Transcription
Cataclysm Discipline Priest is a really flexible, strong spec. It's highly desirable in 10 and 25-man, and it has really great utility as well as having a pretty engaging play style. Relative to Wrath, this is going to be a pretty in-depth guide.
First of all, I'm just going to go over like the broad changes to the toolkit and this spec. Um, then I'm going to go over talents, and then I'm going to go through like each of the spells in your toolkit in depth and talk about their strengths and weaknesses, and where you want to use them. And then finally, I'm going to end with a section on just like how to heal in different situations.
So first of all, I'm talking about the spec. The most important piece of the puzzle to how the spec changes is the changes to Power Word: Shield. So we're going to do a bit of a, a bit of a funeral, a bit of a send-away for this spell. Whereas in Wrath of the Lich King, you could basically replace any Disc Priest with a bot that just picked a random raid member that didn't have Weak Soul and press Power Word: Shield on them on cooldown, and they would do like 98% effectiveness as a Healer. Now you actually are going to have to use your other spells, which I think is overall a good thing. Though Wrath Disc Priest is kind of fun in my opinion. I, I, I enjoy playing it. I think the Cata design is a lot healthier and better and more engaging. And I think this goes along with the general changes to healing in the game where Mana matters a lot more, the health bars move down slower, and they also move up slower. Similar to how healing is in Vanilla and TBC in that way, but also there's, you know, a bit more depth to the design of the healers, and they're all intended to have you making meaningful decisions about which spell you cast. So it's a little bit of the best of both worlds where you have like the pace of Vanilla and TBC, which I think is more engaging. You have the Mana mechanics more similar to TBC and Vanilla where you actually care about your Mana bar, but also you have a bit more depth rather than just sort of downranking your heals being like the main decision tree. Now you actually have different tools and different play styles for different encounters.
How is Power Word: Shield so nerfed? Well, it's sort of a bit of a mix of Power Word: Shield itself being nerfed and also the rest of your toolkit being buffed, as well as those structural changes to healing I talked about before. First thing to talk about is the Mana cost. So Power Word: Shield now costs significantly more Mana than every other spell in your toolkit. It's very expensive. Um, and also the way it interacts with Rapture is completely different now where you can't stack Rapture up and sort of cheese it and get infinite Mana like you can on pretty much all the hard fights in Wrath where you're going to be spamming this. So it's expensive, and also your Mana changes. The second significant nerf to it is that its duration is nerfed 50%, from 30 to 15 seconds. While on the surface you might not think of that as being too big of a nerf if you haven't really thought deeply about how the spell works, but what that really means is that effectively, even on higher raid damage fights, the total like average DPS that a person in your raid has to be taking from the boss or from mechanics or whatever has to be double that of what it was in Wrath in order for you to expect the Power Word: Shield to be fully absorbed. So that makes your Power Word: Shield a little bit more of a situational button because you can't just willy-nilly always press this and assume it's going to be close to fully effective like you can in Wrath. A person has to be taking a considerable amount of damage in order to get the full absorb effect over 15 seconds. Also, the way that damage goes out in Cataclysm sort of reduces the effectiveness of pre-shielding. Whereas like all the hard fights in Wrath you kind of just want to prevent people from being one-shot before they can be instantly topped by a giant Holy Light from a Holy Paladin, um, now you're going to be more focused on efficiently healing up the raid and preventing them from rotting out, in which case pre-shielding is worse. Also, the duration nerf is a significant nerf to the amount of targets you can pre-shield, right? So you can only pre-shield damage 15 seconds before it happens rather than 30, and you can't pre-shield the entire raid super easily like you can in Wrath, right? Even if you're GCD-capped, you can only get 15 targets, so you can't fully pre-shield the raid and negate an entire mechanic like on Aglon or Lich King, which are, you know, two of the hardest fights in Wrath. So that's a, all those things sort of combined together to make Power Word: Shield not your main spammed ability.
Aside from that, the toolkit does not really change too much. You don't really get anything new leveling 81, 83, and 85. They're just sort of marginal abilities. Your core toolkit is basically the same as it's, as it's ever been, right? You have Prayer of Healing, you have Heal, Greater Heal, Flash Heal, you have your Holy Word: Serenity, you have Binding Heal, um, you have your Renew, and you have your Power Word: Shield. So if you've played Priest in like any other version of the game previous or subsequent, you'll probably know all these tools. They're kind of simple in and of themselves, but you put them all together and the spec play style becomes decently complex and deep. Um, the only other thing to mention is Atonement, which is new in Cata. The spec is not designed around Atonement the way it is in retail where your whole spec is basically, basically structured around transferring damage into healing, spreading your Atonements out with like Holy Word: Radiance or whatever it is and like doing big ramps. This is really just sort of a niche thing that you add to your toolkit that you're going to use sometimes. It's going to be really powerful sometimes, and it's not going to be powerful other times. I think this is a good thing; it just adds another facet to the play style. So yeah, that's the toolkit. Again, we're going to talk in depth about each of these spells later. For now, let's just go over talents.
All right, so let's go and do a just a quick overview of the talent build perspective Disc. You get Penance, you get Enlightenment, which is 15% intellect. You get Meditation, which is like baseline for every healer now, uh, just increases like your spirit regen in combat as spirit is the like global healer regen stat now. There's no more MP5. Absolution, which makes your dispel able to target friendlies, and you get your Mastery at 80, which just scales all your absorbs by a percentage, and this like scales pretty high. Baseline is 42%, then every point of Mastery is an additional 2.5%.
First tier, we're going to get everything. Improved Power Word: Shield is 20% Power Word: Shield. This is just 6% healing and damage. Agility is 10% Mana reduction on instant casts, which a decent number of our spells are instant casts, so this is quite nice. We're going to get Evangelism and Archangel. This is part of our Atonement package; super valuable point for point, almost pretty much no build is like not going to get Atonement. Going to grab Atonement. We're going to grab, we're going to grab Inner Focus. This is a lower cooldown now; it's 45 seconds, so it's more of a rotational ability. Uh, we're going to grab Renewed Hope. This is just increased crit chance of our casted heals and Penance on targets with Weak Soul or Grace. So your tanks are always going to have either Weak Soul or Grace, so it's just like 10% increased crit for like any, any heals you send into the tank. Pantheon will put up Grace with its first tick, though its second two ticks will always benefit from this, which is kind of nice. We're going to get Piety. This is 2 minutes now instead of 1.25, but still just like a really nice external. Also, the Mana reduction is more relevant now, as you can put it on yourself or another healer in situations where you're actually like going OOM and you just need extra throughput, although that will make your DPS pretty mad. Rapture. This is every 12 seconds you get 7% of your total Mana when your shield gets absorbed. This is changed from Wrath, where you can no longer stack this up, like structure your Rapture where it comes off ICD right when a big damage event goes out that pops a bunch of your shields all at once and gives you whole Mana bar back. You're going to want to be mid-maxing this around like having a target that's taking predictable damage and saving your Weak Soul on that target for when Rapture comes off ICD. So usually that's going to be either a tank, an off-tank, or like a person who gets a debuff that's doing ticking damage, something like that. Also, the ICD is a little bit shorter than Weak Soul, so you can take points in in Strength of Soul on fights where you're just going to be doing more tank healing to reduce that Weak Soul debuff to lower than the ICD Rapture. Uh, we're always going to take Borrowed Time. This is just a big haste buff after we cast Power Word: Shield. However, it is nerfed from 25% to 14% in Cataclysm, and also we're not going to be casting as many Power Word: Shields, so we're going to have lower uptime on this.
