest, discerning eye of the beast and try them all out (this'll allow you to level a shadowpriest or boomkin fine, and even be borderline acceptable for an elemental shaman if you use a shield). However if you want to level a ret paladin, you -will- need the plate shoulder + chest + 2h weapon.


.. and yeah, there's a reason I'm leveling a druid and not playing my priest/shaman. :p

Resto Druids reek at 5v5, and they aren't anywhere near as dominating in 3v3 as they are in 2v2. They are the undisputed Leafy Gods of 2v2 though.

Paladins have strong if not down right dominate showings in all brackets last I checked.

Disc Priests are still arguably the most powerful Arena healers overall.

Shamans have guaranteed spots on any 5v5 team, and very good showings in 3v3. Don't think they do very well in 2v2 relative to the others.

Holy Priests aren't for Arena for the most part, they don't have the mana or tools really.

All healers are force multipliers in any battleground, so if you don't care to arena, pick which every playstyle you prefer.



For PvE: Resto Druid or Holy Paladin

They are both "The Best" at what they do.

Druid = Raid healing
Paladin = Tank healing

What does the shaman do well?  I never see too many Resto shamen, and I figure there must be a reason for that?

For PvE? "Nothing".

They are stuck in generalist limbo. Their old niche of Chain Heal bot is pretty much replaced by Resto Druids entirely. They can single target heal, sorta. They can raid heal, sorta. They don't really stand out anymore.

With that said, I wouldn't kick one out of my bed or anything. If you have a solid Resto shaman it is a boon to almost any raid, the totem buffs and bloodlust are all huge huge things.


They are solid in all aspects of PvP outside of 2v2.

-edit- I should expand on the PvP bit, in that a large reason they are doing well currently is due to the fact they hard counter DKs.

So much of this chat assumes that you are in a universally skilled raid group. For the majority of wow players the people they group with will not be skill capped, and as such disparities between the classes really diminish. A good player of any class can do well when compared to the majority of wow, and skill is the limiting factor on performance for most, not class nor gear.

Thanks for all the advice.  No one mentioned using a wand; this has cut my downtime as a noob by a LOT.   :oh_i_see:

I disagree on the gear part.  A bad player gets a whole lot easier to take with good gear.  This is especially the case with overpowered classes where you can use just a few abilities and be effective with good gear.  One of the reasons that I dislike WoW is that good gear plays a greater role than skilled play, especially in pvp.  A purple geared player can roll their face on the keyboard against someone in green gear and win easily.

You are right; I am really only talking about PvE here. Gear is the limiting factor in PvP for sure, but in PvE (which most of this discussion seems to be floating around) gear is far inferior to skill in terms of how it limits your character. This is particularly highlighted by more complex classes (such as SPriests).

Man, don't fuckin' tell someone to make a paladin healer. Ugh. Life is too short to play a paladin healer.

Disc priests are almost as good for tank healing and roughly a billion times more interesting.

While I do agree to a certain extent, bad players are a drag on any raid if there are things that need to be avoided.  Standing next to the dragon and eating cleaves?  Avoiding fire when it is tossed on your hear and starts to burn?  Situational awareness at *all* required?  Bad gear vs. good gear is going to be next to no help.  If someone gets a snobold firebomb on their head and they refuse to move out of it, they die regardless of their gear.

Yeah, gear can help brute force a shitty DPSer to decent numbers or help marginally aware people have a bit more of a HP buffer to give them time to notice they're standing in fire, but for the most part, I agree with Selby. If someone straight up sucks at noticing stuff beyond "hit the boss," all the gear in the world won't help them suck less.

They wanted "The Best", not "The not soul sucking" !  :oh_i_see:

It's ok.  If that happens, they can always download a UI element that will tell them what button to push and when.  Another aspect of this game that really removes a large portion of the skill element. 

No, they still fail and usually just spam the raid with non-sense from their mods.  :angryfist:

Them's fighting words!

 :cry:  :heartbreak:

Not to mention flat out wrong! Don't get me wrong I loved playing a disc priest, but they are no paladin. Not even close. They MIGHT be able to heal burst damage like a paladin, but with beacon of light a paladin is doing that AND healing someone else, too!

Priests have tank cooldowns which can be absolutely essential for hardmodes. Their healing may be subpar but things like pain suppression are almost required on some fights.

I have to agree that Hpally is best for tank healing.  Not only are they doing that, they are raid healing too due to the double hit.  I'm so critted up I can typically get away with spamming flash heal for 5-7k pops.  Big heal needed?  15K+ X 2!  Chance of there being damage to myself?  Put beacon on me and spam the tank!  Never ever die first.  Ever.  Normally comes down to me and the tank being last on a wipe.

When I heal with my pally I'm much more comfortable that I'll be succesful.  With the priest, I'll do well, but there is always that chance that I won't get the right combo of all those necessary spells right, which is really where the "fun" part is for me.  You have to actively do a lot more to be as successful as a pally.  Actually, if you do everything right, you are still going to be sucking wind compared to the pally.  On top of everything, my pally never runs out of mana.

