Talents Part 2: Holy

The holy tree, the tree that defines my character. As you can probably guess, this is where the priest class gets most of the upgrades to healing. Unfortunately, this tree has many problems, being the 11,21,31, and 41 talent points. I have not taken any of the talented abilities in this tree, as I feel they are rather lackluster considering how many other talents you can get. Well, lets get to it!

2/2 Healing Focus - Healing focus is a necessity for almost any priest except pure shadow. For only 2 talent points you get 70% chance to resist losing cast time if you get hit. As we all have experienced in game, if a heal is a few seconds off, it can mean the difference between a trip back to the spirit healer or getting your loot.

3/3 Improved Renew - Since I use renew as one of my main heals in every group I am in, it just makes sense to make it heal my target better. When your renews start ticking for around 750-800 per tick, it makes it so easy to keep a whole group healed with ease, while your focusing your bigger heals on the tank.

4/5 Holy Specialization - Critting on a heal is one of the best things to happen for a priest. It helps you conserve mana because the target just got extra health for free, and combined with Inspiration, it makes your tanks seem invincible for 15 seconds.

5/5 Divine Fury - Remember how I said about making sure your heals get off at the right time? Well I think a 2.5 second heal instead of a 3 second heal will help with this. This talent is of course a no brainer and is a must in any healers arsenal.

3/3 Inspiration - This talent is amazing when your tank has great gear. Whenever I crit on a heal this talent increases their armor by 25%. This talent has saved me a number of times. If it procs at the right time, it ends up saving me a few moments for my next heal on the target, in which they usually will be not taking as much damage. Of course armor does nothing to prevent damage from spells, but, it still is beneficial nonetheless.

3/3 Improved Healing - If you made it this far in the holy tree, no reason to not pick up this talent. It is probably one of the best healing talents in the tree, giving your heals an extra little bump for free. Must have talent!

5/5 Spiritual Guidance - If your healing as a priest, spirit should be a stat that you stack, and if your following my build, stacking this with the improved divine spirit buff, give you even more +healing (yes they do stack together). Another must have.

5/5 Spiritual Healing - Yes you guessed it another must have, if your healing this is needed again.

3/3 Holy Concentration - This is a talent I picked up recently. At first I was like 6% pfft who would care how often would you see that? Well maybe Blizzard put it at like 20%, because it seems to proc all the time for me. This talent should be a necessity as well, because it really saves your mana, and I have had it proc a few times on 2 or 3 heals in a row, thus keeping me healing even if I was out of mana. I believe even with casting heals with this, it does not use the 5 second rule, thus you will be regenerating mana the whole time. I love this talent, one of the best talents blizzard put in the tree.

Now I know it seems like I went through the holy talents very quickly, but unlike discipline, the reasons I chose them are very obvious. I still want to try Empowered healing a bit, to see if that few percent extra is a lot, but I believe the extra mana I am getting in discipline is too good to give up for just maybe 100-200 extra health on my greater heals. What have your experiences been? Have I just been getting lucky on Holy Concentration procs? Or does it really proc that often?

I really do want to try circle of healing again but I cannot bring myself to do it. I know that in certain circumstance its great, but I haven't found those yet that a well timed prayer of healing can't fix. With the new change to lightwell (lolwell), I want to try how much it will heal for with my +healing, but I don't know if giving up 2% of my mana for lightwell is worth it. If anyone can let me know how the new lightwell is with the +healing (along with how much +healing you currently had), please let me know.

Talents Part 1: Discipline

Today, I am going to be looking at the Discipline tree and the talents I have chosen. The overall feel of the discipline is more for utility, it benefits your priest in many different ways such as mana regen, increased mana, survivability just as examples. This tree greatly compliments both shadow and holy, and every build should have at least 14 points in. The priest as a class lacks one thing, and thats mana efficiency, but by getting the correct discipline talents, you can make that negative not so bad, especially by getting the Meditation talent. Keep in mind all the talent choices I am doing is for pure PvE mostly raiding and heroics.


5/5 Unbreakable Will - I chose this talent over improved wands, just on the off chance that if the boss does fear me, I may be able to resist it, thus being able to cast a heal without any interruption.


