Priest Guide

Discipline Priest is one of two healing specializations that the Priest class has access to. Discipline Priests rely on dealing damage to enemies to heal their allies via Atonement. The core gameplay of Discipline Priest revolves around casting abilities like Power Word: Radiance to spread Atonement buffs out and then dealing damage to heal them up in burst windows. They also have access to powerful group cooldowns such as Power Word: Barrier and Evangelism.

As a Discipline Priest your gameplay loop will reward you for knowing when big moments of damage are happening. By planning ahead for these moments you can ramp ahead of time by casting spells like Power Word: Radiance on allies to get Atonement buffs out on as many group members as possible. In Mythic+ this means you have easy access to apply Atonement to your entire group, while also being able to get relevant damage out of the spec.

Discipline Priest is a great healing spec for progression Raiding encounters. It rewards you playing around boss mechanics that are more deadly during progression and can help push content. For this reason you will typically see these in high-end compositions particularly in Mythic difficulty for the added utility and strength of Discipline's cooldowns. On top of this Priest still brings Power Word: Fortitude which is a necessary buff for high end content.

In Mythic+ the utility provided by Discipline Priest makes it a common healer to see, even pushing at the high end of key levels. The Priest utility cannot be overstated in value here with things like Power Word: Fortitude, Mass Dispel, and Power Infusion providing some of the best value in the game. On top of that Discipline itself brings its own powerful cooldowns such as Power Word: Barrier as a Group Defensive and Pain Suppression as a single target external cooldown.

Discipline Priest in Mythic+ will reward players that are up to the challenge and is more than capable of pushing high keys with an insane amount of throughput. Compared to Raiding this is often seen as easier to get into as you have less daunting ramping playstyles since Power Word: Radiance instantly covers the group with Atonement.

Holy Priests specialize in having a large toolkit to handle reactive healing situations, particularly in large group compositions. Rotationally Holy Priests primarily focus on casting their large Holy Word spells such as Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify. Due to the large burst of healing these provide you want to cast these as often as possible and then weave in filler spells to reduce their cooldown to cast them even more. Each Holy Word has specific abilities that will reduce these cooldowns. In addition to managing your Holy Words, you also have access to powerful spells such as Prayer of Mending and Prayer of Healing which adds even more reactive healing spells to your kit. These spells all help contribute to applying Mastery: Echo of Light to the group for even more healing over time.

One of the most important things Holy Priest offers are the large healing cooldowns that can slot into almost any composition and feel useful. They have access to Divine Hymn and Apotheosis which ends up being an extremely powerful set of cooldowns. There are many talents to increase the duration of Apotheosis and reduce its cooldown to have even more uptime if played well.

In Raiding environments Holy Priests are quite popular, particularly due to how it fits into the overall Raid composition. Holy Priests are one of the best reactive healers which can makes it easy to pickup without having to do as much preparation as other specs might need. On top of that Priests by themselves bring great utility in the form of Power Word: Fortitude and Power Infusion so adding more Priests into your group will always be a welcomed addition.

Holy Priests in Mythic+ can use their powerful Holy Words to be the incredibly good at reactive spot healing and be able to put out good damage. This makes it easier to fit into damage patterns that most dungeons will throw at your group while also being able to weave in damage when you get time. On top of this you also have access to great utility spells such as Power Infusion for group damage, Guardian Spirit as a single target external, and Power Word: Fortitude to help with group survivability.

Shadow Priests bring together gameplay elements from all previous iterations of the spec into a builder-spender package with lots of playstyle choices. Combining raw power from Damage Over Time (DoTs) spells with flexible cooldown choices fuel this specs theme and playstyle. Casting our spells gives you Insanity which you can spend on your most powerful DoT, Devouring Plague, which hits extremely hard and is one of the many spells that replicates its damage via Psychic Link to build up our Priority Target AoE profile.

As a Shadow Priest you not only get to choose your primary cooldown with Dark Ascension or Void Eruption, you also get to choose your primary filler spell between Mind Flay or Mind Spike. This means you get to choose some variation of the spec as a build your own Shadow Priest depending on your preferred playstyle choices.

Shadow Priest in a Raiding environment is where the spec puts a focus on boss damage in particular. Our kit is primarily strong when dealing with sustained target encounters, where we have plenty of time to get our damage out, particularly when playing Void Eruption builds. Whenever adds spawn that need to be focused down the spec can swap to that target and still do relevant boss damage via Psychic Link giving us a big advantage when priority adds need to die quickly. On top of this the class also provides another Power Infusion for the raids benefit which can make you best friends with the DPS of your choice to give it to, without sacrificing the buff yourself thanks to Twins of the Sun Priestess.

In Mythic+ Shadow Priests specialize in dealing focused priority target damage to the big important mob of the pack while cleaving the rest of the enemies with Psychic Link. You are heavily dependent on good usage of Shadow Crash (paired with Whispering Shadows) to get Vampiric Touch out on as many mobs as possible. This damage pattern is very desirable for pushing high keys as it allows other DPS to deal full AoE without sitting there at the end of the pack doing single target while you wait for the mob with the highest health to die last. With a Shadow Priest in the group composition everything dies more evenly so everyone can focus on what they are best at.