Holy Paladins are unquestionably the most powerful tank healers in game.

They are also unquestionably the most boring spec in the entire game. Hope you like HolyLight spam!  :awesome_for_real:



You can also do some serious shenanigans with the Glyph of Holy Light.

Well the problem lies in bosses with special abilities that can and will one/two-shot tanks with 50k hp. Without question the healing ability of paladins and druids in pve top priests but priests both discipline and holy have gimmicks that are if not necessary, very much desired in many hardmode fights.  My personal preference though would be to not make such gimmicky cooldowns be what the class specializes in.

Things like raid shielding though can be very important for fights where damage will hit too many people too fast. Hardmode northrend beasts for instance when fighting icemaw. He has a tendancy to do his arctic breath right before a stomp which can insta-gib most people and there simply isn't enough time to flash of light everyone in the raid. druid hots would help here but making sure as many people in the raid are shielded as possible is actually the best solution. 

Again, priests are the best pure healers but they have enough gimmicks that they are nowhere near useless.

I quit healing on my paladin as hard as I could this expansion. So awful and boring, ugh.

I was assuming tippytop raiding game wasn't necessarily a going concern (I can't keep track of which people on this board are poopsockers and which one just sort of do ten mans). I guess if you're definitely going to be doing hardmodes and shit, you could slog along as a paladin, but I would still personally rather play a disc priest. Let someone else fall asleep on their holy light/flash of light buttons.

I'm the GM of a 25 man raiding guild that clears current content, clears most 10 man hard modes (SRS BZNZ AMIRITE) and makes honest efforts at 25 man hard modes.

 :cry:

Don't ask.  I'm still sort of stunned about it myself.

And yes, I'm generally the go-to guy for keeping two or more tanks alive.

Disc priests were competent tank healers up to a certain point, but a lack of scaling with gear has made healing anything that hits hard rather difficult (Hi to you Gormok hard mode).  Once penance and shield are on cooldown you're left fishing for flash heal crits, and if they don't crit then you're usually in trouble unless another healer helps you out.

I had no problem tank healing back in naxx and ulduar, but now in toc the gulf between a holy paladin and a disc priest is just enormous, not to mention most fights in there are simplified a great deal by beacon (especially in 10 man).  Disc still has a place but it's more of a niche shield spamming role, with the odd penance/prom thrown in to help out.  Really it's more support than healing in a sense.  Disc is loads of fun but I've been holy for the last few months and feel I'm contributing far more.


On a different note my guild put together an Onyxia alt run the other day, so I dusted off my resto druid in her shiny naxx 10 gear and set forth hoping my crappy gear would pull me through...

My first nourish crit for 12k  :ye_gods:  I know druids lacked a flash heal type heal but it seems pretty crazy to me that a druid with circa 2k spellpower can pull that off.   Of course I don't want nourish to be nerfed, I just want my flash heals to crit for 12k too   :grin:

Nourish is purposefully overpowered when used in it's ideal situation. Partly because of it's setup and relation to the other druid healing spells, partly because Blizzard has spent the entire expansion trying to get Druids to actually *CAST* a heal.

Stack up all your HoTs, Glyph it and toss in the 4 piece bonus for good measure, and you can chain those 12k crits every second if you have Nature's Grace, for at least 4-6 seconds before you have to refresh a HoT on your Nourish target.

Each Crit is also tossing up a Living Seed proc, another 2-4k bonus heal once the target takes damage again.



The issue being is the ideal situation only lasts for that 4-6 seconds before you have to start refreshing HoTs, those GCD's really add up.

And people wonder why priests and shamans cry so much.

Healing Priests will continue to cry as long as other classes can still cast heal spells. Doesn't matter where they actually stand, they fight against non-priest healers out of PRINCIPLE.



Shamans on the other hand, went from being the go-to AE Raid healer, with a minimum of 5 per raid for all their various buffs, to generic every-healer that doesn't really have a clear cut job anymore. I'll give them a pass   :-P

Planning on getting back on the horse after a few months break.  I'll be raiding with a few friends on my Disc (probably) Priest or Holy Paladin.  Has much changed in terms of relative utility between the two specs with 3.3?

(I ask because I'd need to transfer the Priest, but it has better gear, cool guy 310% mount, and I kind of hate Holy Paladins.)

Disc priests are nearly essential for one of the Icecrown bosses.  Blizzard is still trying to find ways to get paladins to wear their Mp5 plate.

Priests still bring a lot of utility, the most overall of any healer; we have two of the best external tank/player saving cooldowns. Disc and holy priests are good additions to any raid. Holy paladins have scaled better than pretty much all the other healers and from being a bit meh in the early expansion they are now pretty untouchable when it comes to throughput and they are the best tank healers and with improved beacon and glyphs can raid heal well. The only real change is that Disc tank healing has dropped in strength relative to other healers, but the ability to pre-shield portions of the raid is a unique ability and one that proves very helpful on almost all fights.