This tier, we're going to get Pain Suppression. It's a 3-minute CD now, same 40% damage reduction on the tank for 8 seconds. Really nice external. Going to get Divine Aegis. Uh, this is considerably buffed from Wrath of the Lich King where it has a 25% increase in its duration from 12 to 15 seconds. It's still a 30% on crit, but uh, the big, big change to this is that it's all heals from Prayer of Healing, not just criticals. So you can always absorb with your Prayer of Healing, and Prayer of Healing just becomes like super strong and super efficient in Cataclysm. It's like a bread-and-butter raid heal that we're going to be casting a lot of now, so this is really nice. Also, there's like a stealth buff to this, which is that in Wrath, I believe it was capped at 20% of the caster HP, now it's 40%. Next, we're going to grab Grace. Grace is buffed from 3% a stack to 8%, so one Penance on the tank means you're going to increase all your healing to them by 24% for 15 seconds, which is, you know, really, really strong.
Now we have a couple of points that we can put in to get to Barrier. A lot of the time you're going to be taking two in Soul Warding. Power Word: Shield is, is really high throughput but it's low efficiency, uh, so as long as it's fully absorbed, you're going to be wanting to Power Word: Shield a couple times everyone every now and again, especially when you're moving because it is instant. So having that optionality to be able to use two or three Power Word: Shields in a row with no cooldown is quite nice, although you can go, you know, zero or one points in this on fights where you're going to be casting Power Word: Shield less. Uh, also like the talents that you're going to get over Soul Warding are not like super valuable. The two throughput options are Train of Thought, which is 50% chance up to 100% chance to reduce your Inner Focus by 5 seconds when you heal with Greater Heal. So like if you're doing really focused tank healing, this is going to give you a bit more Inner Focus cast, although that's not like super useful unless you're like going OOM casting Greater Heal, which you probably shouldn't be doing. Um, it also gives 100% chance to reduce the cooldown of Penance when you Smite, but that's doesn't really matter. Strength of Soul. This is the one you're probably going to be grabbing. When you heal a target with your Heal, Greater Heal, or Flash Heal, the duration of Weak Soul is reduced by um, 2 seconds or 4 seconds with two points, and it also gives you like kick immunity when you cast Inner Focus, which is not really going to be relevant too much in PvE content. Weak Soul reduction is actually quite strong when you're tank healing because if you put like, you know, two Greater Heals or a Heal and a Greater Heal into the tank, you're going to reduce your Weak Soul either by four or eight seconds, and because Power Word: Shield is like really, really high throughput, this just gives you more opportunities to proc your Rapture on the tank, but also it gives you more optionality to cast a really big Power Word: Shield on the tank if they drop. So you have like your Power Word: Shield kind of becomes like an NS-type heal where it's like an emergency instant that with the glyph plus the shield like heals for a significant amount instantly on the tank. So this is like if you're just doing like a fight where you're really tank healing a lot, you can swap into Strength of Soul over Soul Warding. Although like generically I would use a build like this to get our 31 points, and the really the flex would be taking one out of Soul Warding into Strength of Soul. This would be like the generic like two builds you're going to go for your 31 points in Disc to get Barrier. Barrier is the, is the capstone and it's very, very powerful. It's a 3-minute, 40-yard range, uh, little ring that you put on the ground that lasts for 10 seconds, and it just gives 25% damage reduction to everybody in the ring. Can also be glyphed to increase healing done to the targets in the ring. So this is like really flexible, really, really powerful, huge part of our utility as Disc. You can put it on the tank just for like a second PS, put it on the melee if they're all stacked up for raid damage. If the whole raid stacked up, this is like obviously insanely good, you know, you're going to be finding ways to use this on every single fight, and it's going to be good in every single fight, even if it's just like a pure Patchwork fight or whatever, you can just put it on the tank.
So now we have the rest of our points to spread out where we want them. Discipline is actually an, you can think of it is a good thing or a bad thing if you're like a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty type person. If you like having flex points in different builds that you can kind of mid-fight, fight for fight, and all that, like Disc, Discipline is actually in a good spot for that, um, with its, with its points in Holy and Shadow, but you can also look at it as that you have to sacrifice things for other things, which can feel kind of bad sometimes. So because we're going to always be grabbing Atonement, which requires us to be casting Holy Fire and Smite, I would never drop Divine Fury if you have Atonement, um, and this just reduces the cast time of Smite, Holy Fire, Healing, Greater Heal by 0.5. Even if you're like tank healing only and you, and you don't want to use Atonement for some reason, you're still going to grab this just for Healing, Greater Heal cast time. The big thing that's going to structure how we use our like flex points is Inspiration. So Inspiration reduces physical damage taken by 10% for 15 seconds after getting a crit from like basically any of our heals. This is really strong on the tank; you, you want to have as much uptime on the tank of this as possible, and the only other two healers that can provide this are Holy Priest and Resto Shaman. Resto Shaman's version of this buff also gives maximum HP, so, so ideally in a raid you want to have a Resto Shaman keeping up this buff on the tank, um, and also Holy Priests get this in their just generic build and they don't have to sacrifice anything for it. Same thing with Resto Shaman; they really don't have to sacrifice that much to grab this. Ideally, you're going to have one of those two healers in your raid keeping it up with like Riptide or Shield or like Renew, Prayer of Healing into the tank, that kind of thing. But if you don't have that and you're like on Prague and you don't have like a really, really geared or skilled like Blood DK that just they don't need this at all, you know, uh, you can kind of sneak drop points in this to get some throughput somewhere else, but generically for like progression, if you don't have one of those other two healers, you have to grab this, which is kind of a bummer. And if you do have to grab this, you'll be grabbing, you'll be grabbing um, points in Empowered Healing to unlock this, which is just percentage buff to your casted heals and also your Binding Heal, which is something that most priests never cast but is quite a good heal. You and the target are both damaged now. There's different options for what we can grab next. We have three points left, um, so I would try my hardest to get three out of three in Darkness all the time. You're, you're going to be raid healing a lot, and when you're raid healing a lot like this spell haste on your Prayer of Healing is really, really nice. Even if you're just tank healing, like this spell haste is really good; it's just really nice throughput. You can get Veiled Shadows if you find a fight where you're going OOM, and it's a very long fight where you can weave in two Shadows. The problem with this is like you can't just Shadowfiend on the rip and then use it on CD, right? Because you have to wait until you actually have Mana lost out of your pool to have this be effective. So finding a fight that's long enough where you can get two Shadowfiends that are actually full effectiveness is like pretty marginal, but still you can keep an eye out for that, um, but this is like, this is the generic. If, if I had to take one build into every single fight and like I couldn't swap, I would probably take this build, um, unless I was 100% certain that I had a Resto Shaman or a Holy Priest in every fight, and I would take points out of Inspiration and go Empowered Healing, and I would probably grab one in Strength of Soul. That you can grab Desperate Prayer as like a defensive, just instantly heals you for 30%. The problem with this is like not very good; I'd rather have that point somewhere else. Also, like your Surge of Light, which is three or six if you put two points in to get an instant free Flash Heal from your Smite, Heal, Flash Heal, Binding Heal, Greater Heal, like this is not really that good. It doesn't proc off of Prayer of Healing, and it doesn't proc off of Holy Fire, just Smite, though you're not going to be casting that many Heals, Flash Heals, Binding Heals, and Greater Heals, um, and if you, if you get like even if you get two points in this, it's just not that, not that big, and you have other more efficient things to be doing with your globals than casting like a free Flash Heal. If I, if I had to take points out of Inspiration, I would go, yeah, I would go Strength of Soul and one more Empowered Healing, which would just be 5% increase on our, on our casted heals as well as uh, this optionality to reduce Weak Soul on the tank. Generically, I would take this build to everything if I had to, um, but I would be looking for opportunities to drop Inspiration, and I would be looking for opportunities where potentially you could get two Shadowfiends. Also, if you have to like full-focus tank heal, I would take, I'd probably grab one more in Empowered Healing, taking a point out of haste, and then I would also put a point in Strength of Soul and take a point out of Soul Warding for it. So this would be like my, my tank healing build. A lot of people will tell you to like drop Atonement for tank healing. I just think that's crazy because of how Atonement works; like there's always going to be periods of lower damage and then periods of higher damage, even if that period of lower damage is just like where your tank pops a cooldown, and in those periods of lower damage if you're looking to be efficient, what you can do is Atonement heal in the low damage, and then when you're going to have a spike of damage come up, you pop your Archangel with those Atonement stacks, and then you go back to tank healing or raid healing. And the optionality to do that and the optionality to have like Archangel is just so good that I don't think you're ever going to be doing like a full, full zug zug tank build where you get like full points in Train of Thought and full points in Strength of Soul and take all your points out of the Evangelism and Atonement and all that and just go like something like that. This is just like bad in my opinion.
