[EN] [Guide] [PVE] [Priest] Holy Priest in 7.2.5

Barnacle · Last edited by Barnacle on 29-07-2019, 10:20:53; edited 3 times in total

Barney’s guide to Holy Priest for 7.2.5

Welcome to my guide on how to play Holy Priest in patch 7.2.5,
Holy is one of the most straightforward healing specs in the game, you have spells that do some healing and you have a few spells that do damage. In my opinion it’s one of the best specs to start out with if you’re new to healing or if you just want a decent to good healing class. This is both the problem and the strength of Holy, the spec is pretty good but not great at everything it does, however, it does a lot which makes it worthwhile to bring in raids. The other big problem with holy isn’t the spec itself but one of the other priest specs, Discipline, this spec can do almost everything holy does aswell but do it better ie. Better burst healing, better external cooldowns and on top of that it deals more damage, which is a very big plus on progression fights. However, holy has its benefits over Discipline, namely the sustained healing it offers with Renew and Prayer of Mending and its overall ease of play.
In this guide I will show you how to most efficiently play holy priest in both raids and dungeons so that you won’t be forced to play Discipline by your Raid Leader 

First off, what has changed in patch 7.2.5?

-Changes-

Damage of Holy Fire, Holy Word:

Chastise, and Smite increased by 25%.

Damage of Holy Nova increased by 14%.

Binding Heal cost reduced by 32%.

Circle of Healing healing increased by 15% and cost reduced by 40%.

Divine Star cost reduced by 20%.

Halo cost reduced by 25%.

Smite damage increased by 11%.

In conclusion, not a lot has changed for holy, we got some damage increase but not any substantial increases to our healing throughput or to our talents,
everything is just about the same as it was since most of the mana cost changes will have little effect on the gameplay and decisions we will make when picking talents.

Talents

Now for talents we have 2 very specific sets of talents that we can swap between depending on the content.

First the set for dungeons is the following:

15: Trail of Light
30: Angelic Feather
45: Censure / Shining Force
60: Light of the Naaru
75: Surge of Light
90: Divinity
100: Apotheosis

And for Raiding the next set gives you the most effective build:

15: Enlightenment
30: Angelic Feather
45: Afterlife
60: Light of the Naaru
75: Piety
90: Divinity
100: Benediction

Trail of Light makes it so that your last target healed by Flash Heal will also be healed for 40% of the healing of your next Flash Heal on another target.
This is extremely useful in mythic+ because its gives you a lot of extra healing on top of your already top tier single target healing.
Enlightenment is a talent you should often take in raids because the fights will be longer and you can’t get away with just spamming Prayer of Healing or Flash Heal like you can in m+.
If you find yourself with mana left after a fight and you feel like you could’ve healed more if you had taken Trail of Light you can always swap it out. Enduring Renewal should never be taken.

In this tier of talents the only one that is worthwhile is Angelic Feather, this talent not only gives you some movement, it also gives you some extra utility to help a slow moving tank or other player out in times when you need movement speed.

Both Censure and Shining Force are useful in m+, Censure gives you some nice crowd control on a single target, which can be used on a hulk in NL or a Skrogg in EOA, and Shining Force gives you some great CC for necrotic week because you can temporarily shield the tank from all mobs to help him lose his stacks.
Afterlife is the best talent for most raid encounters since it gives you some extra time on your Spirit of Redemption, which is even better when you pair it with X'anshi, Shroud of Archbishop Benedictus the other part of this talent is that both censure and shining force are less valuable in raids since there often are not a lot of adds that need this kind of CC. You can always swap between these talents when you need more CC though.

Light of the Naaru is the best talent for this row, simply because it buffs your Serendipity by 2 seconds per cast, this means that you can take of about 10 seconds of the cooldown of both your holy word spells, this is huge because these are our most powerful spells for both multi and single target healing. Symbol of Hope can be useful in cases where you are severely outgeared by other healers and you need to get more healing somehow. By giving them 12 seconds of free healing you can help your raid survive without doing much healing yourself.

On this row we once more get a more interesting choice between 3 viable talents, Surge of Light is the best talent for m+ and extremely movement heavy encounters, while
Piety is very good while healing raids, this is because you use Prayer of Mending on cooldown during raids and this makes this spell so much better.

Lastly Binding Heal, there are a few scenarios where playing Binding Heal outperforms either Surge of Light or Piety but these scenarios are few and you won’t find them very quickly, you can always experiment with this to see what works best for you though.

