Holy - Part One - Talents and Glyphs

I'm going to start my guides with Holy, as it is my favorite of the two specs and my primary raiding spec (my disc spec usually only comes up in 10 mans and when 25 mans are missing all of the tank heals, or when I run five man instances). Remember that holy is a low mana efficiency (a.k.a. a mana hog) raid healing spec. If you want to focus on tank healing in a raid, go Disc or reroll. Yes, a holy priest can heal a tank in a pinch or be the offhealer for a tank (which is a common assignment for any healer on any given fight), but it is honestly a waste of the spec unless the fight requires no raid healing. I know that Disc has a different playstyle than Holy, but unless your comp is something like two holy priests for a 10 man, you are being utilized poorly to the detriment of the raid unless you are on as heavy a raid healing assignment as possible.

Holy is somewhat annoying in that there are several specs that are "good" raid specs.

Dictionary Time

Before I get into the swing of writing a guide, I figure I should define a few terms just in case readers don't understand them and run into these in the middle of a guide and go "huh?" They're pretty common in the theorycrafting community, but I don't know how widespread they really are outside of it.

Things to come...

Making guides takes awhile. Well, thorough ones anyway. Within the next few weeks, I'm hoping to finish a series on each spec (Holy and Discipline) in terms of talents, gearing, spell usage, and all that fun stuff. I suppose once I'm done with that task I'll move on to more vague posts on the joys of raid healing and how to set up healing in 10s and 25s, but it's a lot of guide to write.

I rolled a priest. Now what?

So, you want to heal. You rolled a priest, the quintessential healing class. The next question is, now what?

Oh hai

Hello there!

This is WoW blog and is meant to serve as a guide of sorts for healing priests, mostly aimed at tackling healing from a raiding perspective.

I am currently an undead priest raiding with a hardcore casual guild. I'm pretty darn good at it. No, I don't want to share what guild I'm in or what server (though we are first Hordeside, the server is a bit backwater, so this means we're 4/5 ToGC, and are focusing more on our last achievement for Ironbound proto-drakes than hardmode Anub'Arak.25).

I'm hoping to make a guide that is less "the way healing is" and more based around identifying how to set yourself up and supporting the healing core of your own raids. I'm attempting to integrate some math and situational specs/gearing instead of speaking in absolutes based only on my own raid experience. I will be making some posts related to five man content and fresh 80s, but most of this blog is centered around raid content, and the healing benchmarks are more based around having raid gear available to you. While this is easier to attain even as a five man-only healer than it has been in the past, don't expect to hit gear/stat benchmarks as a fresh level 80.

I don't know jack or squat about good PvP play, so I'm not even going to pretend. PvP is good for your reflexes, and I've seen some really good healers come from PvP backgrounds (high reaction time, good dispel reflex, etc). I've seen bad ones too, but point is, if you're afraid to PvE heal, starting in battlegrounds never hurt anyone as a training tool.