Holy Priest Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Midnight (12.0.1)

Raid healing is primarily focused on group healing and priority triage on targets that may be in danger of death. The next section outlines the priority you should follow in raids. You should not cast a spell that will mostly overheal, so keep this in mind as you work through the priority list and skip an item if there is likely to be significant overheal. Apotheosis and Divine Hymn are powerful cooldowns you should be using regularly. For more information on how and when to use them, see the Major Cooldowns section below.

1. Holy Word: Sanctify when a cluster of your raid is injured.
2. Holy Word: Serenity on an injured ally.
3. Halo when most of your raid is injured.
4. Holy Word: Chastise to trigger Divine Image.
5. Prayer of Mending on cooldown, preferably on an injured ally.
6. Benediction on an injured ally.
7. Prayer of Mending on cooldown, usually on melee.
8. Flash Heal with 1 or more stacks of Surge of Light
9. Prayer of Healing with 1 or more stacks of Surge of Light
10. Prayer of Healing for general purpose healing.
11. Flash Heal for healing one injured ally.
12. Prayer of Healing with 1 or more stacks of Lightweaver
13. Flash Heal with 0 stacks of Lightweaver
14. Holy Nova while moving or when little healing is required.
15. Smite an enemy when no healing is required.

Your general goal while healing is casting as many short-cooldown spells as possible. Holy Word: Serenity, Holy Word: Sanctify and Prayer of Mending despite all having a cooldown, should be thought of as rotational spells and cast almost as soon as they are available. Using lower priority spells when one of your Holy Words is available is considered a mistake as it wastes mana and does less healing. An example of this mistake would be casting Flash Heal instead of Holy Word: Serenity, or Prayer of Healing instead of Holy Word: Sanctify.

Some tips for utilising your talents:

• Flash Heal is used to generate Lightweaver stacks. These stacks should then be spent on Prayer of Healing for increased healing. Casting Flash Heal while at maximum Lightweaver stacks wastes mana and does less healing.
• With Oracle, Prayer of Mending should be cast on injured allies where possible to make the most of Prompt Prognosis. You should not delay your cast of Prayer of Mending if you are at maximum charges to wait for an injured ally, instead cast Prayer of Mending once to get it on cooldown immediately.
• With Archon, Halo should be paired with your major cooldowns Apotheosis and Divine Hymn as much as possible. See the cooldowns section below for more details on maximising their usage.
• With Archon's talent Spiritwell, you should aim to use all of your Surge of Light procs on Prayer of Healing. This maximises the healing output from Empowered Surges and also makes the most of the mana reduction from Surge of Light.
• Empyreal Blaze increases your damage output significantly at the cost of fewer Surge of Light procs due to Holy Fire being unable to trigger Surge of Light. You should stick to Smite as your primary damage dealing ability if healing is your primary focus.

When your focus is raid healing, your only damage spells should be Smite or Holy Nova. They both cost very little Mana and have a chance to generate Surge of Light procs. Surge of Light procs are not only a healing increase, but also assist with movement and mana conservation. If an encounter demands damage over healing, and you find Mana isn't a problem then you can go ahead and use the full damage rotation.

Dealing with damage while in dungeons is often overlooked by healers. While any additional damage is beneficial to your group; it should not come at the cost of keeping your group alive, which is your main priority. Holy Fire is your main damage dealing ability when paired with Burning Vehemence and Empyreal Blaze.

Damage spell priority:

1. Halo
2. Holy Fire
3. Holy Word: Chastise
4. Holy Nova (4+ enemies)
5. Smite (1-3 enemies)
6. Holy Nova
7. Smite

Apotheosis is a major cooldown you want to be pressing as often as possible. There are several talents that improve Apotheosis:

• Eternal Sanctity increases duration of Apotheosis.
• Divinity improves the burst healing of Apotheosis making it more potent and increasing your mobility.
• Divine Image has no direct interactions, but more Holy Words make Divine Image a more effective talent.
• Archon's Perfected Form increases healing done while Apotheosis is active.
• Archon's Sustained Potency is great at granting an extra few seconds of Apotheosis uptime per minute.

