TBC Priest Guide

This TBC Priest guide covers all of the Addons, Stats, Gear, Enchants and Talents you will need to be the very best priest you can be!

A. Suggested AddOns

  • SW Stats – Has some great features for tracking healing done, mana efficency, decursing, etc. (required for OLN)
  • Item Rack – Addon to swap out gear sets. Very nice for switching out of DPS and healing sets.
  • SmartBuff – This one keeps track of your buffs. When one expires it will splash a message on the screen and make an annoying noise, it will recast the buffs with a scroll of the mouse wheel. Healbot apparently does some similar stuff but I’ve never used it.

B. Stats

The stats important to a healpriest are as follows:

  1. +Healing
  2. MP5
  3. Spirit
  4. Intellect
  5. Stamina

I consider them approximatley in that order of importance, but you need a balance of them all. The recomended minimum stats for going into Kara are as follows for priests, all unbuffed:

  • +Healing – 1k absolute minimum, 1.2k recomended pre-Curator, 1.5k recomended post-Curator
  • Mana – 7k pre-Curator, 8.5k post-Curator, can be on the lower side if MP5 is high
  • Health – 6-7k HP, Attumens Charge can crit for upwards of 8k so it’s a good idea to be on the higher side if you can manage it
  • MP5 – 85 absolute minimum, 120 recomended, some recomend 150 for post-Curator but I’m not sure that much is necessary.

It’s reasonably easy to achieve these stats with the Tailoring Epics. I put Solid Star of Elune’s in all my blue slots to help with the Stam, and healing gems in the other slots. The healing enchants listed below are also very important to get to that 1.5k +Heal.

C. Gear

The Primal Mooncloth and Whitemend sets are HIGHLY recommended for Priests. I wrote an article in my blog about why, but here’s the short version. The Tailoring gear is comparable to Tier 4 stuff. The +Heal on Tier 4 is about 60 less than the Tailoring, but the other stats are higher. Tailoring is also available at 70 (assuming your Tailoring is high enough, PMC is BoP) and you have to get all the way through Magtheridon to get all of Tier 4.

Here are some specific gear recomendations for each slot before entering Kara. These are by no means the only options and I’ve tried to include items from various sources (quests, instances, badge rewards, and heroic instances)

F. Suggested Enchants for Healers

  • Weapon – Enchant Weapon – Major Healing, Enchant Weapon – Major Intellect, or Enchant 2H Weapon – Major Intellect
  • Head – Glyph of Renewal requires Revered with Honor Hold
  • Shoulder – Greater Inscription of Faith or Inscription of Faith requires Exalted or Honored with Aldor
  • Back – If you can find someone with the recipe get Enchant Cloak – Subtlety
  • Chest – Enchant Chest – Restore Mana Prime, or Enchant Chest – Exceptional Mana
  • Wrist – Enchant Bracer – Superior Healing, Enchant Bracer – Mana Regeneration, or Enchant Bracer – Major Intellect
  • Hands – Enchant Gloves – Major Healing
  • Legs – Golden Spellthread, or Silver Spellthread made by 375 Tailors with Exalted or Honored with Aldor
  • Feet – Enchant Boots – Vitality or Enchant Boots – Fortitude

D. Talent Builds

Most raiding Holy Priests will have one of 2 talent builds.

Disc/Holy
Disc/Holy Build 1

or

Disc/Holy Build 2

A less common but still viable Disc build would be

Less common Disc Build

A small disclaimer: these talent builds are samples. There are many changes you could make, and I highlight a few of them, that would still be viable raiding builds. Take everything with a grain (or three) of salt and do what works for you and your play-style.

Imp Divine Spirit Build
Imp Divine Spirit Build
This build takes 23 points into Disc to get Imp Divine Spirit. If you are the only Priest in a raid I definatley think this is the way to go. Some of the points in the early Tiers of the Disc tree are interchangeable, but to me, the important ones are: 2/2 Imp PW:F, 1/1 Inner Focus, 3/3 Meditation, 5/5 Mental Agility, and 3/3 Divine Spirit. The other points can be spread around into Imp PW:S, Absolution, Silent Resolve, and Imp Inner Fire. In the Holy tree I think this is the best placement of points for raiding. Some don’t like Holy Concentration, but I find it procs often enough to make it worth the 3 points (if you follow it with an Inner Focus when it procs your sure to get a few good seconds outside the 5 sec rule). If you don’t take Holy Concentration, move points from Holy Specalization to Spell Warding since you won’t be getting as much advantage from the crits. The other place for variation is putting the points into Healing Prayers and taking them out of Spiritual Guidance.

Circle of Healing Build
Circle of healing build

This build will become much more viable with the buffs to CoH that are comming in Patch 2.3. The Holy talents are very similar to the previous build with the addition of CoH and the same comments from the earlier build apply to the Disc tree.

Disc Build
Disc Priest Build
With a Disc build you won’t have the big #’s from your heals, but you’ll get huge boosts to your base stats making you more Pally-like, able to heal for smaller #’s for long periods of time. You’ll also get 20% boost to healing on a 3 min cooldown. In the Holy Tree, I’d definatley take Spell Warding over Holy Specalization since you won’t have Holy Concentration.