Holy Priest Healing Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

Holy Priest is a fantastic reactive healer, especially suited for healing large groups and raids. With a response to almost all damage types, there is always a tool on hand to deal with the situation and keep you thinking while you play.

Raid healing as a Holy Priest revolves around the chosen talents and the two Holy Words, Holy Word: Sanctify and Holy Word: Serenity. Outside of these, the bulk of the healing comes from the Mana-efficient Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing, alongside the variety of "filler" spells used to reduce the cooldown of our burst-healing Holy Words. Talenting into Holy Word: Salvation gives Holy Priest a second raid cooldown, which can be invaluable to your healing team.

To properly play a healing role, you will need more than just class-specific information. To better understand healing in general, we recommend that you read our healing guide.

Strengths

• Excels at reactive raid healing healing.
• Unique cooldown-based healing style providing regular bursts of healing.
• Powerful raid cooldowns.
• Good single target and AoE damage potential, but only when healing is not required.

Weaknesses

• Many abilities to track.
• Low single target sustained throughput.
• Mediocre group healing in situations that force a large spread.
• Poor damage compared to most other healers.
• No interrupt.

The War Within introduces a few minor changes to Holy Priest, primarily increasing the healing done by our single-target spells.

• Flash Heal healing increased.
• Heal healing increased.
• Holy Word: Serenity healing increased.
• Power Word: Life healing increased.
• Power Word: Shield absorption increased.
• Divine Image's Healing Light healing increased.
• Several new talents were added replacing Mindgames; Cauterizing Shadows, Manipulation and Phantom Reach.
• Multiple paths were added and removed within both talent trees to increase potential build options.

The two Hero Talents added for Holy Priest are Archon and Oracle. Archon is focused on interactions between Halo, Surge of Light, and providing small buffs to the healing around Apotheosis and Holy Word: Salvation. Oracle introduces a new ability, Premonition, which grants beneficial buffs to enhance your regular playstyle.

Patch 11.0.5 brings no significant changes to Holy Priest that alter gameplay, gearing or talent choices.

While levelling a Priest, you will often want to heal your allies through dungeons and other group content. Our levelling guide has you covered for the basics, as well as some tips and tricks to help when healing.

Hitting max level and then trying to dive straight into end-game content as a healer can be quite daunting. To ease this transition, you should try to implement relevant macros and addons as you are levelling. While not all are necessary throughout the levelling process, getting started in modifying your UI and how it impacts your performance as a healer early on will make it much easier to dive head-on into the end-game content when you reach max level.

Holy Priest is classed as a reactive healer, meaning you will primarily be reacting to damage your allies take and then cast the appropriate spells from your toolkit to respond to that damage. While this healing style does make Holy Priest one of the easier healers to pick up, getting your head around the number of healing spells available can take some time.

To learn about the fundamentals and make sure you are doing the basics right, familiarize yourself with the Spell Summary page, then move on to the Easy Mode page.

If you have experience playing Holy Priest, you can dive into a bit more depth by learning about the current talents, builds, and rotation. The rotation page, in particular, provides a lot of value in helping you properly decide when to use each of the spells and ensure you get the maximum return from your Mana spent.

Gearing as a Holy Priest is quite straight forward, particularly for Raiding. Due to Holy Priest not heavily favouring one secondary stat over another, for most gear slots, you will be prioritizing item level. This advice can be further complicated by gear with special bonuses like trinkets or tertiary stats like Leech and gear containing sockets.

To help you wade through it all, the stats page discusses what and why you should prioritize while gearing, and there is a best-in-slot list for the current raid tier to use as a foundation for gearing.

Once you obtain new gear, be sure to squeeze out that extra bit of performance by improving your gear with gems and enchants. You should also look to be buffing your character with the appropriate consumables.

How you gear, play, and support your allies depends heavily on the type of content you are participating in. Whether it be large groups in a raid, smaller dungeon groups or PvP skirmishes, understanding the best way to prepare, and then apply each of your abilities to specific situations is crucial to becoming a solid Holy Priest healer.

A huge part of being a successful Holy Priest in any content is the ability to analyze your shortcomings and adapt. Most of the common mistakes for Holy Priests are around incorrect spell selection, resulting in poor Mana usage and low HPS. While the Rotation advice is quite clear on how to perform optimally, actually putting it into practice can be challenging. We have compiled a list of common mistakes, frequently asked questions, and some useful tools to assist you in improving.