Because Apotheosis also increases the Holy Word cooldown reduction gained from casting abilities, it amplifies the priority of some spells during Apotheosis to help get Holy Words back off cooldown quickly:

• Prayer of Mending - When talented into Voice of Harmony and Epiphany, Prayer of Mending becomes a high priority cast. Due to the number of Holy Word casts during Apotheosis, resets on Prayer of Mending cooldowns are frequent.
• Flash Heal - When talented into Archon's Energy Cycle and with a Surge of Light proc, Flash Heal is a high priority due to the additional cooldown reduction.
• Halo - Due to Archon's Manifested Power, Halo either just before, or during Apotheosis is important for the additional Surge of Light procs. This is in addition to the extra healing from Archon's Resonant Energy.

While not always possible due to how things line up, an ideal usage of Apotheosis with Archon would look like:

1. Holy Word: Sanctify - to get it off cooldown.
2. Holy Word: Serenity - to get it off cooldown.
3. Prayer of Mending - to get it off cooldown.
4. Halo - to start generating Surge of Light procs and start stacking Resonant Energy.
5. Apotheosis - getting back a charge of each Holy Word.
6. Power Infusion - if you don't need to use it at a specific time.
7. Resume normal rotation.

Divine Hymn is a major cooldown that heals all nearby allies, pulsating healing as it channels. It is best used when your group is taking a large amount of damage and you need to heal everyone quickly. Keep in mind that the spell is channelled, so you cannot perform other actions while casting it.

When raiding, your raid leader will generally assign you to use this spell at a certain time in the fight to counter a heavy burst of damage. If this is the case, make sure your spell is available at that time. Otherwise, you should simply try to find a moment when using this spell is beneficial. Most often, this will happen during a period of very intense raid damage.

While doing Mythic+ dungeons, Divine Hymn is commonly used just before damage hits your group, as the healing it does isn't strong enough to completely counter the highest AoE damage abilities. This is typically timed so the last second or two of Divine Hymn is while your group is taking damage. That way you fully stack up the Divine Hymn buff on all of your allies, but are still able to triage heal anyone near death.

Guardian Spirit is one of the most useful tools you can bring to a raid. Using it places a buff on the target, which lasts for 10 seconds and increases all healing received by the target by 60%. If the target receives a killing blow during this time, they will not die and instead be healed for 40% of their maximum health, consuming the Guardian Spirit effect.

While you can use this on any raid member who is about to die and whom you have no other means of saving, it is by far better used on a tank that is about to take a large amount of damage. You should make sure to communicate with the tank and other healers to ensure that you do not use multiple powerful cooldowns at the same time.

You can also use this spell to allow tanks (or other players) to survive an ability that should otherwise have been avoided, either as part of your raid's strategy or to recover from a mistake.

Keep in mind that your raid leader may assign you to use this spell for a specific event in the encounter.

Casting your Holy Words as often as possible is an important part of playing Holy Priest. Each Holy Word gains cooldown reduction when an associated spell is cast, allowing you to cast them even more frequently:

• Holy Word: Serenity - 6 seconds each from Flash Heal.
• Holy Word: Sanctify - 6 seconds from Prayer of Healing.
• Holy Word: Chastise - 4 seconds each from Smite and Holy Nova.

When talented into Voice of Harmony you also gain cooldown reduction from additional spells:

• Holy Word: Serenity - 4 seconds from Prayer of Mending.
• Holy Word: Sanctify - 4 seconds from Halo.
• Holy Word: Chastise - 4 seconds from Holy Fire.

When talented into Ultimate Serenity, anything that would ordinarily trigger cooldown reduction for Holy Word: Sanctify instead reduces the cooldown of Holy Word: Serenity.

There are multiple ways to further increase the cooldown reduction you gain from casting spells:

• Apotheosis - While this buff is active, you gain 3 times as much cooldown reduction to all Holy Words.
• Light of the Naaru - When talented, you gain 10% increased cooldown reduction to all Holy Words per point.
• Archons Energy Cycle - When talented, provides Holy Word cooldown reduction when consuming Surge of Light.

