Classic Priest Healer Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities

If you have not already, please read the spells summary page. Knowing how each spell and ability works in detail will greatly increase your understanding of the topics discussed on this page.

As a healer, you do not have a set in stone rotation; rather, you have to properly use each spell to your disposal depending on what the situation demands of you. Especially in WoW Classic, your role as a healer is not just to maximize your healing throughput and to focus on being first on the healing meters. It is possible, or even likely, that you will be assigned a certain aspect to primarily focus on as a healer, if you are in a raid. Luckily, you are very versatile to fill in whatever role your raid needs you to do as a Healer Priest, as you have powerful tools to deal with both single-target oriented healing, or group-oriented healing.

This is how you would generally want to use your relevant healing spells in a PvE setting, assuming you are specced according to our Talents page:

• Use Greater Heal whenever you know that a large amount of damage is incoming. Try and time for the cast to finish just as the damage happens to minimize possible overhealing. Use Rank 2 of Greater Heal for average bursty damage and Rank 3 of Greater Heal for very bursty damage.
• Use Flash Heal if you really need to heal targets as soon as possible - Flash Heal is primarily used a spot healing tool, as it is a pretty Mana inefficient spell if you use it too much. Whenever you use it, you will probably want to use Rank 7 of Flash Heal most of the time, but use lower ranks if Rank 7 is not strictly needed. Rank 4 of Flash Heal is probably the lowest rank you want to be using.
• Heal is used for parts of a fight where there is not a large amount of damage going out, so you can conserve Mana for when large damage periods actually occur. Rank 3 of Heal is the most consistent rank to use for this purpose as it is very Mana efficient.
• Renew is mostly used when you are on the move; its usage in a raid environment is very limited. It is not bad for dungeons, though. You do not want to downrank this spell.
• Power Word: Shield is not particularly efficient, but is useful for mitigating predictable damage. Only use the highest rank.
• Prayer of Healing can be tricky to use because it costs a lot of Mana, and so it can not be used very liberally. It is very efficient as an AoE healing tool, though, so you want to use different ranks of this spell depending on the damage that has gone out.

Depending on the talents that you take, you can have access to up to 2 cooldowns as a Healer Priest: Power Infusion and Inner Focus. Inner Focus is always assumed to be taken, but Power Infusion (especially in the early stages of WoW Classic) is a bit more niche.

Power Infusion should be treated as a DPS cooldown first and foremost. It also increases healing by 20%, but the damage aspect is much more valuable to take advantage of, because you can also cast it on other players. This makes it powerful to use on, for example, a Mage, because they can stack their own cooldowns with Power Infusion. Try and coordinate your usage of Power Infusion with whomever you think is best to receive it, in order to get the most out of it.

Inner Focus making your next spell completely free, meaning it is best to use whenever you want to use a max rank healing spell - the fact that its chance to critically strike also gets significantly increased makes Inner Focus efficient both in terms of Mana conservation, as well as raw throughput. It is usually best to use this in conjunction with a max rank Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing, depending on whether you need to do AoE healing or single-target healing.

Downranking refers to using lower ranks of a spell, usually as a means to conserve Mana. Even though you do not cast a tremendous amount of unique spells during a fight, you will have to use different ranks of these spells. If you do not, you will simply run out of Mana very quickly. Knowing when to use what spell rank for what situation will come with experience and is a crucial part of learning to optimize your skills as a healer.

Healing Power increases the healing of your spells by an amount depending on the coefficient of the spell. This is usually indicated on gear in the following way: "Increases healing done by spells and effects by up to X"

To better understand how spell coefficients and Healing Power interact with one another, read the Healing Power section of the Stats page.

So why is Healing Power so important? It makes downranking a whole lot more efficient to do: the more increases to Healing Power you have on your gear, the more healing your lower rank spells will do. This allows you to use these lower rank spells without being as penalized by the fact that they will do less healing, whilst benefiting optimally from the fact that these lower rank spells cost less Mana to cast.

Whenever Mana is spent for any reason at all, your Mana regeneration gets halted for 5 seconds. During these 5 seconds, any regeneration based on Spirit does not happen, unless you have certain talents to partially counteract this. As a Priest, you can spec into Meditation, as an example of this. Another exception includes the amount of Mana regeneration per 5 seconds you have; this is a specific stat that you can get from your gear. Note that the rule of needing to have Mana spent means that you can safely cancel casts before they finish, as that will not incur the 5-second rule.