Here the only real choice we can make is to take Divinity, this talent gives you 15% more healing after using a holy word spell for 6 seconds, if you use both your Holy Word: Sanctify And Holy Word: Serenity on cooldown or close to that you can have some great uptime on this ability, boosting your healing a lot. Both Divine Star and Halo are outperformed by this talent almost all the time.

Apotheosis is a great talent to take when you need a lot of burst healing, this means that this talent is the best for m+ and short fights with high damage phases, this ability doubles the effect of serendipity, meaning that you can have a holy word spell on and off cooldown within about 5 seconds, meaning that you will have 100% uptime on Divinity and you can get some very nice heals off with your holy word spells.

However great Apotheosis may be, in raid encounters it is outshined by Benediction, this talent makes it so that every time your Prayer of Mending skips to another player it has a 40% chance to leave behind a stack of Renew, when paired with your artifact traits that give your Prayer of Mending a chance to not be consumed on jumping and with the legendary pants you get even more sustain than you already have. Together with the Prayer of Mending trait this passive ability gives you about 2.5 Free Renews for every Prayer of Mending that you cast.
Circle of Healing is almost never a better option than the first 2.

Stats:

As with the talents we have 2 different stat priority lists for dungeons and raiding.

For raiding the stats are as follows:
Mastery (until ~40%)>Crit>Haste(at least 15-20%)>>>Versatility.

While for dungeons you can get:
Haste(25-30%)> Mastery (30%)>Crit>Versatility.

The Holy Priest Mastery is extremely strong in raid environments, and when I say extremely strong I really mean this, if it’s not on the top of your healing meter in raid fights you’re probably doing something wrong or your gear is not good enough yet. What it does is give all your targeted healing spells an extra healing over time effect, this effect scales with the amount of mastery you have, and it scales better than both haste and crit in raid fights until you reach about 40-45%.

For raiding, if you feel like you’re running out of mana all the time this is probably because you

a. Have too much haste and are using every single GCD.

b. Are just spamming Prayer of Healing

If you can’t cast almost all the time without running out of mana during a raid encounter I advise you to swap out some haste for more crit or Mastery.

Another important thing to check in raids is your overhealing, it is entirely normal for a Holy Priest to be on top of the overhealing meter, simply because your Mastery gives you a HoT on the target after healing them with any other spell. What this means in practice is that if you’re not on top of the healing charts but you are on top of the overhealing you need to drop mastery for crit. If you are on top on both or on neither but your other spells are doing more healing than your Mastery you need to get more mastery and drop either haste or crit.

Try to find the best gear combo for your raids and for your level of gear. And keep in mind that overhealing is of no use for your raid.

Rotation:

For healing there often isn’t a set rotation, but there are a few things you need to do regardless of what content you’re doing.
Raiding:

Firstly, get some Prayer of Mending stacks on both of your tanks, keep in mind that the maximum amount of stacks for this spell is 10 per person, so before the fight starts, you should cast the following:

Prayer of Mending on MainTank, Prayer of Mending on OffTank, PoM on MT, PoM on OT, PoM on anyone. After your 5th PoM the first stack should have about 5-10 seconds of duration left, so if the fight were to start now you start with 25 active stacks of PoM.

Secondly you want to get some Renew or Flash Heal on targets that are going to take damage or have already taken damage.
After this you can cast either Holy Word to trigger Divinity and start casting your Prayer of Healing or your Heal or Flash Heal.

Keep casting your
Prayer of Healing and other spells until either everyone is full health, or your Prayer of Mending comes back off cooldown, after that you want to cast a Holy word spell again and keep on going until the boss is dead. Simply put your ‘rotation’ is as follows:

Prayer of Mending on cooldown

Holy Word: Sanctify and Holy Word: Serenity on cooldown

Prayer of Healing, Flash Heal or Heal between the first 2 parts of the rotation

Light of T'uure is also very important to use, it increases the healing you do to a certain target by 25% and heals for a nice amount. You will often cast this on the tank or on another player that needs extra healing due to having a certain raid debuff or something like that. The spell has 2 charges so keep this in mind, my advice is to use this on cooldown and try to always keep one charge for emergency situations. Keep in mind that not using any cooldown and having someone die because of it is the worst you can do so it would be better to use both on cooldown than to have someone die on you.

Guardian Spirit Is your last resort spell to keep someone from dying when you're certain they will take a lot of damage or are very low health already. It will absorb a killing blow for at most 40% of the targets health, meaning that if the target is at 20% and has 10.000.000 health this spell will absorb a hit worth 6.000.000 after mitigations like armor or personal cooldowns. This spell is extremely powerful and can be used to save a tank or other player from certain death. Once again, not using this and having someone die on you is one of the worst things you can do as a healer, so unless your raid leader is telling you to save it for a certain other mechanic or player you can cast this freely to save lifes.