Same shit, different patch, WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Still going with the Priest though, because $25 is well worth it not to play a Holy Paladin.

Out of all my alts, my Disc Priest is my favorite for PvP.  The utility he brings to any fight has a bit of everything.  Some things like Hot's, direct heals, group heals, etc. are not the best over other classes but he has them all in some way.

I also prefer Disc for healing purely from utility, mana usage, etc.  Does it pump out the same max numbers as Holy?  No.  But the shields can make or break a boss run.  A Disc Priest can put shields on everyone without much effect on their mana pool, so I can be generous with it as a quick save.  Typically the shields just hold people up long enough for another healer to get the big heal on them.

Pain Suppression is great for PvE or PvP.  I especially love it in PvP.  I can just see that warrior's player cussing up a storm at me because I just won't die.  Between have renew, shield, grace, binding heal, pain suppression, and popping a scream on a group, I can be a real pain in the ass.

For tanks in PvE, it can prevent a wipe if you can time it right.

I can go on and on with this, but the fact is Disc Priest have a depth to them that most people overlook and do not appreciate.  It isn't easy to utilize all of them effeciently, but once you learn to do it.  They are quite powerful and *gasp* fun to play.  I like it so much, I did both specs in it.  PvE and PvP.

Preach it!


EDIT: And I  :heart: disc priests, either healing me or me doing the healing. I think I might like druids a teeny bit more to heal with, but that could be because my druid is 80 and my priest isn't.  :awesome_for_real:

Disc is my go to healing spec. It does pretty much anything passably, and heals tanks very well without sacrificing utility and spot heals. And that's even with me forgetting I have pain supp 90% of the time.

Holy is my offspec entirely for raid healing heavy fights. But Disc suits my rather messed up method of healing pretty well. I totally don't do well with "ignore the rest of the raid, THIS is your heal target" setups, so I like having penance as a tank heal, and shield/flash heal as dumbass dps stood in fires heals <3

Holy is my offspec for when I want to win meters. Disc is what I play when I want to feel useful.

I actually prefer Holy healers, because disc is such a pain in the ass for Spiritual Attunement / Rage in heroics, and I pretty much just tank heroics.

I thought rage through shield was fixed. Anywho, it never seems to slow thorgrim down when I shield him in a heroic, and it usually lasts for half a trash pack with his block/avoidance factored in.

The only thing I favor Holy for is 10 mans where the other healer is a paladin and you hit an AE healing fight of doom. Hodir as holy was so much easier than Disc for our raid setups.

My priest is disc / shadow dual spec, and the only time I've noticed shields being a tank problem was when healing an overgeared pally tank in an instance where chain pulling is not really feasible and incoming damage is low (h-vh); in those cases just using pom and renew [yes, renew!] covers 90% of the trash damage anyway. Otherwise the shield breaks soon enough to let them get mana - and I really can't imagine doing the icc heroics without shield spamming the entire group at times.  :ye_gods:

(yeah I use a pvp disc spec, but it heals 5-man stuff just fine, h-HOR included...)

I haven't used my warrior in a long time, but I felt really starved the last time on my Paladin.

I much much prefer to be healed by disc than holy when tanking the harder 5 man fights. The rest of the group might not feel the same, of course, but there are spots where it is hard for (non overgeared) holy to keep up with tank damage in the new ones.

It's only really an issue for Paladins at this point, they have mostly fixed the Rage/Bubble interactions. But yea, it's a real bottleneck at times.

If they'd up the mana gain from BoSanc to where it was sometime before then end of BC then pallies wouldn't have an issue, either.   But that would 'overpower' pally tanks somehow... I continue to not understand how, exactly. 

Flippant answer: Paladins are fine, l2play.

More seriously, the amount of mana BOS returns has always been 2%.  Are you sure you're not confusing it with the changes to spiritual attunement?

Nope, I can't say I'm not.  I do recall that soloing became a lot harder at some point due to mana issues.  Either because of BOSanc changes or other changes to the class.   I'm certain it wasn't the SA changes because it was a soloing issue when I realized it, not a grouping one. 

They changed Judge of Wisdom at one point, it used to return % of Total mana, now its base. It was also nerfed a few percent points if I recall correctly.

I use shield on everything in every instance/raid with my disc priest.  I've never seen this problem for my tanks that I heal (war, pal, bear, dk.)  My SP is to a point now that my shield blocks 3.5k+ now.  It is a cheap mana cast and highly effective.  It also makes my subsequent heals better.  It is a must have in many of the new instances.

That is true, but between Judge of Wisdom and Divine Plea and all the other mana contributors, I really never have mana problems.  If I do have troubles, it is because I'm sacrificing mana recovery for some other ability to increase dps or something.