Or Glyphs. Glyphs are very straightforward. Your prime glyphs are just going to be basically the same as they were in Wrath. You're going to get Penance for just 2-second CD on Penance. You're going to get Power Word: Shield. This is just 20% of the absorb instant heal is really good if it's like effective, right? And it's always going to be effective now, or at least more likely to be effective because you're not going to be blanketing Power Word: Shield as much; you're going to be using it more as like a reactive heal on people who are dropping or taking a lot of damage. And then we're going to grab Prayer of Healing. You can swap out Penance or Power Word: Shield for Glyph of Power Word: Barrier, which increases healing received under Power Word: Barrier by 10%. For fights where there's like really big spiky damage, this will be like a decent raid healing cooldown as well, and it affects like other healers as well as you, right? So it just increases your raid HPS on those like key moments by a lot. You know, losing two seconds on your Penance is like not too huge of a deal; your, like, Penance is not like the greatest spell of all time, right? So getting a tiny bit of reduction in how much you can use it on the tank is not a huge deal. For majors, we're going to get Divine Accuracy, which gives us hit cap on our instant heals. Going to grab Smite, which gives our Smite 20% damage when the target has the Holy Fire DoT on them. And then for our last slot, we're going to get Prayer of Healing. What Prayer of Healing does is it makes the first charge of our Prayer of Healing heal for 60% more, and as Prayer of Healing, like you're always going to be selecting the target you choose to Prayer of Healing with your first tick to be a target that's like low or taking damage, so you're always going to get effectiveness out of that first jump if you're like casting the spell correctly. This is just like a really nice throughput increase for that, for that ability. Also, a lot of the time you're going to be pinging the tank, right? So the tank is usually going to get really high effectiveness out of that boosted first tick. This is just like really, really nice. Glyph if you're not using Atonement for some reason, you could grab, I mean, there's really not like anything else that's that good here. Spirit Tap, uh, if you can work it so that you're going to get a kill with Shadow Word: Death, this could be a good talent, but you're basically never going to happen, right? As a healer, this is just, you're dreaming if you think you're going to get healing blows with Shadow Word: Death. This is, there's no like Lich King where you can get, you can snipe killing blows on like Wicked Spirits or the orbs or whatever and get Spirit Tap procs, like this is just never going to be good. You can swap Mind Control in for fights where you have to Mind Control, but you should probably just let your Shadow Priest Mind Control because your Mana pool is so much more valuable. Holy Nova is like kind of a bad spell now; I wouldn't ever take this. You know, almost all of this other stuff is just for PvP. These majors are going to be your bread and butter; you're pretty much never going to swap these out or in. For minors, you just grab Shadowfiend and uh, Order to, and then probably Shadow Protection.
So that's the spec. Again, with the abundance of sort of flex points, we have both inside the Discipline part of…
The tree and also in holy and Shadow, you really have to be worried and thinking more about like how you change your spec for each fight and each raid comp, particularly with inspiration. Right, this again, it's a sort of a kiss curse right where it's nice because we have a lot of decisions to make, and those decisions can be interesting, but it's also a bit punishing because you have to give things up to get other things, and that can sometimes feel kind of bad, and it's more complex, right? So you have to think about it more; that's talents and glyphs.
Now that we've talked about talents, I'm going to go through each spell in the toolkit and talk about its strength and weaknesses, where you want to cast it. Um, so we're going to start with atonement; so that includes like Holy Fire and Smite along with this atonement package here. So what are the strengths of atonement? Uh, the number one strength is that it obviously does damage while healing, and damage is valuable, although it's like a little bit hard to quantify how valuable exactly it is. But that being said, like if you could do equal throughput with AA and with casted heals, you would always use AA because it does the same throughput but also adds damage. So its strength is that it's very efficient. Holy Fire particularly is very strong; it's low Mana cost that gets reduced further by evangelism. Um, it heals for a large chunk, and it also uh puts a little dot that also heals, so it's like a big initial heal then a hot, and it's very low Mana cost. Smite is a little bit less efficient; it's longer to cast and more expensive, but it is buffed by a glyph which makes it, you know, a bit more potent and a bit more efficient as well. But most of your atonement healing, if you're like being really efficient, is going to come from Holy Fire. It's also smart healing, which is, you know, you don't have to aim it; it's always going to Target a low Health individual, so that might reduce overhealing. Uh, it does scale with all your stats, right? If your haste effects how quickly you can cast Holy Fire, your Mastery effects whether it crits, how much healing it puts on, and also crit is going to scale it, although this healing is not like treated as a separate instance, so if the Holy Fire crits it will just take that amount of damage and put it into healing rather than having the healing also be able to crit, so it can't like double crit. Uh, it gives you Archangel Stacks, right? So this is really nice in periods of low damage; you can, you know, use your atonement to get these stacks, and if you have to cast heal as you press Archangel, and you get a little bit of Mana back and a little bit of increased healing. Also, the Limited range on atonement being 15 yards from the target means that it's going to hit the tank more often. So what are its weaknesses? It's not as high throughput as casted heals. The Limited range is also sort of a weak because it can't heal the range if they're spread out. Uh, you have to use it to get Archangel Stacks even if you don't always want to use it, which can be a bit annoying sometimes. The healing generated from atonement also does not put stacks of Grace on the Target, and if it jumps to you if you happen to be within 15 yards of the boss, uh, the healing is going to be reduced by 50%. That's atonement; we'll talk a little bit more about this later when we talk about like how to heal in different situations. All right, so Power Word: Shields next. Uh, we talked about how it was nerfed, and we went over a little bit in the intro, but let's talk about where it's strong here. So we're going to be using this to proc Rapture every 12 seconds, so you're going to want to be saving your Weaken Soul cooldowns on targets that are taking like predictable damage, so you know tank, off tank, person with a debuff, uh, you know, someone who often stands in fire in your raid, something like that. You're going to want to save those Weaken Souls so that you can like track your Rapture ICD and have a person who's going to have a shield pop instantly on them every 12 seconds. Um, it's also one of our powerful instant heals with no cool down, right? We have this; we also have Renew and Palm. If Palm is off cool down and uh, you know, you're moving, you're going to press Palm; otherwise you have to choose between Power Word: Soul and Renew. This is part of the reason why I take two points in Soul warding, and even the generic build, just so that you have the option to cast Power Word: Shield when you're moving. It's also quite a strong uh instant emergency heal; it's basically like a Swiftmend with no cool down. Uh, so as long as somebody has like no Weaken Soul on them and they drop really low, you can just emergency Power Word: Shield them, and the odds that they die are quite low. It also uh can be used to sort of turn extra Mana into haste with the way that Borrowed Time works. If you want to have like really high up-time on that and you're, you know, you're not going, you have some extra Mana, you can alternate Power Word: Shield, Power Word: Shield, Greater Heal, etc., sort of translate extra Mana into haste.
