Holy Priest Healing Guide — Midnight (12.0.1)

Compared to many specs, the changes to Holy Priest in Midnight are not as dramatic. Some of our baseline defensive abilities have been moved to the class tree, and with the removal of multiple active abilities from the class tree, there are ample points to pick up all of the throughput talents. Your remaining points can be spent to enhance your defensive abilities or to choose some utility talents. The Holy tree has seen less change overall, and is very similar to The War Within, with the notable exception of Ultimate Serenity. Additionally, as you level up there are new hero talents for Archon and Oracle, and the new Benediction Apex Talents.

Levelling up grants you additional talent points you can use to unlock the Benediction Apex Talent, which provides the following benefits as you put points into it:

• First Point: Benediction causes Prayer of Mending bounces to periodically transform your next cast of Flash Heal into Benediction, increasing the healing done and triggering a Cosmic Ripple.
• Second and Third Points: Benediction Increases all healing done, and further increases the healing of Cosmic Ripple.
• Fourth Point: Benediction Causes each pulse of Divine Hymn to trigger Cosmic Ripple. During Apotheosis, Flash Heal is upgraded to Benediction.

How it works: The periodic Benediction procs are triggered by regularly casting Prayer of Mending. When triggered, Flash Heal is replaced with Benediction for your next cast, doing increased healing and triggering a Cosmic Ripple. Due to the added healing, Benediction is a high value spell to use and should be prioritised as part of your rotation whenever it triggers.

With Halo being removed from the Priest class tree, Archon has seen a bit of a shuffle in its talent placements, with the first talent in the tree now Halo. Much of the Archon tree remains the same, with the continued focus on empowering Halo and providing regular buffs to Flash Heal and Prayer of Healing. Archon continues to play much the same as The War Within, with the exception of Spiritwell which enables usage of Prayer of Healing to consume Surge of Light.

Oracle has seen the most change with the primary focus of the tree in The War Within Premonition being removed. Replacing this are numerous talents that focus on enhancing Prayer of Mending. This includes the new Guiding Light for an additional charge of Prayer of Mending which is a fantastic quality of life improvement to the spec, especially when paired with the other new talent Prompt Prognosis. Prompt Prognosis was the Season 3 set bonus from The War Within, granting a sizeable heal on the target you cast Prayer of Mending on. This talent helps reduce one of the weaknesses of the Oracle tree, which is its reduced spot-healing. The other talent of note is Piety which carries over the Piety effect from the old Premonition system. Due to how Holy Priest Mastery Mastery: Echo of Light works, this is a solid improvement to our healing which naturally results in a considerable amount of overhealing.

The playstyle of Holy Priest remains very similar in Midnight. There is still a heavy focus on using your Holy Words Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify as much as you can, along with your short cooldown spells like Prayer of Mending, and for Archon, Halo. Between your short cooldown spells, you heal your group with Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing, and sometimes Holy Nova depending on the talents you've taken and the style of damage coming in. Our powerful cooldowns Divine Hymn and Apotheosis have not seen any major changes.

Notable talents that have been removed include Renew, Heal, Lightwell, Shadowfiend, and Symbol of Hope. Some other more situational spells have also been removed; Power Word: Shield, Power Word: Life, Divine Star, and Divine Word.

The healing amount and mana costs of most spells have also been rebalanced in an attempt to try and put more focus on active healing spells and reducing the amount of healing that passive talents contribute to your overall throughput. This doesn't have an impact on your playstyle beyond making it feel better when you use direct healing spells like Prayer of Healing as it comparatively does more healing than passive spells like Renew procs.

Ultimate Serenity is a notable new talent, which grants additional power to Holy Word: Serenity and causes it to heal nearby allies for a portion of the amount it heals your primary target. It also causes Holy Word: Serenity to gain some benefit from talents that would normally affect Holy Word: Sanctify such as Prayer of Healing reducing the cooldown of Holy Word: Serenity. The trade-off is that while talented into Ultimate Serenity you are unable to cast Holy Word: Sanctify. This talent aims to land somewhere between the functionality of the two Holy Words offering a simpler, single button that performs similar amounts of healing.

There are no major changes to survivability or utility in this patch besides some defensive abilities like Desperate Prayer and Fade being added as talents in the class tree. Some minor changes have been made to various talents including Body and Soul which can also trigger from Prayer of Mending, and Shackle Horror which now works on Aberrations alongside Undead.