While you do not need to actively manage this mechanic in any way, it is very important that you are aware of its existence and that you constantly monitor the remaining cooldowns of your Holy Words so that you can use them as soon as they become available.

Mastery: Echo of Light is a passive ability that causes your direct healing spells to leave a heal over time effect on the target. This effect lasts for 4 seconds and heals for a percentage of the original heal. The amount healed is increased by your Mastery stat. Successive applications of this HoT stack and will extend the duration of the HoT for a short period. Mastery healing is never lost by successive casts on the same target, the additional casts just make the Echo of Light healing ticks stronger.

There is no benefit in tracking this buff, as there are no interactions with it worth cluttering your UI with the buff.

Mastery: Echo of Light also increases the amount that your Renews tick for.

The talent Prismatic Echoes slightly increases the healing Mastery does, while also increasing the healing done by Renew.

When talented into Divine Image, your playstyle shouldn't really change whether or not you have a Naaru active. You still want to emphasize casting whatever suits your current situation, and the Naaru will mirror that appropriately. The only exception to this is Holy Word: Chastise, which can be used right before periods of intense healing to provide an added burst.

The only worthwhile minor playstyle adjustment that can be made to better utilise Divine Image, is to ensure you try to cast Prayer of Mending on a tightly grouped clump of allies, as the bounce radius of Blessed Light is quite small. This is most often the melee DPS in your raid, and is not a significant enough gain to worry about if doing so will delay your Prayer of Mending casts.

Below shows you most of the common spells that will trigger Divine Image to try and cast a similar spell.

Your Spell	Divine Image	Your Spell	Divine Image
Flash Heal Holy Word: Serenity Desperate Prayer	Healing Light	Prayer of Healing Holy Word: Sanctify Halo Divine Hymn	Dazzling Lights
Prayer of Mending	Blessed Light	Smite Holy Fire Holy Word: Chastise Shadow Word: Death	Searing Light
-	Tranquil Light
Holy Nova	Light Eruption

In Midnight, we gained the Benediction Apex Talent, which provides the following benefits as you put points into it:

• Benediction (1 point): Prayer of Mending bounces periodically transform your next cast of Flash Heal into Benediction, increasing the healing done and triggering a Cosmic Ripple.
• Benediction (2 points): Increases all healing done, and further increases the healing of Cosmic Ripple.
• Benediction (1 point): Causes each pulse of Divine Hymn to trigger Cosmic Ripple. During Apotheosis, Flash Heal is upgraded to Benediction.

The periodic Benediction procs are triggered by regularly casting Prayer of Mending. When triggered, Flash Heal is replaced with Benediction for your next cast, increasing the healing done 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.

Lightweaver is fairly simple to use. The goal is to alternate between Flash Heal and Prayer of Healing, utilizing the buff that Flash Heal generates to buff the Prayer of Healing casts. Ideally, you shouldn't be casting Prayer of Healing without having the Lightweaver buff active. Also, be mindful as Archon with Spiritwell talented to try and keep a charge of Lightweaver so you can consume your next Surge of Light with a Lightweaver buffed Prayer of Healing.

Miracle Worker provides you with an additional charge of both Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify. When playing with Miracle Worker, you still want to avoid capping at 2 charges to maximize the cooldown reduction provided by casting your other spells. Exceptions to this are when there is large amounts of damage upcoming in the very near future, in which case it can be beneficial to sit on 2 charges for a very short period of time.

Epiphany has a lot of potential that is often missed by many Holy Priests. Ensuring you have a good way to track when Prayer of Mending is ready is essential to maximising the value of the talent.

You can further maximise the value of Epiphany by trying to avoid casting two holy words ( Holy Word: Serenity or Holy Word: Sanctify) back-to-back when you get an Epiphany proc, and casting Prayer of Mending instead.

For more information on the synergy between various talents, as well as deciding which talents you can change around and why, check out the Holy Priest Talents page.