Things you wish you knew before rolling Priest

[Primalthirst]

Hey all, I'm considering rolling Priest for my return to WoW.
One of my mates has been very convincing so I thought I'd give it another go, I last played Ele Sham in ICC back in WotLK and was thoroughly terrible at it as it was my first MMO experience.

Currently I play I main spec as a Chloromancer (Healing Mage) in a World Top 10 Rift guild (If that means anything to anyone/I know, Rift competition isn't that amazing) and I'm looking to moonlight in WoW and just build up my experience as a healer in general since I've always played DPS primarily. Also raiding is fun and who doesn't like learning new encounters?

Is there anything you found out after playing your Priest that you wish you'd known earlier/would you have chosen a different class instead?
My mate plays Holy Pally and I'm pretty confident I can force my way in and replace the other MS healer in his guild in the starting lineup (it's 10m) and my initial thought was to go Holy Priest, am I wrong in that? I was also considering Resto Druid as a backup option, possibly Mistweaver if desperate, but Monk is so FOTM.

I go nuts for theorycrafting so I've already read every relevant article on Noxxic, HowtoPriest and Icy-Veins.
Any extra thoughts/tips/hints would be appreciated.

[nevermore]

Holy Priests have the largest healing toolbox out of all the healers and have the 'right' answer to every situation. Get Disc as your dual spec and you can cheese certain boss encounters.

Don't ever play a Resto Druid, they're only for hardcore masochists.

I can't really come up with anything that I dislike about Priests. Mana management is really tight, but that's where skill comes in I guess.

[Valium104]

I knew it before I rolled this class, but group restriction on PoH feels dated.

[Primalthirst]

I knew it before I rolled this class, but group restriction on PoH feels dated.

Yeah group restrictions seems very 2004 to me as well

[emni]

I don't think Prayer of Healing being restricted to groups is too bad. It's only bad if you have a raid leader that doesn't listen to how you want the groups set up (or doesn't give you the power to set them up yourself).

I really love priests, I think there are only some minor inconveniences to mention.

I mostly noticed that priests take longer to gear up than any other healer I've played. As a healing priest, you share loot with all the mages, shadow priests and warlocks (potentially 7 specs!), and these classes are plentiful. Resto druids and mistweaver monks only compete for leather with balance druids and each other, and resto shamans only share spellpower mail with elemental shamans. Holy paladins have no loot competition for spellpower plate whatsoever.

As for playstyle, as a discipline priest I have to say that Weakened Soul is an incredibly annoying mechanic. My own weakened souls are fine, but when the shadow priest shields himself with a crap shield that absorbs almost nothing while taking a crap ton of damage... ugh. It's really annoying to not be able to cover them with a much stronger shield. Instead, I need to spot heal which is nowhere near as efficient or effective. I wish Weakened Soul only worked with shields of the person who cast them.

[Deleted]

Eh, it'd be too easy if poH was a smart heal. I kinda like the feel of it as it is atm.

Besides, changing PoH would ruin Spirit Shell as it is now for disc.

[Danner]

First of all, despite what will be said by me and probably others - the priest is a great class!
Once you go priest, you do not go back. For me, my priest has been a bumpy love story for the last 6 years - soon 7 - but it has never been boring.

For me, the act of casting a Cascade + Prayer of Healing + Circle of Healing combo - and seeing 25 targets being healed up in a zerg swarm of green numbers... that's pure bliss. No other class comes even close to that.

--

But you want to know what truly annoys me with the class, and here it is. This will be PVE healing-centric, but not exclusively so.

- You have an option of two different healing styles. Due to one of the two specs generally being woefully inadequate on at least one boss every tier, you generally have to master, collect gear, and spec for both. This eats up both your spec slots barring you from doing anything else, and forces you to play the spec which you don't enjoy the most, and also bars you from easily going shadow should you decide to drop a healer. I think that is what annoys me the most with the entire class.

- Priests are always over-balanced due to a primal fear of making us too powerful. Over the course of a new expansion, every priest spec will triple its performance due to buffs and hotfixes as a result. That makes every new expansion an exercise in pain. It usually settles down in the x.1 patch, which is right around the corner.

- In fact, priests are the archetype healers, so we always have to be held down to avoid us outshining other healing specs. The devs even admitted to this being the case for prot warriors and holy priests back in the TBC days (before disc was a real spec). Not sure how official that policy is anymore, but you usually find at least holypriests at the bottom of the healing barrel. Disc fluctuates wildly between massively OP and useless. There is an upside to this though; given the tight scrutiny of the power balance of the class, it is rare that at least one spec isn't at least fully capable of doing all content. For example Restoshammies aren't always that lucky!

- Priest healing design is based around the idea that it is brilliant fun to heal on mana vapors and fumes. Expect to be OOM. Expect to be told that this is intentional, and that you are supposed to think this is awesome. Expect to grow bitter over this. I don't mind a mana challenge, and I do think infinite mana is boring. I do mind that mana challenge happening on every single fight until you overgear content, and I do mind running OOM while spamming my cheapest weak-noodle heal. This issue is genrally horrible until hotfixing comes along in every expansion.