Next, let's talk about Prayer of Healing. So Prayer of Healing, this is the same as it's ever been; it's a long cast time heal that heals everyone in a party for a certain amount, and then you can glyph it to heal for an additional 20% over 6 seconds. So what are its strengths? It's always procing Divine Aegis, which is scaled from your Mastery. You can use this to pre-shield, and it's pre-shielding capacity is now more effective than Power Word: Shield in most situations; highly efficient, and it also does really good throughput, especially if like three or more targets are damaged in a party that you use it on. It also has a decently large radius, with a 30 yards. What are its weaknesses? The glyph heal from this, the little hot it puts on, does not like stack or accumulate over time, so if you're constantly casting Prayer of Healing on one group repeatedly, you know, Divine Aegis will stack up, but that hot will not get any more effective, so you kind of want to spread it around a bit to optimize that hot. You get from the glyph; has a long cast time, so you can get sniped on this. It's also limited to party, and it's not a smart heal, so you know if you aren't like really good at picking your targets for this, it can become less and less efficient. That's Prayer of Healing; let's talk about Palm next. Palm is much the same as it is in every version of the game; it's very, very efficient; it can crit, and if it crits it puts on Aegis. It also has like very, very low overhealing because it procs off of damage instances. Uh, those are strengths. Uh, what are its weaknesses? It's bad if it can only jump once or twice, and it's bad if only one target is taking damage. Can also sometimes jump to targets that have absorbs on them like Power Word: Shield or a really high stack of Divine Aegis, which can reduce the chance that that Target is going to take damage for the Palm to keep bouncing around, so there's a little bit of like a nonbo there with your other tools, but we can mitigate that by doing proper Target selection.
Next, let's talk about Heal. Very low Mana cost; it only costs 347 at level 80; it applies Grace, Aegis, you know, all your skills with all your talents on your casted heals benefits from Renewed Hope, all those sorts of things. What are its weaknesses though? It heals for a very small amount, and it's out-competed by Atonement in the situations where it would otherwise be good, right? So in those sort of like low damage to single Target spot healing, you know, maybe just casting this on the tank over and over again to sort of Mana neutral put a little bit of healing on the tank, in those situations you're much more likely going to be just using your atonement, which is also very efficient and is going to do a lot of the same things Heal will, so you're very likely not going to cast this very much at all. Next, we're going to talk about Greater Heal. So what are Greater Heal strengths? It's very high throughput on a single Target; it's decently good healing per Mana if it does not overheal, assuming that you have Grace stacked on the target. It can quickly stack Aegis on a tank; if you have to like pre-shield a big like tank Buster or something, you can stack almost your full value of Divine Aegis with just a Greater Heal crit and then like put a Power Word: Shield up, and you have like a big nice juicy absorb on the tank. It does proc Grace, and it does scale with all your talents that scale your casted heals, which is nice, although it only puts up one stack of Grace itself, and it's much less efficient if you don't fully have Grace stacked up on the tank. Um, what are its weaknesses? It can very easily overheal, and it's sort of a cast; you can get sniped on it; it's a bit less efficient than your other choices, uh, and it's also, you know, like I said before, only one stack of Grace, so it relies on Grace being pre-stacked.
Next, we're going to talk about Penance. What are Penance strengths? Uh, it's three ticks, so it stacks up Grace fully in just one cast. It has a very high chance of procing your inspiration because it's three separate instances; they can all have a chance to crit independently. It doesn't consume Borrowed Time, so if you press a Power Word: Shield, pressing Penance as the next Global is like really, really nice. Also, each tick benefits from the Grace and the Renewed Hope from the previous tick. What are its weaknesses though? It does have a travel time, so you know if you're casting this reactively on somebody who's like dropping really quickly as an instant heal, they can sometimes die as the bolts are traveling through the air, which can be kind of bad. Power Word: Shield in this way is a stronger emergency heal. Um, it does have a cool down that can be reduced by the glyph, so you can't like spam this in the same way that you can spam Greater Heal as a single Target heal. It also has lower throughput than Greater Heal and Flash Heal, assuming that that Grace is stacked up already. Speaking of Flash Heal, let's talk about that next. Flash Heal is very high throughput with a low cast time, so it's sort of designed as being an emergency heal that you are not going to cast that often, but you know in those situations where someone's going to die in the next two seconds but not in the next 1.25 seconds, you can cast this over a Greater Heal. It also does benefit from all your talents that scale your casted heals, like you know, Grace, SOS, RH, Aegis, all those things. What are its weaknesses though? It's very inefficient; costs about the same as a Greater Heal but heals for considerably less, and also the niche that's filled by this of being your emergency single Target like triage heal is filled much better by your other instant, namely Power Word: Shield with the glyph. It does instant healing and also puts a very large absorb on the target, so as long as you like don't have a Weaken Soul and you don't have any of your good instants to cast on a Target, you will sometimes be using this, but most of the time you shouldn't ever use this. Those are our main three casted heals. Let's talk about Renew. What are Renew strengths? It has a very low Mana cost. Um, it is instant, so you can use it during movement when you can't cast. The ticks can now crit and benefit from haste like every hot and Dot in Cataclysm, um, and those crits do proc Aegis, which scales off Mastery as well, so it's good for like a very efficient spell to cast while you're moving if your Palm is on CD and your Power Word: Shield is like not going to be effective for some reason or it's just like too expensive to cast, although that's a very marginal situation. What are its weaknesses? It lacks scaling, right? So it's designed around all the talents and the holy tree that, you know, scale it up, and you as a discipline do not have any of those talents, so it's rather weak for us, so again you should only be pressing this very occasionally for movement.
Last, we're going to talk about Binding Heal. So Binding Heal is a very often ignored spell for most priests; you know, most priests are just never going to cast this ever, but it is a sort of interesting utility niche ability. Has a very fast cast time; it's basically two Flash Heals, one on you and one on the target. Um, it does heal for a little bit less, but again it does double that healing, so it's very high throughput if you have both the Target and yourself getting full Effectiveness from the heal. It can proc Aegis; it's a very good emergency heal if you're like low but you also need to heal a second target. It's effectively sort of a defensive in that if you're spamming Binding Heal, you will very likely never die unless you get fully one-shot, and it can heal two Targets if they aren't in the same party, much better than Prayer of Healing, right? Because Prayer of Healing as your main, you know, AOE raid heal is tied to a single party. What are its weaknesses though? It is inefficient the same way that Flash Heal is inefficient. It's also hard to play around well; it takes like some cognitive bandwidth to constantly be looking for situations where it's going to be useful. If you if you don't want to think about it at all, you can safely unbind this and not be too sad about, you know, losing one out of a 100 situations where it's actually correct to use this. You can also just like use a weak aura that tells you when you're below a certain Health threshold. It also lacks some Talent scaling from Renewed Hope as well as Strength of Soul.
