Priest Spec question

I dont want to give up my shadow but i know i need to respec soon, im lvl 52 currently. Holy doesnt seem to pack much punch. I was thinking maybe some kind of fancy tri-spec. All I really want out of shadow is mindflay and silence. Focused casting doesnt seem very worthwhile. I havent tested out to much of the disc tree. How good is mental agility, mental strength, meditation, and inner focus? Anyways I dont want to be straight holy/disc, any suggestions how I could still have efficient heals and keep mindflay/silence/mindblast upgrades and SW upgrade (21 points of shadow)? I dont care where the other 30 points go.

tri-specs dont work, you'll get the garbage abilities of each tree.

mental strength is awesome.

mental agility for the ppl who love cheap renew, shield, and pain, awesome ability.

meditation is pretty deep in the tree, and of questionable utility. it's only really useful in sustained fights (like magmadar or "hard" bosses). other than that, if you have mental strength, you shouldn't run out of mana anyway

innerfocus is... idk, it depends. i use it mostly for prayer fort... and just try not to run out of mana. usually fights arent made or broken w/ one spell, but i do notice that while it's active you continue regening even if you start casting, and it doesnt initiate the 5-second shit. so when i get low i usually just activate it, and try to time the most effective Gheal i can by starting and canceling the cast, all the while regening.

in summary:
tri-spec -- bad idea.
disc talents -- i love them.


--Xancha, 60 priest, Illidan

I am a holy priest and I love it. I don't run around looking for PvP because my opinion of PvP right now is that I am less than impressed. When I do PvP I have a warrior and rogue to rip shit up. I'm much more group oriented. Don't get me wrong I loved my shadow spec, but I enjoy holy also. That said, you don't really NEED to have holy for anything. Now this is coming from an alliance perspective, but we usually have so many paladins second and third healing MT's in MC that it's more about mana consumption than anything. Of the priests that we have for MC, 5 are shadow/disc, 1 is disc/shadow, and I'm holy/disc. However, the tanks would rather have me as their main healer over the shadow priests. I took the 5 points of master healer and honestly thought I had wasted 5 points that could have gone into meditation (with my regen equipment I have 30 mana/5s + 300 spirit) up until MC, but I find I can use greater heals in places where others can't. I just feel more comfortable with it.

Now, I did have a holy/shadow build for a long time and I will say that you will be shooting yourself in the foot. If you plan on soloing, just stick with the shadow/disc build until 58-59 and then switch if you want to. Without the high end shadow talents you're still going to kill shit very slowly.

Gibe is right though, the discipline talents are probably the most important. That's why it's not very efficient to go tri-tree, but I don't think that it's a terrible idea. Mental strength is a must if you're going to put points into the tree. Inner focus is nice, but I use it same as above... pofII and when oom. Meditation I'm on the border. I think it becomes more attractive if you have a high sprit and +mana-regen build. Either way, with 8.5k mana or 6.5k mana, you're going to run out of mana at some point in those long fights and discipline will help you get the most out of your mana.

I think the best chance for a tri-build would be:

Saved Template

Class: Priest
Level: 60


Discipline Talents (20 points)

# Unbreakable Will - 5/5 points
Increases your chance to resist Stun, Fear, and Silence effects by 15%.

# Improved Power Word: Shield - 3/3 points
Reduces the duration of your Power Word: Shield's Weakened Soul effect by 15 seconds.

# Improved Power Word: Fortitude - 2/2 points
Increases the effect of your Power Word: Fortitude spell by 30%.

# Mental Agility - 5/5 points
Reduces the mana cost of your instant cast spells by 10%.

# Mental Strength - 5/5 points
Increases your maximum Mana by 10%.



Holy Talents (10 points)

# Improved Renew - 5/5 points
Increases the amount healed by your Renew spell by 15%.

# Spiritual Healing - 5/5 points
Increases the amount healed by your healing spells by 10%.



Shadow Talents (21 points)

# Blackout - 5/5 points
Gives your Shadow damage spells a 10% chance to stun the target for 3 seconds.

# Improved Shadow Word: Pain - 2/2 points
Increases the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain spell by 6 seconds.

# Shadow Focus - 3/5 points
Reduces your target's chance to resist your Shadow spells by 6%.

# Mind Flay - 1/1 point
Assault the target's mind with Shadow energy, causing 75 damage over 3 seconds and slowing the target to 50% of their movement speed.

# Improved Psychic Scream - 2/2 points
Reduces the cooldown of your Psychic Scream ability by 4 seconds.

# Improved Mind Blast - 5/5 points
Reduces the cooldown of your Mind Blast spell by 2.5 seconds.

# Improved Fade - 2/2 points
Increases the duration of your Fade ability by 10 seconds.

# Silence - 1/1 point
Silence the target, preventing them from casting spells for 5 seconds.

Click to expand...

This gets what I think are the best talents you can get mid range in the trees without too many useless talents.

Im specced for shadow/holy. Most of my points are in shadow, and I've got all the damage dealing I need with that. Out of the holy tree I am getting everything I really need, excepting that when hit 60 I will only have 3 points in master healer instead of 5. This doesn't bug me too much, though, considering as heal/greater heal I tend to use after a fight unless I think I have enough time to pull one off.

thanks for the help, that tri-spec looks pretty killer. and how in gods name can you get 300 spirit?

I logged with my "int" gear: http://wow.allakhazam.com/profile.html?6391

It's still spirit heavy. If I switch out some rings, and weapons I can get it to right on 300. If I can get a bracer drop out of DM that I want and the trinket, I'll have a set of +healing gear that I mess around with that give me up to +200 heals. I got some new gear between when I wrote that and now, so in actuality I probably hit about 290.

I tried tri-spec.. Just didn't cut the mustard.. having silence (and mind flay) rocked, but everything else suffered.. I did get inner focus, but the extra bonus to healing/mana was missing, and I noticed a difference between myself at 60 and a guildmate at 60 doing disc/holy.. I switched over, and it's great for runs (it does suck for pvp, though I can almost live as long with the healing aspect now), so what will probably happen is once I'm done with the garbage runs and they ramp up pvp battlegrounds or what have you, I'll definately be switchin back to shadow/disc

In the end Shadow isnt a great spec esspecialy at the end of the game. When you are soloing or dueling yea its nice but once you hit high end PVE and PVP its not so great. I currently have 30 holy/21 disc you get a nice expansion on your mana pool from Mental Strength and a free spell (inner focus) and the extra healing power from the holy tree. Holy Nova isnt worth it at all so not worth sinking that many points.

People say shadow priests can heal fine. Our guild has a shadow priest, she runs out of mana sooner than anyone else. Because she cannot keep up with the amount of heals needed.

Xancha, /gquit

I'm swapping out 2/2 pw:f for 2/2 martyrdom. In the leaked notes, Mind flay now work with focused casting, so I'd guess that you can get at least 1 MF + 1 FH off on 1 proc of focused casting. This build is mainly for small 1v1 pvp encounters, and in those, rogues/warriors/etc. are gona be critting you alot, so martyrdom is a nice passive to have.

Its not worth it to me to put in 1 more point into focused casting itself though. 8s is kinda bleh, and it starts universal cooldown.

I am pretty much of the opinion that Shadow Priests are fairly worthless to raids.

only topend raids. For the other ones, as long as you have a mana pot handy, it should be okay.