4/5 Silent Resolve - This talent reduces threat, which is always great for any PvE encounter, but I only chose to get 4 points instead of the full 5, because there is really NO way a priest should be pulling aggro as long as you have a decent tank. If you pull aggro healing, its not your fault, unless if the enemy has a complete aggro wipe and it happened right before your heal went off, but other than that, if you have aggro, talk to your tanks and tell them to learn to play.


2/2 Improved Power Word: Fortitude - Depending upon the number of priests in your guild, you may choose to get this or not, I always choose to get it, because it can never hurt to have the extra stamina for your group. This one talent can be the difference between a wipe, and some new epics for your party. The way I see it, if I can keep my job easier to heal by everyone having as much health as I can give them, I don't see why I should not do it.


1/1 Inner Focus - Inner Focus is one of the best talents available to any priest, although it seems to "fit" better with a healing spec. There is just not enough I can say about this talent, I usually use it in the beginning of any instance to get a free no mana cast Prayer of Fortitude on my party. This makes it much faster to "start up" and not have to drink right after casting this buff.


3/3 Meditation - This talent is almost a requirement for any priest in my opinion. The mana regeneration is very important to both shadow and healing specs. With this talent, and my current gear I notice that I do not need to really drink even in raids. Since as a priest you should be dancing in and out of the 5 second rule for spirit anyway, this talent will allow for a few "free" casts on longer fights, but will certainly let you go longer without needing to yell out an Innervate or to ask your shadowfiend for help.


5/5 Mental Agility - With the burning crusade, priests received as an ability my favorite spell, prayer of mending. If you don't know prayer of mending it is instant cast and it puts a buff on anyone in your party( or raid) and when they take damage it heals them. That alone is a great ability, but in addition it also "jumps" to other party member placing the buff on them, up to 5 jumps. The only two problems with this spell are that its mana cost is moderately high, and it has a 10 second cool down on recast. With mental agility, I can at least alleviate one of those problems by reducing its mana cost. I also love this talent because I cast renew on my off targets and also to alleviate the amount of damage my tank is taking, while I am healing someone else. Since I use prayer of mending, and renew so often, Mental Agility is too good to pass up.


5/5 Mental Strength - As I have stated before, mana in general is a tough battle for a priest. Every kind of priest I have seen or have tried speccing into myself, has had some sort of mana issue. I decided once hitting level 70, that I would get this talent, to make mana much less of an issue. Even though speccing 5 points into increasing my mana seems like a huge amount of talent points to spend for an additional 10% mana, this talent alone has made my job healing about 30 percent easier. In addition to the mana regeneration I am getting from previous talents, the overall increase in mana I am getting from this talent, make the one major negative of a priest (mana) become a positive.


1/1 Divine Spirit - If your a holy priest, I see no reason why this talent is not in ur arsenal. Since the holy tree is lacking (which I will talk about later) in a good 41 talent point, there is no reason why every healing priest should not have this ability. I understand if your shadow specced in not having it, even though the spirit would help you too, there is just too many good talents in the Shadow Tree to sacrifice for a few extra spirit points.


2/2 Improved Divine Spirit - I like this talent because I feel it overall gives my party such an incredible buff. The amount of damage and healing per person increased may not seem like much, but when you spread that over 5 or 10 people, that's a few percent extra boost in helping taking down that enemy, just by having a buff on. I also love the idea of having a normal stat count for more than one thing. Such as spirit now not only gives me increased mana regen (when out of the 5 second rule), but it also gives me more +healing, so now this one stat is a multitasker for me.


These are the talents I chose for the Discipline tree for my priest. I do not think that these are all necessary, but they have helped me heal entire raids without having to worry too much about my mana efficiency. But what do you think? I have had entertained thoughts of removing the Mental Strength talent, and even taking out some of the points in Divine Spirit, in order to get deeper into the holy tree. If your a healing priest and you have a different take on Discipline, let me know.

Welcome

So after much pressure from my other blogging friends, I decided to make my own Blog. First, let me introduce myself, my main character's name is Grazen and he is a level 70 Dwarf Priest. I am currently holy/disc specced, but have tried out every other spec that is available. Below is my current talent spec, 28/33/0.

Besides talent specs, I will also discuss the pros and cons of the priest class, and tell about my experiences in the game.