All right, so now that I've gone through the toolkit, I'm going to just talk about how to heal in different situations. Um, um, I don't have any footage from the the beta raid testing, so I'm just going to play some footage from like a Halion ICC run, um, with some like Rats from The Guild uh in the background. Um, so there's really like a couple of different modes of healing; it's, you know, healing is different in this way from DPS, whereas the DPS you pretty much just do whatever rotation the Sim tells you is best for single Target or multi-target; there's not like really that much reactivity; maybe you have a proc or something, maybe you have some reactivity in that way, but you're not really going to change your play style too much uh like depending on the encounter's demands or like how many DPS you have in your raid; it doesn't really change how you play. Whereas with healers, you know, how much damage the raid is taking and what type of damage the raid is taking along with, you know, how many healers you have, your tank composition, your healer composition, that kind of thing is going to change the way you play, and it can change the way you play pretty dramatically. So for priest, um, there's a couple of different different uh play Styles, so um, first of all, for bosses where either there's a huge damage amp, um, the big example of this in Cataclysm is like Halion, that's the one you're going to see in in Phase One, um, where the boss gets a huge damage amp, you're just going to be spamming Holy Fire and Smite, um, and you're going to be doing really good healing and damage. But outside of those niche examples where the boss has damage amp, uh, atonement is like more so going to be something that you use when there's down time, when there's periods of less damage, when that damage is mostly going on either the tank or like the melee because again it's 15-yard range, or if the whole raid is stacked, and you're usually just going to be using that, um, those casts to generate Archangel, and then as soon as you need like really big throughput, you're going to pop that Archangel and just spam your cast of heals, either, you know, Greater Heal on the tank or Prayer of Healing on the raid. Um, the second type of healing is going to be like sort of mixed, where there's some raid damage and some tank damage. In this situation, you're really going to be healing reactively, where you're going to be looking for opportunities to cast a Prayer of Heal on a group that has three or more damage targets. If you don't have that to do, you're, you know, obviously you're going to be chucking out your Palm on CD, usually into the tank; you're going to be um using your Holy Fire on cool down just to generate Archangel or Evangelism Stacks rather. Um, you're going to be using your Power Word: Shield on the tank um pretty much on cool down just to generate that um Rapture, and usually what you're going to do after you Power Word: Shield the tank um with that Borrowed Time is you're going to use a Penance on the tank if the tank is missing HP um just to top them off. Usually, you know, the tank has a big HP pool, so the instant heal from your Power Word: Shield probably won't top them if they're low, so you can chuck out a Penance with that haste buff and then go into a casted heal. Um, also if you have to Greater Heal the tank, you usually want to Penance first to get those uh Grace Stacks up. Um, so yeah, for mixed damage, you're just sort of you're you're going to be reactively healing and looking for those opportunities to um get an effective Prayer of Healing out, um, get, you know, your Palm is bouncing, and uh, you know, emergency heal the tank if a if a player emergency drops. You usually you're going to want to use your Power Word: Shield there, which is a reason; it's another reason why you don't spam Power Word: Shield as much, because you kind of want to have, you know, there's like an opportunity cost to casting a Power Word: Shield on someone preemptively, because then you don't have Weaken Soul on them if they, you know, get if they stand in fire, they get hit by something, and you know, they get chunked down to 20%, and they're going to die, you can pop a Power Word: Shield on them if they don't have Weaken Soul, and you can usually save somebody's life unless they're, you know, doing something really stupid, uh, and you know, they get two-shot or something. Um, so that's like more the reactive play style. Um, there the the really the third the third play style is going to be like really heavy raid damage. On really heavy raid damage, what you're going to want to do is ideally you would have your Evangelism stacked up previously from a phase in the fight where there's less damage. Um, so if you do have that, you're going to pop your uh Archangel. If you don't have those Stacks, I wouldn't bother like Holy Firing and Smiting four times while there's big raid damage going out to stack them up; I would just go straight into um, you know, you're going to use your Palm if it's going to bounce a couple times; that's your first priority. Your second priority is going to be uh again just using your Power Word: Shield cool down on the tank; that's always going to be pretty high priority, and then your third priority is just going to be spamming Prayer of Healing. Uh, what you can also do is if the raid damage is extremely high, uh, you can um pop your cooldowns, like if you're a troll you can pop your Berserk; you can use the first like eight seconds of that Berserk to cast Prayer of Healing, and then with the last second of that, uh, like the last Global inside of that haste cool down or like, you know, like your gloves on use any on-use trinkets, you can pop your HM, and it'll benefit from that haste, which is really nice. HM is also very strong now; you can see it there; I just HMed on Death Whisper to heal up uh like a Frost B volley and some some ghost explosions. Um, it's very, very strong; it's way buffed from the Wrath of the Lich King version; it just heals like way more now, and it still does provide that 10% healing buff uh on the targets it heals, um, although your HM is a little bit less strong than a Holy Priest HM, it does uh put up Aegis with its crits, which is quite nice. Um, so that that's your really your play pattern for like extremely high throughput; it's really going to be mostly uh spamming Prayer of Healing and just sending some Palms. The other thing you can do, you can see here these these two players drop really low, so I Power Word: Shielded them; that's really going to be the role of your Power Word: Shield is as more of an emergency heal to save somebody from dying, um, and it's also a really useful tool for movement if you do have to move and you don't have a Palm CD to use, um, you can Power Word: Shield, and that's a big reason why before I said you should take two points in Soul warding; it's just very useful to have that optionality to be able to cast a few Power Word: Shields in a row if you have to move for like three or four globals. Um, otherwise you would have to, you know, like Palm your first Global on movement and then maybe Power Word: Shield and then Renew and then Power Word: Shield, so you'd have to mix a Renew in there probably on the tank. Um, but again that's just like your Renew is not very good now. Here you can see Deathbringer Saurfang; this is a good example of a fight where you're going to be just purely atonement healing; you could probably solo heal this fight at this point just with one priest doing atonement, um, because there's just one target taking damage most of the time. Uh, you just, you know, spam Smite and then Holy Fire on cool down, um, and then you can see I'm Power Word: Shielding just the blood boils and uh keeping it on the tank, um, but there's not going to be that many fights like this in Cataclysm; most fights have some portion of raid damage; you're not really just going to be purely spamming atonement all that much. Um, yeah, so that's like the that's the play pattern for like really heavy raid damage. The the next thing is the next play pattern is like really heavy uh tank damage. So for really heavy tank damage, um, again this is going to be a situation where like if you have a fight where you're consistently having heavy tank damage that you have to heal, uh, you should be taking a point in those that Talent that I talked about before in the talent section that reduces the duration of Weaken Soul on the tank, and what you're going to be doing is your number one priority is getting those Rapture procs, right? So you're going to keep your shield on the tank when your Rapture is off ICD, uh, and then you're going to be Penancing on cool down just because it's efficient, and then you're going to just be Greater Healing into the tank. Um, for maximum throughput you can mix a Holy Fire and some Smites in um if there's periods where like maybe the tank pops a shield wall, you can you can Holy Fire and Smite a couple times just to get some Evangelism stacks and then, you know, you press your Archangel and go back to Penance, Greater Healing. Um, also as long as like more than one target is taking damage in melee, which usually there is, it's not just going to be pure tank damage, you can also mix a Palm in there, although if it's just the tank taking damage and the Palm isn't going to bounce, it's uh probably better just to use your casted heals. Um, so that's that's heavy tank damage. Again, you can see here, um, I'm going to back up a little bit, so uh the next thing I'm going to talk about is your pre-o, so where is in Wrath, uh you can see here this is like this is a Rot face, uh 10 seconds into the pre-o, you can see on my raid frames here I have uh Divine Aegis tracked on my raid frames now. Uh, that's something I would recommend you track. The things I'd recommend you track on your raid frames are Weaken Soul, Power Word: Shield, Aegis, and Prayer of Mending. You can also track
Renew if you want, but you're going to be casting it so infrequently that it doesn't really, really matter. Um, yeah, those are things I'd recommend tracking just in terms of your buffs. Obviously, you want to track like debuffs and stuff like that as well, but the reason why you should be tracking to find Aegis is because you can refresh the duration and the value, and it stacks up cumulatively. So, uh, you can pre-shield the whole raid before the pull with Prayer of Healing. And if you have decent haste, like there's going to be gaps in there where you can drink. Um, and then you can also, you know, obviously you can pre-OT mana so you can go into the fight with big shields on the whole raid and, uh, full mana.
