Forever Holy Priest Healer Guide

Holy Priests are the classic reactive healer style with motifs about light, divine energy, and being a holy devout. They embody a traditional servant of the Light, their faith and spirituality manifesting in their abilities to heal, cleanse, and protect. When an ally gets injured, Holy Priests are the ones to restore them and keep them healthy.

Those who follow the Holy path are known to perform miracles regularly to save their allies from grave injury. Their Light flows into the injured, their compassion for life being their core value. Holy Priests are akin to clerics as they both share the identity of a divine healer.

In World of Warcraft: Forever, we see new additions to the Holy specialization that improve their multi-target healing potential. Examples include Binding Heal, allowing the Priest to heal themselves and another simultaneously, and Prayer of Mending, a heal that bounces between party members when triggered.

In this page, we will discuss Holy Priest's strengths and weaknesses, as well as advice for leveling, gear priorities, a talent build, and more.

Overall Performance Leveling Dungeon Utility Mobility

The Low Skill Floor All-Rounder

Holy Priests are great all-rounders and have access to a very broad toolkit that allow them to be versatile. The Holy specialization is also very beginner friendly. Unfortunately, the jack of all trades tends to be a bit weaker than the other healing specializations. Priest healers also tend to struggle to level efficiently when playing solo.

Zero AoE and Lackluster Damage

While Holy Priests are great at their role of healing, they lack tools to solo level effectively. It's typically recommended to play with a group if you plan to level as Holy, otherwise it is a better idea to primarily use Shadow talents until you're able to get into group content.

Ol' Reliable

One of the top options for performing their role in dungeons and raids. Though Holy thrives during AoE healing phases, they are mildly outshined by their Discipline counterpart in single-target healing and overall throughput.

Adapts Well To Any Situation

Holy Priest has access to the same baseline utilities that the other Priest specializations have: Fade, Fear Ward, Cure Disease, Dispel Magic, Mind Soothe, and Mana Burn. They also have access to a handful of CC abilities: Mind Control, Psychic Scream, and Shackle Undead.

Zero Horizontal Mobility, Slow Fall Vertically

Priests don't have any innate mobility skill that would help them to reposition during a battle, such as a blink or ability that increases movespeed. They do have Levitate, which can be useful for traversing the overworld, but underwhelming for Dungeon, Raid, and PvP content.

While most of the information provided here is applicable to full release, some of the information regarding leveling will be tailored to the beta's level cap of Level 20.

The best race for Holy Priests in the Alliance faction is Gnome. They have the best Priest exclusive racials among all the Alliance races. Confounding Flash is an amazing AoE CC that confuses up to 5 enemies, broken on damage dealt. Contingency Plan is the star for Gnome Priests since it can give an ally a second chance at life.

In the Horde faction, Undead are the best option. They have more options for mana management and sustain than Trolls do. Cannibalize and Dark Sacrifice are new options available to Undead Priests for aiding in Mana Management.

Quests reward lots of experience. Prioritize nearby quests, particularly the ones that have close proximity to each other. It's a good idea to kill some mobs as you travel to your next quest destination rather than ignoring them entirely. Avoid pursuing quests that send you very far for unimpressive experience gains.

Once you picked up a good amount of quests for a dungeon, it's a good idea to run it. Try to avoid running a dungeon before you've accumulated the quests for it. The one caveat about running dungeons is that it can be very efficient experience gain if you have a reliable and coordinated group to clear them with.

When looking to log off the game for any long period of time, it's highly recommended to log out in an inn or a capital city. Whether you're offline or AFK, your character will earn Rested XP that increases the experience gained from killing enemies. This can be an invaluable bonus if leveling seems slow.

In WoW: Forever, you can have up to two Primary Professions.

For those who pick Gnome as their race to play, Engineering has good synergy since Gnomes have the Engineering Specialization racial passive. Mining pairs well to enable you to gather some materials for use in Engineering.

Another good pick to pursue during the beta is Alchemy and Herbalism. These professions enable you to craft your own supply of Health Potions, Mana Potions, and other useful utility consumables.

Tailoring and Enchanting pair well together for those who are interested in crafting their own gear. With the item obfuscation in Forever, it's unknown whether it will be worth the time to level Tailoring for gear or if it would be better to grind for an item drop.

Regardless of which race or primary professions you choose, you can also learn First Aid to gain access to consumables such as Bandages.

There are many other ways to improve your mana consumption. A big component of managing mana well is avoiding overhealing. Overhealing is an example of inefficient mana usage and can catch up to you fast. There are a few methods to avoid overhealing, such as using wands as filler rather than spells, downranking, and awareness of the 5-Second Rule.