- Chakra sucks donkey, but is sold as the biggest reason to play a holypriest. Hint: it's not. Priest devs can be SO stubborn at times; It took them 6 years to make lightwell not craptastic, and that means we're stuck with chakra for another 3 years as well.

- Disc playstyle has way too much "cooldown accounting". At any time there are six or seven cooldowns ticking, and you are SCREWED if you miss one of them. It takes a special kind of OCD to enjoy it.

- A large amount of priest glyphs are designed for Disc PVP only (Holy PVP is mostly still a joke, but hey, so is Disc PVP now), or are blatant obvious trap glyphs that offer nothing compared to a better glyph or even lower your performance. Priest glyphs really need a do-over.

- Mind Control as a talent...? Seriously? On paper the spell sounds awesome, but in reality you will find that all you achieve is pull yourself out of the commision while casting it. It really is the worst talent ever.

- The class is VERY divided on shadow. Virtually all talents and even some spells are "You get X... unless you are shadow, in which case you get Y". It doesn't feel like one class as a result, but rather two classes merged together. Even the forum threads are strictly divided on "shadow only" or "healing only". I can name you 20 healing priests posting on this forum off the top of my head. I can probably only name you 2-3 shadowpriests, because I just don't read those threads much. Quite a few of us are playing both, but we don't specialize much outside of our preferred role.

- You really need that shadow spec to quest efficiently. In fact, for the first 60 levels, you're probably better off healing dungeons as shadow as well. A spriest can easily heal anything up to that point, and offers far superior firepower to boot, making runs go that much faster. So what's the point of playing a healer outside of late game dungeons and raids? If you know the answer, a lot of us want to know

- If you don't like healing, and roll a priest, there is always a constant social pressure to make you heal.

- Priests may be squishy, but Fade more than makes up for it in PVE. In PVP, not so much. Love Fade, avoid PVP

- Beware of rogues, dks, warriors, hunters, paladins, some monks, sporebats, furious critters and small gusts of wind. They all murder you brutally.

[Primalthirst]

@Danner
Playing either Disc or Holy or Offspeccing Shadow doesn't bother me at all, in fact I see that as a plus. Don't know how I'll go being constrained to just 2 specs though, a third would make me much happier
The spec flexibility is one of the main reasons I play Rift to begin with since there I have ~6 specs I use regularly in raid encounters and have that many spec slots available to me.

[Rivellana]

A few things:
Having played Rift myself for 7 months when it launched, mostly on a hybrid cleric but also having a chloromancer I know the class/spec you're familiar with and if you're looking for something similar for WoW you'd probably want to choose disc priest or mistweaver monk.

My personal experience is that I have played all healing classes/specs in WoW at 85 in raiding (at least LFR on alts), disc priest was my main in Cata and my current main in MoP is a mistweaver monk. I rerolled to monk when I came back a couple weeks after MoP launched because I wanted to try it and at that point disc priests were beyond awful.

Disc has been buffed in the past few weeks and I'm getting my priest to 90 right now so I can make it my first alt. I always played disc as a pure healing class and never used atonement to do damage so I can't really comment on that however I can say I love the mistweaver monk and how much of the raid healing I do is based on me doing damage. I don't think you should be so quick to dismiss it, especially calling it FOTM because I would have to say you're wrong and it's not.

Monks were nowhere near as overpowered as DKs were when they were launched (and still are) and therefore from what I can tell there aren't that many at 90 right now. If you combine the fact that a lot of people just aren't interested in playing it because it's not overpowered and that many people haven't leveled alts yet and are still working on their mains, there's not a ton of monks out there yet.

I'm not completely versed on what they've done in changes to disc priests yet, however I'm willing to bet that if you were to compare a disc priest with a mistweaver monk you would find that the monk has an insane amount of pure aoe hps output/very little that counts as a utility cooldown/horrible tank healing versus the disc priest whose hps output is almost as good as a monk now but can still decently tank heal and actually has utility.

[Danner]

The problem with playing a priest healer is that you really need both those specs locked down to healing. You can get away from it, but you will at most any given point in time, be gimping yourself if you do. The state of raiding right now is actually one of those rare exceptions to that rule.

But: that means no shadowspec, meaning you cannot effectively do quests. You'll be losing out on a lot of the game that way. Sure you can do quests as a healer spec, but it takes 3x as long, and when there is roughly 3-4 hrs worth of dailies to do for any toon per day, dailies you NEED to do to gear up properly, that's just not an option unless you are willing to move to Azeroth. You could respecc one of your two specs every day, but I don't particularly enjoy setting up my action bars every day.

Also: that means no pvp spec. Sure, the difference between PVP and PVE isnt' that large anymore now that talents are simpler, but it's still a PITA to change glyphs and talents around.

So, you could spec up one healing spec, and one spec for the other thing you like to do in life. Which works right up until you hit that boss where your chosen healing spec is garbage. You're still better off than the other healing-enabled classes where you're basically completely screwed when that happens. But it will happen.

--

Well, maybe I am just being pessimistic. It hasn't actually happened yet in MoP. Maybe they learned something. But it happened quite a lot in Cata and WoTLK.