Um, so you can see here I'm just PA of healing going through the groups, uh, one by one. Prayer of Healing to get that Aegis stacked up. I have a Palm on the tank, um, pre-OT, and I have a shield on the tank pre-OT. You can also put a Renew on the tank pre-OT if you want, but I don't hear it's not that huge of a deal. It's a pretty low amount of healing, especially because it's going to be timing out like while your shields are up anyways most of the time. Um, and this is like a just sort of moderate tank damage, moderate raid damage fight, right? There's, I, you have pretty much infinite mana in ICC gear right now, and the fights are so short that I'm just full spamming Prayer of Healing here, which is which is fine. Then you can see I'm looking for opportunities to use my Power Word: Shield on targets that are going to take high damage, so in this case it's the disease targets. Um, and I'm not really doing much tank healing just because the tank is not taking really any damage here.
Um, so yeah, that's that's the pre-OT. I'm going to go on onto Festergut. Yeah, so this is Festergut. Again, you can see on the pre-OT here I'm doing the same thing, um, although people are a bit more spread out here, so some of the targets are not getting hit by Prayer of Healing. Doing the same thing with the with the pre-shielding. I think I actually pre-OT haste here instead of mana, just because again the fights are so short that basically have infinite mana. Um, yeah, I see I do pre-OT haste here. This is something that healers don't really do. You can pot throughput, uh, if you don't need the mana and it's, you know, obviously you get throughput from that, so more relevant like if you if you're want to parse cheese or if you're like dropping healers or something and you you actually do need throughput for key moments, but you know for here it's just a kind of a parse cheesing thing. And here I'm ripping my hymn just on the beginning where there's no inhales where the raid damage is, uh, is super high. And you can see here this is this is kind of the play pattern I was talking about before with, um, like heavy sustained raid damage where I'm mostly going to be Prayer of Healing spamming. Um, I'm going to be putting a Power Word: Shield on the tank and then ping. So you can see there I palm the tank and shield the tank, and I'm just back to Prayer of Healing spamming. Prayer of Healing is like a really insane spell if there's just ticking raid damage like this. It's just very efficient, and it puts the shield up, so even if you overheal with it, it's still not like completely wasted.
Um, and then you can see at the end here, uh, the tank starts taking more damage, so I'm doing more of a tank healing style where I'm shielding the tank, um, sending a couple of Prayers of Healing into the melee, um, and you know, pinging into the into the tank again. Here the tank has has a CD up, so I don't have to do as much targeted healing. And you can see after the CD drops I'm casting some Greater Heals. So that's another thing you should definitely be tracking on your raid frames is tank defensive cooldowns, just because you can it's like really useful information to have to know like how much healing your tank needs. Um, you can even track like Death Shield for blood DKs now since that's like a big defensive layer that won't show up as like a cool down. Um, so yeah, that's a some examples there. Putrid again, this is just like a taking raid damage fight. You's just going to be Prayer of Healing, palming, shielding the targets to get the debuffs. Like there you see I shield and PS the the red target since they take heavy damage at the beginning.
Um, Blood-Queen Lana'thel. This is actually a really hilarious pull. This is I think I think this is still rank one for pre-patch, so you know, kind of a meme, doesn't really matter, but uh, we we, uh, we definitely messed this one up. The melee are like act just aggressively Zug zagging. We we we drop a couple of bombs, um, but this is useful to where do I get knocked here? Um, yeah, we do get knocked there, so you see we get knocked, and I think I instantly hymn this. Um, no, I run back in, and that's a this is a really good example of why Soulwording is good. Um, as you can see I get knocked, and as I'm flying by him here because there's people out of range that are taking damage just to top the raid, I get knocked again, and as I'm running in, I I palm there, and then I start shielding low targets. Um, so that's that's a big reason why Soulwording 2/2 is so good. If I didn't have that there, I wouldn't be able to cast all those Shields one after the other as I'm running in in like this kind of emergency where there's a bunch of people getting chunked. I would have had to do like palm and then shield and then renew and then wait a second for that soulwording cool down and then shield again and then maybe another renew, and that's just like way less healing. So that's a big reason why you want that, uh, that optionality to use Power Word: Shield on movement, and you don't give up too much for those two points. Um, but again, if if if there was a fight where I never had to move and I could just turret, uh, I probably would take out one or two points in that and just put them in a more throughput. That's Council.
Um, yeah, again we we let so many bombs fall here. This is just this is a goofy, um, pre-patch raid where everybody's just, uh, kind of messing around, not taking it too serious. Um, so let's talk about Blood Queen. We do the stack-up strategy, and again this is just the the same pre-OT. Um, you're going to be doing this this type of pre-OT in like almost every fight you can get away with. We do the stacks right here just to because it's more fun for for the healers and people have have to move. And again this is just like a heavy raid damage fight where there's also like a decent amount of tank damage. And you can see here I'm just Prayer of Healing, looking for opportunities to shield the tanks. Um, I'm not using Penance here really because Penance is not like high throughput, so if you have like effective targets for your Prayer of Healing, you're better off pressing that than like a Penance into the tank, um, if if a Greater Heal into the tank if it's fully effective is like pretty close, right? Does a lot of healing. If it crits, it puts a big absorb up that's like always going to be 100% used because it's the tank. Um, but still like your Prayer of Healing is just really, really, really high throughput, especially like here I pop my berserk and I'm in lust, you can see that here. Um, so Prayer of Healing is just like really, really good healing per cast, uh, healing per mana in this situation. Um, also I have my RS trinket up, and Prayer of Healing puts up five instances of this and also puts it on pets if you heal a pet group. So that's like Prayer of Healing if you have this RS trinket up is really good. I also think that this RS trinket on certain fights where the entire, uh, raid is stacked up and there is heavy raid damage, you might actually wear this RS trinket in Cataclysm. Again, like it's it has like a decent amount of intellect on it, and if it heals for like 150k or whatever every time you use it, that's like a decent decent chunk of healing, although I mean I haven't tested it, so it remains to be seen. I could be completely wrong about that, but just something to keep in mind. Yeah, so that's that's Blood Queen. Again, standard just raid raid healing, Prayer of Healing, Palm, Shield the emergency targets and shield the tank. There's I don't think the tanks really ever drop here too much. There I think the tank drops and I PS him, um, PS him as I'm running him because the other healers have to move. Um, yeah, again there's these fights, there's not too much damage going out here on the tank, so I don't do too much tank healing.
Sindragosa again, just another raid damage fight. The thing they were mentioned about Sindragosa here is that, um, what I was talking about before with Atonement where you have to like look for sort of ebbing and flowing in the fight where like there's low periods and then high periods and then low periods and high periods, and in those low periods you want to be stacking up your Evangelism. Um, so if you think of Sindragosa like what is the low period, the obvious low period in Sindragosa, well it's the ice tomb phase, right? So here I'm going to be doing my like my high throughput raid healing, um, which is Prayer of Healing spamming and ping and, uh, Power Word: Shielding the tank as well as, um, just like emergency low targets. Um, also like the, uh, when you get the debuff if you Prayer of Healing and and queue an instant you only get one stack, so that's what I'm doing here. You can see I'm doing like 30k HPS with, uh, with the debuff just, you know, going up to only like six or seven stacks, which is like pretty useful for this fight. Um, yeah, again just just the typical raid healing stuff. And then you'll see in the ice tomb phase, um, since there's really not too much healing to be done here other than just like topping people off and maybe pre-shielding a little bit, I'm just going to use my, um, again you can see we we got some people who who didn't have their weak auras working and they're they're freezing each other, so you can see here I'm just stacking those Atonements up in this period of lower damage, and then as soon as the boss falls down I'm going to pop those Atonement stacks. You can see that popped them there, and then I'm going to go back to healing. So that's a that's just something you should be looking out for in fights, are opportunities to get those stacks. Um, so that's Sindragosa, just some typical Sindragosa gameplay.