If the fight doesn’t have a lot of movement you should never cast Renew, just let your Benediction apply it, this is because it is not very mana effective at all. If however you need to move a lot and you have no time to stand still and cast another spell, Renew is a very nice and easy way to quickly heal someone.
Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify are your other instant spells, so use them if the same circumstances apply.

Divine Hymn.

Divine Hymn is our raidwide healing cooldown, it’s channeled over 8 seconds and heals for a lot, there are a few traits and tricks that empower this ability and have the option to make it one of the best raid cooldowns in the game, these are:
Make sure you have a lot of Prayer of Mending out, during Hymn the Prayer of Mending will jump to a new target every second, also having a chance to leave renew on them of course.

Cast all your holy word spells beforehand, this is to trigger Invoke the Naaru, increasing your healing by a considerable amount. You holy word spells will also trigger Divinity so this is a double buff to your healing.

Use your Light of T'uure on the main tank or someone who is going to take more damage than the rest of the group. If you have both use them both.

If you can use Velen's Future Sight

Following all these steps you have one of the best healing cooldowns in the game, giving your group the chance to survive some insane damage and giving you loads of hps to get happy from 

For dungeons the whole thing is quite a bit easier,

Try getting your Prayer of Mending on the tank and maybe one dps, after the fight starts you can start spamming either Prayer of Healing or Flash Heal, always keep using Prayer of Mending on cooldown and do the same with your Holy Word spells unless there is some high damage ability that you need to heal quickly within the next 10-15 seconds.

For moments when a lot of bursthealing is required you can use Apotheosis and spam away like there’s no tomorrow (really tho, if you don’t spam there probably won’t a be tomorrow because you wipe)

If group damage is very high, Cast Divine Hymn and try following the same steps as you would when in a raid, and be sure to get your Light of T'uure out on the tank and someone who needs it badly.

If the damage taken by the group is low you can always keep on casting Smite or other damage spells.

Gearing

Currently the best trinkets for healing throughput are:
Velen's Future Sight

Sea Star of the Depthmother – Mistress Sassz’ine

Unstable Arcanocrystal – Withered Jim

The Deceiver's Grand Design – Kil’jaeden

Archive of Faith – Fallen Avatar

Etraeus' Celestial Map – Star Augur (Nighthold)

Chalice of Moonlight – Sisters of the Moon

All of these trinkets are very good and will boost your healing by a lot. Keep in mind that this list is only viable for items of the same itemlevel (except for Velen’s, this is your best trinket by a wide margin). So if you get a high ilvl Map, you can swap out even a low ilvl ToS trinket.

Legendaries

There are quite a few good legendaries for Holy Priest, and I’ll list some of the best ones here

First we have X'anshi, Shroud of Archbishop Benedictus, this legendary brings you back to life after your spirit of redemption ends, with health according to your healing done (maximum 100% health) and your mana will regenerate during your Spirit of Redemption just like it would when you are out of combat, but spells don’t cost mana so you can get a lot of mana back this way. It also resets the cooldown on your potions, meaning you can use 3 potions during one fight instead of 2, if you use 2 leytorrent potions here this gives you 500k mana back during one fight. This is huge. Also the fact that you cannot die and can cheese mechanics with this make this legendary the strongest of the bunch.

Velen's Future Sight, an on use healing cooldown that increases your healing done and decreases your overhealing, what else do you want? It’s the best legendary after X'anshi, Shroud of Archbishop Benedictus and the best trinket in game right now for Holy.

Entrancing Trousers of An'juna. These legendary healing pants make your Renew last 6 seconds longer, or 33%, this means its healing is increased by 33%. When paired with both Benediction and the Prayer of Mending artifact trait this legendary gives you a lot of free healing. With Benediction you don’t have to cast Renew and when you stack that effect with this legendary you get an even better Free heal.

Muze's Unwavering Will. These Bracers will give you a bit of extra cast speed on your Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing and Smite while you are at or above 75% health, what this legendary allows is for you to swap out a bit of haste for some more crit or mastery while retaining almost all of your casting speed. Another place where it has a lot of benefits is in mythic+, where it boosts both your single target healing and also gives you a bit of extra damage, this can be huge on higher keys where every bit of dps counts.

