Holy Priest Healing Guide — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Compared to many specs, the changes to Holy Priest 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 exceptions of Ultimate Serenity. Coming with Midnight launch as you level up are additional hero talents for Archon and Oracle, and the new Benediction Apex Talents.

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 TWW tier set bonus, 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 often 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 Halo for Archon and Prayer of Mending for Oracle. 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 going out. 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 situation 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 has 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.

A notable new talent is Ultimate Serenity which replaces Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify. This talent aims to land somewhere between 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. Some minor changes have been made to various talents including Body and Soul which can also trigger from Prayer of Mending, and Shackle Undead which now works on Abberations alongside Undead.