Lich King. Lich King is an interesting one to talk about just in terms of like obviously none of these fights are like super relevant for Cataclysm. You're not going to be going back to ICC, but they're relevant in that like it gives me an opportunity to talk about general play style in different, uh, situations and like the the the the general play style is going to be relevant. You can see there my melee player is absolutely Zug zagging, standing right on the boss on pull. Um, so Lich King is an interesting fight because there's like sort of different healing requirements for each phase. So for the infests, uh, you know, obviously I'm just going to be doing the pre-shielding rotation where I'm just going through each group and and Prayer of Healing to keep that Aegis up. Uh, so this is really kind of a a niche, um, uh, you know, infest-specific play pattern, but it's really not too different from the general raid healing style. I'm also going to be shielding the tanks here, although again I basically have infinite mana and ICC gear, so, uh, been maxing those raptures is not like super important. Um, so here it's pretty much just raid healing, raid healing, raid healing in the, um, in the intermission phase where he, you know, does Hunger and Cold. You can see here again like what as I'm moving out I'm going to be casting my instants using my, uh, Power Word: Shields and Palms. Um, and then once we get out to the this, uh, intermission phase I'm just going to be again Prayer of Healing, palming, shielding, and Penance into the tanks. Um, and then there's another infest Valk stage. Again, this is just more hymn here. I hymn him for the first infest. Um, so again for him you're just going to want to be looking for opportunities where either like your other healers like sometimes if your other healers have to move or they get, um, you know, they get they get a mechanic that makes it so they can't heal as much, that can be a useful opportunity to like either send some big heals into the tank or like pop a cool down like that like a PS or a hymn. Um, so they're like, you know, we're all running in from the transition, so the other healers aren't able to heal. I'm not able to pre-shield, so that's why I use my hymn here. Um, so again this is just raid healing, raid healing, raid healing in the down phase, uh, we got another transition, more raid healing in the down phase. It's again just just raid healing. Um, and this is another fight where there's movement, right? So here, you know, if I had more mana I would be using more Power Word: Shields here. I press Holy Nova a couple times. This is just muscle memory from Wrath. In Wrath of the Lich King Holy Nova is actually like a pretty decent spell. It's it's limited to your party, and it's not limited to your party in Cataclysm anymore, but the just the amount that it heals and the damage that it does is like highly nerfed in Cataclysm. So in Wrath Holy Nova is actually like pretty good if it actually heals effectively on five targets, but in Cataclysm I would pretty much never press this button. Yeah, I just do it here because it's a bit of a muscle memory thing and it's, you know, it's still like it's not terrible. It does heal a bit. Um, yeah, that's just something to keep in mind if you're one of the 0.1% of healers that actually or priests rather that actually did press Holy Nova in Wrath. Shouldn't do that anymore. Um, and then the this the last phases here where there's just defile and tank damage, you'll see I'm just doing a lot more focused tank healing, shielding, Penance, Greater Heal into the tank. Um, you can see I'm just just spamming those Greater Heals into the tank because it's pretty much the only damage going out, and I'm also, uh, taking the opportunity to cast a couple Atonement spells while the boss is channeling. Yeah, that's that's Lich King. Again, this is like the Lich King. You're not going to be doing Lich King in Cataclysm, but all these like techniques are relevant, and I think it's much it's more helpful for you to be thinking about like general play style because then you you can adapt to your raid and your boss environment than me just telling you like this is exactly how you heal Chimaeron and this is exactly how you heal, you know, Sindragosa or whatever. Like not super helpful because it's not going to be relevant to every person in every situation. It's more helpful for you to like know the general strengths and weaknesses of different play styles and then adapt them to your own raid and your own tanks and your own healers. So yeah, that's the that's the play style section. Now I'm going to just talk a little bit about stats, um, consumes, and some gearing tips and stuff like that.
Uh, so your stats. Stats are actually a bit more complicated on healers, right, because, um, whereas a DPS you literally just put your stats into to a sim and you put your kill time into the sim and you just can see exactly what's the best thing every time as long as the sim is accurate. With a healer, like there's more factors to what is the correct type of gearing. It's kind of like a tank, and the way that a tank you kind of want to gear to the point where you're not dying, and then you want to gear for damage after that, right? Healer is similar where you you want to gear where you're doing the maximum amount of throughput where you go OOM exactly at the end of the fight and not before. So your your stats are sort of in two categories, right? There's like throughput stats and there's mana stats. The simplest mana stat is Spirit. Just gives you regen, right? It's like the pure mana stat that just gives you more mana, but people don't think about is that crit and and Mastery are also mana stats in the sense that they give you more healing per mana. If it costs a thousand mana to Prayer of Healing, you get more crit, it means you get more healing from that mana that you spend on Prayer of Healing, so your healing per mana goes up, which means you sort of have more like effective mana, right? Right. Um, and this is contrasted with haste. Haste, or Discipline Priest specifically, does not increase our actual healing per cast, right? It just increased the number of casts we can do in a given period of time. So haste actually makes us spend more mana, not less. There's a tension here where like haste is really good for throughput in almost every healer, um, and the reason why it doesn't give us healing where it does give other healers healing is that we don't really have HoTs, and the way that HoTs work in Cataclysm is like you can get extra ticks on them with more haste, and if you get an extra tick on like Renew for a Holy Priest then haste actually does increase your healing per cast, right? Because the Renew it's not like you're just getting more Renew out per second, you're also having those Renew tick an extra time, right, which is more healing. So haste is really, really good for the HoT healers, but for Disc specifically, like it's it's really just purely throughput, and it actually hurts our mana, right? Because we cast more spells per second. So what you have to be doing here is like if you're really just looking at pure throughput, you're going to be wanting to go like haste Mastery, um, but again you can balance these stats depending on your raid, your fight, your kill time to, you know, you could go crit Mastery, um, you could be casting more of the time and using less mana, right? Again, a lot of people think of healers as like, well, I want Spirit until I don't go OOM, and then I want my best stat, which is going to be like haste or Mastery. You can also balance your mana consumption by having more crit and Mastery than haste, and that will be like effective Spirit. You're going to want to be gearing for the hardest fight in the phase, right? So let's look at Lich King for example. So if you're progging at heroic Lich King, what do you care about the most as a priest? Well, you care about your Shields absorbing all of the infest, right? Which with no percentage buff you're really not going to get full absorption out of your Shields most of the time. You don't have to focus too hard on on spell power, and then you want to not go OOM if you mess up your rapture. So if you play perfectly on your raptures, you can go full spell power, crit, haste gear, um, but if you mess up a Rapture here and there, you are going to want to have like Spirit crit gear, right? The same thing goes for Cataclysm where you're going to be looking at the fights that are really hard for your guild and your raid specifically, and you're going to want to gear to not go OOM on those fights and to be able to do enough throughput on those fights. So like sort of the generic stat priority is going to be like haste and Mastery than crit, but again if you if you have like a crit Mastery piece and some Spirit crit pieces and you find you're going OOM, you can Chuck those on over haste crit pieces or or whatever, and maybe you won't go OOM. That's why I'm probably not going to put like an abyssal list out. I just don't think it's really that useful to think that way as a healer. Again, you're probably going to be low on gear priority anyways as a healer, so just pick up whatever you can, whatever scraps you can get from like the loot council of your guild or GDKP or whatever, and then just, you know, try to cobble together a set that will work for the hard fights for your guild.
