Discipline Priest PvP Guide for TBC Classic

Strengths

• Has both offensive and defensive dispels.
• Pain Suppression can counter high burst.
• Can easily punish poor positioning with Mana Burn or Psychic Scream.

Weaknesses

• Has no personal defensive cooldowns.
• Utility spells have high Mana costs, hurting Mana sustain.
• Has very limited crowd control.

Discipline Priest brings a few desirable things to almost any PvP situation. Pain Suppression is a great life-saving ability, often times changing the course of a fight. Both the defensive and offensive sides of Dispel Magic have great uses, making the spell one of your most-used abilities in PvP.

This is the main talent build for PvP Discipline Priests, grabbing many core abilities and talents. The talent choices focus on increasing your ability to Dispel as much as possible with Absolution and Mental Agility reducing the Mana cost of Dispel Magic.

In PvP there is no real set healing rotation you should be focusing on. The usage of your abilities depends on many factors but the most important thing as a Discipline Priest is to maintain your positioning away from the enemies while still being able to act both offensively and defensively whenever needed.

Power Word: Shield — Use this often to put a high absorb on a friendly target. The absorb is not effected by healing reduction, so you will always get a full absorb, even if the target has a Mortal Strike debuff reducing their healing received.

Flash Heal — This is one of your main healing spells. Use this to throw a quick heal out to someone between your Dispel Magics, or if someone is low health.

Greater Heal — You will want to use this when you can safely get the whole cast off without risking getting interrupted, or your target dying before the cast finishes.

Binding Heal — This is useful to give yourself and a friendly target a moderate heal.

Renew — This is a very strong healing-over-time spell. Try to keep this up as much as possible, especially when you want to act more offensively or focus on other aspects of the match.

Prayer of Mending — Similar to renew, you will want to use this often. This however, requires additional friendly targets to be near the initial target to let this spell bounce to them. This spell is insanely strong when you are standing with an ally and both of you have DoT debuffs on you.

Priests have a decent number of utility spells; taking full advantage of your utility is what really separates a good Priest from a great one. When used correctly, Priest has a response to almost every situation.

Dispel Magic is one of your most-used abilities. Use it both offensively and defensively to dispel almost all magical buffs and debuffs you can.

Mass Dispel is an AoE version of Dispel Magic, affecting 10 enemies and 10 friendly targets at once. It can also be used to remove immunity spells, such as Divine Shield and Ice Block.

Psychic Scream is your peel and crowd control. Use this on anyone out of position, or if you need a few seconds of breathing room.

Shadowfiend — Use this to restore your Mana quickly.

Mana Burn — If the an enemy Mana user has poor positioning and gets caught out in the open, start to burn their Mana, quickly running them out.

Pain Suppression — Use this when someone is being focused down hard with cooldowns to prevent them from dying.

Power Infusion — You will mostly want to use this when either spamming Dispel Magic at the start of a match, or when you can get multiple Mana Burns off on an enemy Mana user.

Shadow Word: Death — Use this to push some damage out when your group is going for a kill. When timed properly, the backlash damage can be used to break crowd control such as Polymorph or Blind.

As a Discipline Priest your largest focus stats-wise will be Resilience, Stamina, Bonus Healing, and Spirit. Resilience and Stamina offer some much-needed survivability, especially in lesser-geared situations. Bonus Healing offers a nice increase to our healing output, while stats like Intellect and Spirit increase our Mana regeneration and available Mana pool, allowing us to cast for a longer period of time.

Resilience is the largest source of damage mitigation you can get from stats. Resilience is a flat damage reduction from crits and DoT sources and getting as much of this as possible especially early on can help you in most PvP situations.

You will want to reach 3% hit rating to increase the odds that you land your spells such as Mana Burn or Psychic Scream.

Bonus Healing gives you one of the largest increases to your healing output, directly increasing the amount healed by each spell.

Stamina increases your health pool and especially early on there are times where the raw health added by certain pieces can make a major difference in your survivability.

These stats aim to increase your Mana regeneration. You will need some of these stats to sustain your Mana, or you will simply run out of Mana and have no way of continuing the fight.

Intellect increases your Mana pool, helping you sustain your healing output for a longer period of time before needing to drink.

The list linked below includes the best possible gear setup for a Discipline Priest in PvP.

When it comes to evaluating Discipline Priest's place within the Arena, we have created a number of guides devoted to listing a variety of popular team compositions which you can find below.