When you aren't needing to heal or take other actions, it is a good idea to weave in wand attacks. Wand attacks do not cost mana and, while the damage dealt with wands don't seem significant, it adds up over time. Ultimately, the faster an enemy dies the less you will need to heal.

Downranking is the use of lower rank versions of a spell to conserve mana. This is a harder skill to master, but it's a good idea to practice it when you can. Without utilizing downranking, your Mana resource will dwindle fast. Be patient with yourself if this is new to you as this is a skill that comes with lots of time and experience.

The 5-Second Rule is when your Mana Regeneration is halted for 5 seconds after casting a spell that costs mana. There are some talents you can choose that bypass this, such as the Meditation talent from the Discipline tree. This rule only applies when the cast completes, so if the cast is interrupted for any reason, it will not trigger the halt on mana regeneration.

The standard build for leveling up to the beta's max level of 20 consists of many tools for mana management. The most critical talent to take as early as possible is the Wand Specialization talent from the Discipline tree since we will be using our wand on essentially every enemy we come across. The second most is arguably Spirit Tap from the Shadow tree since it enables you to decrease your mana regeneration downtime between pulls.

Twilight Focus is extremely useful for solo play as well as preventing interruptions from AoE attacks in group play. The remaining points are put into Improved Renew for increased healing efficacy with Renew.

While a Holy Priest's main job is to heal, if you're playing solo or find yourself with nothing to do in group content, the following rotation should be used to deal damage.

1. Make sure to have Power Word: Fortitude & Inner Fire on yourself before entering combat.
2. Just before pulling, cast Power Word: Shield on yourself/your group's tank.
3. Cast Smite as the enemy approaches.
4. Cast Mind Blast.
5. Cast Shadow Word: Pain.
6. Use your wand until the enemy goes down.

It's generally a good idea to use your wand to finish off a foe rather than using Smite or Mind Blast. A key aspect of playing Priest is managing your mana to survive the longer encounters. Remember that it's expected to break from this rotation in order to save yourself or an ally.

1. Use Power Word: Shield if you need to buy time to cast your healing spells.
2. Use Heal for a moderate heal after a few seconds.
3. Use Renew when you are looking to keep up with chip damage or if an ally needs some help while you're repositioning.

Once you gain access to Cure Disease and Dispel Magic, make sure to use them when appropriate to remove important debuffs.

To preface, there is a lot of mystery surrounding itemization in WoW: Forever. Expect this page to fill out more as we gather more information on beta and full game release.

Healing Power increases the efficacy of our healing spells, meaning we will need to cast less often to heal the same amount. This is a stat that can absolutely affect your mana management and is incredibly useful since it increases your potential DPS through using less GCDs on healing.

Mana Per 5 is another mana management tool that is important, because MP5 is active even if the 5-Second Rule is triggered.

Spirit is a stat that affects your mana regeneration while the 5-Second Rule is not active (aka while you're not casting). Reiterating from the section covering the 5-Second Rule, the Meditation talent from the Discipline tree can help supplement your MP5 mana regeneration while your Spirit regen is halted. Once we get access to Spiritual Guidance, our Spirit stat will also increase our spell healing.

Intellect increases our mana pool and gives us additional Spell Critical Strike Chance. This is lower on the priorities, but still desirable enough to be a priority.

Spell Crit is likely the lowest of our stat priorities as a Holy Priest. If you're playing well by avoiding overhealing, then the crits you may get will often translate into accidental overhealing.

Consumables are incredibly nice to have and can make adventuring much smoother than attempting to go it without supplies. Ideally, we should be bringing some food, a drink, and some health potions.

• Water
• Food
• Healing Potions
• Mana Potions
• Bandages

Water is incredibly important for Priests to have on-hand while adventuring. It reduces the delay between pulls caused by a lack of mana. Food is another important consumable to have for regenerating health between pulls. Water and food cannot be consumed during combat and will be canceled upon attacking or being attacked.

Healing Potions and Mana Potions are useful for restoring a portion of your health or mana resource in a pinch. Keep in mind that these potions share a cooldown with each other, so be careful when choosing which to drink. Bandages are another consumable that can be used in combat and rather than an instant heal, it acts as a HoT. It's important to note that bandages can also be used on other players, and can be used in an emergency should you run out of mana.

Rainy

Guide Author

Follow Rainy

Rainy has a long history with Blizzard games starting from as young as 2 years old with the Diablo series' first installment. Across all games and genres, she gravitates towards healing classes. As a testament to her masochism, she is a former Top 500 Support player in Overwatch, a former Celestial 2 Support player in Marvel Rivals, and has thousands of hours across a variety of MMOs as a healer.

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