[emni]

@Danner:

I quest as disc pretty often (ilvl386) and it works just fine. I used to have a shadow spec, but I went away from it and I really don't kill mobs that much slower as disc. What you lose in killing speed you gain in downtime. I'm only missing Klaxxi to exalted now, disc DPS ftw! x)

And PvPing also works just fine. In today's environment you will often change talents and glyphs for individual boss fights anyway, it's really not that big of a deal.

[Deleted]

You could respecc one of your two specs every day, but I don't particularly enjoy setting up my action bars every day.

You can use Action Bar Saver addon. Takes one line to change spells on actionbars.

[nevermore]

To be honest initially I was very afraid of dropping my Shadow spec to be Holy-Disc dual specced (again) simply because of all the daily quests.
However, killing stuff as Disc is surprisingly effective, in fact I only need a couple more seconds on each mob compared to Shadow. I actually kill stuff faster as Disc than I do as a Balance Druid in healing gear (similar ilvl), not even kidding.

Soloing old raids is a whole different issue, but as far as daily quests go I think Disc has a decent burst to make it smooth.

[Fenixdown]

I wish I had known how much more fun healing was over playing a hunter. I would have never had to reroll to Fenix, that would have just been my main from the start.

[HPLathus]

Holy Priests have the largest healing toolbox out of all the healers and have the 'right' answer to every situation. Get Disc as your dual spec and you can cheese certain boss encounters.

Don't ever play a Resto Druid, they're only for hardcore masochists.

I can't really come up with anything that I dislike about Priests. Mana management is really tight, but that's where skill comes in I guess.

I can't agree with you more about the toolbox.

The changes made to holy priests (Priests in general) have been fantastic in MoP, its the reason I came back after a long break at the end of cata.

We used to be 1 trick ponies(Via PoH)

Now we have, cascade, halo, divine star(lol), divine insight, spirit shell, ect ect the list goes on... Some of my favorite changes are:

The 90 talents(YAY NEW AOE HEALING SPELLS WUT)
Divine Insight(Phenomenal holy priest ability)
Surge of light(As disc with atonment, omg a GODSEND)
Lightspring(TOok them long enough, but a much needed glyph)
Power Word: SOlace(A new way of regening mana for when your thumb is up your butt for add phases and damage is low)


Honestly, I could go on for days, but we have such an arsenal of tools right now, and on top of all these tools we have TWO very powerful healing specs.


Regardless of what people are saying about disc right now being a little weak, they are wrong. If you play it right, it's potent beyond reason.

[Deleted]

I wish I knew the priest is the least visually impressive class of all. Almost none of his spells have any cool looking projectile effects, summons look like crap, and if you spec shadow, you will spend most of your activity looking like dark silhouette.

[emni]

I wish I knew the priest is the least visually impressive class of all. Almost none of his spells have any cool looking projectile effects, summons look like crap, and if you spec shadow, you will spend most of your activity looking like dark silhouette.

I couldn't disagree with this more!

Halo is hands down the coolest spell effect in the game right now! Cascade is close second, I love casting it just to see it bounce from person to person. Divine Aegis has always been a beautiful spell effect, and then you have archangel and Devouring Plague glyph giving you a set of cool-looking wings. I personally also really like the spell effect of shadow orbs, but ravens are quite cool as well. I really adore my little shadow octopussy and as shadow specc you can make your pets get your shadow form as well! And if you don't like the shadow form you can always glyph it and just have purple smoke at your feet. :P Then there is the awesomely cool psyfiend and angelic feathers.

Seriously, priest spells are pretty.

[Dorfie]

I wish I knew the priest is the least visually impressive class of all. Almost none of his spells have any cool looking projectile effects, summons look like crap, and if you spec shadow, you will spend most of your activity looking like dark silhouette.

My summon looks awesome, get the Sha-Touched mace.

[Kirse]

I wish I had known that...
-Disc dps would become mandatory to be competitive. Ignoring a 25% buff is not acceptable in a raid, and I don't enjoy playing sub-optimally in any class. If AA was a toggle I would still use it for lower level content and dungeons, but I strongly prefer the flow of raid heals without it.
-Disc PVP would be ruined. I loved cata PVP
-I would not like Shadow even though I loved being a Warlock.
-Priest visuals are not impressive (do love little sha, halo, and cascade though)

---------- Post added 2012-11-23 at 09:28 PM ----------

I wish I had known how much more fun healing was over playing a hunter. I would have never had to reroll to Fenix, that would have just been my main from the start.

With all my qq being said and done, I tried a Warlock, Mage, Druid, and Hunter before my Priest. Healing is sooooo much more fun that I still love my Priest the most, in spite of her flaws

[Wekapedia]

I wish I knew the priest is the least visually impressive class of all. Almost none of his spells have any cool looking projectile effects, summons look like crap, and if you spec shadow, you will spend most of your activity looking like dark silhouette.

You are mad, Jim! If anything, Priest is the visually most impressive when it comes to heals. Aegis, PoM, Penance, Archangel. Not to mention the three new ultimate talents which look jawdropping. I agree that shadow visuals lack though. Even the previous Mind Flay effect in BC looked cooler than what we have now.