Priest challenge mode preparation

[Mrisacc]

Hi, I'm currently leveling my priest and I'm just about to hit 90. I'm curious to know what type of gearing I need to go for to achieve golds in challenge modes. Is mastery still the end all be all stat that I should stack for them? Could crit be better just for challenge modes? I've completed all 9 challenge modes on my mage so I have an understanding of how challenge modes work. I should be able to gear myself just from heroics to get a semi-optimal gear set for them. Any advice would be very appreciated, especially advice from priests that have completed the challenges.

[royals]

I've been doing some Cmodes on my disc priest. To help the team out I actually reforged out of Spirit and into Mastery then Haste. This is personal preference, but I don't need the mana and can get off more smites/hfires/penance's quicker helping dps quite a bit. We have gotten a few golds already and I have yet to run into a place where I am having mana issues. Make sure and pick yourself up a big pile of the ambers from the Klaxxi for quick drinking out of combat.

Good Luck!

[Harmonium]

I recommend to focus on haste & crit over mastery, as Atonement benefits the most from these two stats. The faster your holy damaging spells come out and the more likely they are to crit, the less you have to rely on your direct heal spells. This results in a net dps increase that is not to be neglected.

The tricky part (if there's one) is finding out just what amount of spirit you can get away with (because Atonement doesn't always suffice and less efficient heals have to be thrown in also). Considering you can drink fairly often in challenges, this amount will necessarily be lower than what is expected in raids (10k+). You can probably aim for ~6k spirit and reforge out of it gradually if you notice mana is not an issue.

[Deleted]

have done all the CM golds as both shadow and disc.
I just ran with my normal raiding gear and didn't change anything. Int flask + int food. think I had about 8k spirit in the CM and fully stacked mastery.

No idea if that's ideal (if you're wanting to push for world rankings) but it's easily good enough to just get them all on gold.

[Harmonium]

Well, spirit + mastery gear is viable for challenge modes but it's not optimal imo (even if your goal is only gold ratings). Too much spirit is less throughput stats and mastery isn't as good as the other stats if you can afford to do a lot of Atonement (and you should be able to).

[Deleted]

Well, spirit + mastery gear is viable for challenge modes but it's not optimal imo (even if your goal is only gold ratings). Too much spirit is less throughput stats and mastery isn't as good as the other stats if you can afford to do a lot of Atonement (and you should be able to).

I was just about to post that the disc priest who has 8/9 world best ranks gears for mastery + spirit and then I saw your signature lol.

Do you mind explaining why you gear for it, im leveling a priest atm to "compete" with you. Im not sure if the group will be top 3 material but we should be able to get top 10 in all of them (we are all playing alts).

[Deleted]

If you're planing to dedicate this char to challenge modes, then crit would be better than mastery, and haste giving the most benefit, but being a huge burden on mana. Regarding spirit, you really need just enough to get you through boss fights, everything else can be solved by drinking after pulls. But as people pointed out, you can just run it in 25 man raid gear setup and still be doing just fine.

[Harmonium]

Posted by Pacer
I was just about to post that the disc priest who has 8/9 world best ranks gears for mastery + spirit and then I saw your signature lol.

Do you mind explaining why you gear for it, im leveling a priest atm to "compete" with you. Im not sure if the group will be top 3 material but we should be able to get top 10 in all of them (we are all playing alts).

The gear my armory shows is an altered version of the gear I started running challenges with. I used to gear for pure spirit + mastery and I did complete 9/9 gold with that.

As we started working on our times, it became obvious that in order to pull my weight I had to achieve 2 things: keep the group alive through bigger pulls and deal as much damage as possible — and both at the same time. Now, a spirit + mastery set is good enough to achieve the former but it also leads to low dps and wasted potential.

For this reason I gathered items to build a 2nd set of gear that would be more atonement-oriented (now transmoged as my blue Tier 6), with the goal of using it on easy pulls. I didn't bother too much with the theorycrafting beyond prioritizing intellect, crit & haste ratings. The set also used to provide around 5k spirit (against 10k+ for my other set), which I deemed appropriate at the time for the atonement-to-direct-healing ratio I expected to reach.

The interesting part is I realized over time that my new set was not only more effective at dealing damage (this was the goal) but it was also balanced enough to heal through the tougher pulls. With that observation in mind, I started wearing this new set through entire dungeons (with a few exceptions) and managing my mana better than before. As you may suspect, I found that 5k spirit was still too much and I lowered the amount again and again, to the point where I consistently run below 2k spirit now.

The net effect is I'm able to average 40-50k dps on boss encounters and at least 35k throughout whole dungeons.