Season of Discovery Discipline Priest Healer Talents and Runes

Your talent build as an Discipline Priest is fairly set in stone. The build highlighted above is generally what that will give you the most healing and sustain. At level 60 the addition of the incredibly powerful cooldown Power Infusion makes most of your talent points required in the Discipline tree. The extra points will focus on going into the Holy tree to maximize our Critical Strike chance and lessen the chance at healing spell push back in the Holy tree.

• Gloves — Penance
• Pants — Prayer of Mending
• Chest — Strength of Soul
• Waist — Empowered Renew
• Feet — Pain Suppression
• Helm — Divine Aegis
• Wrist — Surge of Light
• Back — Soul Warding
• Ring — Healing Specialization
• Ring — Meditation Specialization

Penance and Circle of Healing are both great choices and depend entirely on the situation you find yourself in. Penance is an incredibly strong single target heal that you have to channel. Ideally you want to cast this when you know you will be able to channel it completely or it loses a considerable amount of its value. Circle of Healing is another great choice as it instantly heals members of your party. While it does heal more per cast than Penance, that healing is split among five targets. The Mana cost of Circle of Healing can at times be difficult to manage, but thanks to talents such as Mental Strength, Mental Agility and Meditation you will have an easier time managing your Mana.

Prayer of Mending is one of, if not the, single strongest healing abilities in your arsenal as a Priest. It synergizes incredibly with Discipline talents like Mental Agility that make it an even more efficient choice. If you find yourself in a situation where the healing is not needed, then consider taking Homunculi. This summons three minions that will deal damage and apply debuffs to the target reducing the targets Attack Power, Attack Speed and Armor.

While both Strength of Soul and Serendipity are great choices, Strength of Soul is a bit stronger as Discipline due to the strengths of talents such as Improved Power Word: Shield. Both serve similar purposes, but in a situation where you are casting Power Word: Shield often, the reduced time on Weakened Soul can be impactful especially when tank healing.

Empowered Renew is the default, as Renewed Hope synergizes rather poorly with Strength of Soul. Strength of Soul actively works towards removing the duration of Weakened Soul whereas Renewed Hope benefits from it being active on a target. Empowered Renew also allows you to use Renew as an emergency heal, as it now heals instantly as well as allowing it to be stacked with Renew from other Priests.

Pain Suppression is an incredibly powerful cooldown that can be used to mitigate a ton of incoming damage, this will be your default choice as it is often a used as a tank cooldown. In a situation where a fight is longer and there are no real spikes of damage you can consider using Dispersion for the Mana return. Be ready to cancel this effect when needed; you are not able to cast spells while Dispersed.

Divine Aegis causes 30% of your critical healing to be converted to a shield on the target. This makes your healing spells even more potent and increases the value of Intellect and Critical Strike rating. While Divine Aegis is the default healing increase in this slot, consider Eye of the Void if your group is without another Priest to cast it. The curses can greatly reduce the enemies outgoing damage and increase their vulnerability to various damage types.

Surge of Light causes your next Smite/ Flash Heal to be instant, allowing you to quickly react to damage or even deal a bit of damage yourself without losing out on any cast time. This synergizes incredibly with group healing abilities and Penance as they offer multiple chances to crit per cast.

Soul Warding is an incredibly powerful talent and a massive increase to our HPS allowing us to cast as many Power Word: Shields as Mana allows and causing them to scale even better with any bonus healing we we have from gear. It is important to note that this will quickly chew through your mana so make sure to have consumes ready to replenish your mana.

Meditation Specialization and Healing Specialization both just act as passive increases as a Healing Priest by giving you more bonus healing and allowing you to regenerate more mana during combat.

More engravings are likely to come out as we head into later phases so make sure to checkout our general Runes guide to get a better understanding of what all tools you have available to your Priest.

Inner Focus makes your next spell cast free and increases its critical strike chance by 25% when activated. As a Healer the ability to crit on demand can be the difference between someone living and dying as well as having an essentially free heal helps with mana.

Meditation allows 5% of your Mana Regeneration to occur while casting per rank, maxing out at 15%. The ability to regenerate mana while casting is huge in Classic WoW and while tools like the Shadowfiend have been added to help with mana there is never a situation where you have too much.

Mental Strength increases your maximum Mana by 2%, maxing out at 10%. As mentioned above, the more Mana the better as it allows you to cast less efficient healing abilities in emergency situations or even deal damage with excess mana with abilities such as Shadow Word: Pain. This also synergizes incredibly with Shadowfiend that returns mana at a percentage based on your total mana.

Power Infusion is one of the most powerful cooldowns in all of Classic WoW; it increases the Spell Damage and Healing done by 20% for 15 seconds on the target. This, paired with many other class buffs, provides for an absolutely insane damage increase.

Improved Power Word: Shield with the addition of Runes like Soul Warding this talent is made even more important. While traditionally Priest healer only used Power Word: Shield to save someone from dying, in Season of Discovery there is much more opportunity to use it to preempt and avoid incoming damage all together due to many more tools added to regenerate mana.