Prydaz, Xavaric's Magnum Opus, Ahh prydaz, the legendary everyone has and almost never uses if you have better legendaries. For holy the story is no different, you only want to use Prydaz over one of the more high throughput legendaries when you are A. doing progression and want that extra bit of health to keep you from dying to mechanics like the noob you are or B. doing high mythic keys where you want that extra bit of health to not get oneshot by the cats in DHT or even the Thunder in HoV. All in all this necklace is very helpful for a lot of circumstances, but should only be used if there is no better substitute available or you need the shield.

Tier Sets

The tier 20 set from Tomb of Sargeras is pretty good, its main focus is to decrease the cooldowns on your holy word spells even more. The 2Set is basically the tier 5 talent Piety but cut in half. What this means is that your Serendipity removes an extra second from your holy word spells when used. And because we mainly use these spells on cooldown and spam to get them back it decreases their cooldown by another five or so seconds.
The 4Set gives your holy word spells a 40% chance to have their cooldown halved, giving you more of them. This effect is once again pretty strong because it means a higher uptime on our Divinity and a higher proc chance for the image of tu’ure. It is worth sacrificing some itemlevel to get to the 4Set, as it dramatically increases your healing.
The Nighthold set isn’t strong enough to keep. Even at high itemlevel

Artifact and Relics

For the first levels of your artifact you want to use the following path:

After reaching your new traits the next path would be:

As far as relics go you want to prioritize getting high itemlevel on your weapon of course, but there are a few exceptions,

Say your Prayers relics are worth sacrificing 3 itemlevels on your artifact.

Words of Healing

Power of the Naaru

Holy Guidance

[Hallowed Ground

Are all worth one itemlevel over other relics, but 2 fewer than Say your Prayers of course.

Enchants

Binding of Intellect, Binding of Mastery and Mark of the Trained Soldier are the best enchants you can use right now.
For gems you want to get as much mastery aswell.
The only flask that you’ll ever need is Flask of the Whispered Pact.
As far as potions go you have a few options; if mana is not an issue on the fight you can use Potion of Prolonged Power as prepot and then later in the fight again for more healing or more damage. If you need a lot of mana you can still prepot with Potion of Prolonged Power, but as second (and third, if you have X'anshi, Shroud of Archbishop Benedictus) you can use Leytorrent Potion in moments where not a lot is happening to replenish your mana.

Macro’s and Addons

Macro’s
These are some of the simple macro’s that I use to make my life just a bit easier, they give me a bit more control over who I want to heal or damage without having to switch targets.
As you can see I have some macro’s where I can cast both a healing or an aoe spell with the same button:

Spoiler:

Furthermore I have 2 macro’s that allow me to cast spells on myself by using shift, this is by default the alt button but I don’t like using that one, the Sanctify one is a bit special as it will instantly cast the spell with you as its target, meaning you will heal the people standing next to you and you won’t have to worry about aiming where it will land:

Spoiler:

If you have chosen the Angelic Feather talent this next macro will automatically cast the feather at your location, this saves time while running. If you press shift while using it you can just target regularly with it.

Spoiler:

This last one is just for some clutch Leap of Faith pulls, when you use shift it will cast LoF on your target and when you don’t do anything it will cast it on your current mouseover, this way you can just mouseover someone and not have to worry about clicking or anything, just about pressing the button.

Spoiler:

Addons

I use a lot of addons as a priest, first and foremost ElvUI, which is a completely new user interface that you can customize however you see fit. This addon allows you to easier track buffs and debuffs both on yourself and your target. It also allows you complete access over your casting bars and gives you the opportunity to move them as you please.

Secondly I use Vuhdo Raidframes, in my opinion this is the best healing interface addon there is, it offers a ton of customizablity and gives you total control over what you want to see on the raidframe. Configuring this takes a bit of time but it is so worth it.

Another addon I use is Clique, this creates easy to use and spec bound mouseover ability on your raidframes, the big advantage that this has over the Vuhdo mouseover option is that it’s easier to apply your binds since you can click on your spellbook and make the bind instantly.

Weakaura’s is another useful addon that I use, allowing you to create cooldown bars and notifications for things that are happening. You can make these yourself or just copy them from me or other priests, wago.io has some great creations.

Lastly BigWigs or DBM are recommended for raiding, they allow you to plan your heals better by giving you ability timers and other notifications. This is one of the most important parts of healing, and can give you a huge boost in the effect you can have and helping your group stay alive.

This was my guide on how to play holy priest in patch 7.2.5, if you have any questions regarding the guide or my addons or Weakaura’s feel free to pm me on the forum, I’m also a member of the Freakz discord, so you can PM me there. Have fun and good luck playing!!

Barney

XXX Barney