Um, it's also useful to think about swapping your gear out a lot as a healer the same way that a tank would. So I would be having any extra pieces, just keep them in your bags. On the like before the fight, think about how long is this fight, what type of healing am I am I going to be doing on this fight, and what kind of stats do I want for that type of healing and that fight length, and then just look in your bag to see if you have like, oh, maybe I'll put more haste on if the fight's short, maybe the fight's long, I'll take off some haste for some other secondaries. You know, there there's all sorts of things you can think about here. These lists are actually like good to look at for DPS, if especially if you don't if you're not like a theory crafter, but for healers I think it's better to have your own brain working. For gems and enchants, everything's like pretty standard, right? A lot of the if the socket bonus is like 20 int, you're you're just going to want to gem to your colors, right? You're going to be either gemming you're going to be gemming int Spirit, or you're going to be gemming like int haste Mastery or crit. Again, I'd probably never gem int crit. I would always go either int haste or int Mastery. For consumes, it's just you get int on everything, right? The only thing to talk about here is like mana pots, and in Cataclysm we get the like concentration pot that makes you sit for 10 seconds and be like basically AFK for 10 seconds, but it gives you more mana, so you actually will have to think about am I not going OOM on this fight? Can I pot intellect? Do I need mana? Well, maybe I'll pot mana, but if you pop mana you have to think about am I potting the normal mana pot or am I potting the concentration pot where it like takes me out of the fight for 10 seconds? For enchants, the only real thing to think about here for enchantments is your weapon enchant. Um, there's one that gives like mana regen and there's one that gives intellect. I would usually just go for the intellect one. I mean, unless you have like two of the same weapon, you can put one like Haste on one and then you put the int on the other one. Like I just don't I I feel like the intellect product is is just always going to be better. For racials, uh, I think that Goblin is really, really good. Priest is highly immobile as a class. We don't have feathers yet. We don't have like any movement abilities except if you're Holy you can get like the shield sprint, but that's, you know, we're not going to be Holy because this is a Disc guide. Uh, so Goblin jump is like very, very strong in itself. The thing is you're probably going to have, uh, Nitro Boots specifically for that reason as well, but again Goblin Jump's really good. The 1% haste is really nice. It's just always active, so you don't have to think about actually min-maxing like an on-use racial, but I think Troll is going to be really, really nice. You can use your Troll racial like periods of high raid damage. You pop your Troll racial, you chuck out a bunch of Prayers of Healing with that haste, and then as the haste is about to fall off you press your hymn. So if you're like using your Troll racial really well, it it's really nice. We also don't have like haste caps because we don't again we're not like using HoTs where we have an extra tick haste cap, so it's not like as useful just to have that flat haste. For Alliance, who cares, you know, go Human for PvP or whatever. Yeah, I think like Goblin, Goblin and Troll are going to be like...
The two main main races you see as priest, if you ever are going to play like Shadow, I think troll is probably going to be better for that as well. Professions. So let's talk about professions. Um, there's a difference here where like the professions that are going to be really good for pre-raid are not going to be the best for, you know, late game.
So Alchemy is nice for pre-raiding because it gives you the trinket. The thing about the trinket is, if you get the one from archaeology and the one from Dark Moon card, you don't need it, so it doesn't provide any value other than just the 80 int. But if you're not going to do archaeology, you're not out there digging like I am or whatever, getting like hundreds and hundreds of solves, then you can go Alchemy and not be embarrassed to have like The Alchemist Stone plus Darkmoon card; it's still like a really nice trinket combination. So Alchemy for pre-raiding. Tailoring is really really good. The thing about tailoring is it's a proc; it's not a passive bonus. So some healers don't like having procs, but I think it's good; right, just a really high average amount of intellect.
Engineering. Engineering is nice because of just how raid healing works; like you're you're going to have periods of lower damage and periods of higher damage, and if you're just good at using your gloves in the right spot, they're very strong; you're bad at using them in the right spot, they become a little bit weaker. So it's a bit of a it's a bit of like a mid-maxy thing, but again, they're going to be really strong. Also, Nitro boots are really good; like people are sleeping on them because they have a failure rate, but they're still really really good. Any fight where you're going to have to move at all, Nitro boots are going to be very very useful. Also for pre-raiding, Eng gives you the helm, which is nice and has like the Cog wheel, so you can have it be any secondary stats. So like for pre- what I would do is I would be Eng Alchemy if you need the trinket; if you don't need the trinket, I would be Eng tailoring. If for some reason you don't want to have gloves and you don't want to have the proc, you can just go any secondaries; it doesn't really matter cuz they all give identical stats. Otherwise, for late game, once once you get epic gems, blacksmithing is the best profession for like everybody because you get 100 intellect instead of 80. So if you have any of the passive professions late game, you're going to want to swap to blacksmith, but other than that, pretty much everything's the same. Do not be gathering; based on use, it's bad for I mean it's like it's better than nothing, but it's not great. So that's professions; again, like pretty simple. I feel like everyone's just going to end up being engineering, um, and then for your second, you can either be Alchemy or tailoring. Also, if you're going to ever be playing Shadow, tailoring is going to be really nice for that. I think Eng is also going to be really nice for that.
Um, for gearing, uh, so for archaeology, two previous items we can get in the pre-patch; St in the trinket, we have one that we can get in um actual Cataclysm launch, which is the ring from Tolv. If you want to do this, which it's very very a lot of time investment to do this, what I would do is if you don't have a lot of time, just get to 450 and do like 10-20 solves on each one and just see what what rares you get, and then if you don't get the right ones, just quit. Um, but if you're really dedicated, you you can obviously get the staff and the trinket right now. The dwarf one's like crit haste, I think, and then the um Tolv one is like Spirit Mastery or something. You can use either staff; doesn't really matter which one you use, they're both good, and the ring is really nice as well, obviously. But again, if you don't have the time, don't worry too much about digging. Dark Moon card is also like a pretty high priority; it's not as high priority as for Caster DPS cuz it's not as strong as like volcano or whatever, but it's still like really good. That's gearing tips. I'm going to talk a tiny bit about just like UI and uh weak auras and such. If you don't heal with like Voodoo or mouseovers, having good raid frames is like a huge part of being good at healing, and just if you don't have a good setup that you're comfortable with, like fix it, and you'll just like instantly you'll be 100 times better at healing. That's a that's just a little mini spiel there.
Um, for your actual like weak auras, I would have a Rapture ICD tracker; I would have some way to track the cooldowns on your main rotational abilities; um, I would have some way to track your like bigger CDs like pain suppression, barrier, that sort of thing; I would have a way to track your Archangel stacks and the cool down of your Archangel. And other than that, it's like just personal preference. If you're in doubt about weak auras, you can just copy like the FUI pack or like any of the packs that are popular on on Wago, and you'll probably be fine. But I would encourage you to just like if you if you want to really be good at the game, try to have some understanding of how weak auras work, how to make them. So that's it; that's the guide. Uh, I probably will be coming out with more specific like boss for boss guides once the actual patch drops, so look out for that. Subscribe if you want, I guess. I probably who knows how many more videos I'll actually make. Yeah, thanks for watching and uh it's back to digging for me I guess. Have fun in Cataclysm. See you all in Hyjal.