Holy Priest Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Shadowlands 9.2.5

Welcome to our Holy Priest Rotation section. Here you will learn everything you need to know about properly healing as a Holy Priest in Raiding and Mythic+ scenarios.

If the rotations below seem overwhelming at first, you might benefit from checking out our Easy Mode page where the simpler rotation will get you started until you are comfortable learning to heal as Holy Priest in more depth.

The content on this page is purely PvE-related. If you are looking for PvP Rotation tips, please visit our PvP page below.

Healing is primarily based on your ability to react to the damage that the group takes, and as such, there is no set rotation. Rather, you must understand what spells are best suited to the different situations that can occur during an encounter.

Below, you will find the optimal use of your abilities, and it will be up to you to then combine them efficiently in combat.

Raid healing is primarily focused around group healing and priority triage on targets that may be in danger of death. A lot of your decision making will be based on incoming damage and the cooldowns you have available. It is better to use your cooldowns early and often, than it is to save them for unknown future situations.

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 working through the priority list and skip an item if there is likely to be significant overheal.

Holy Priest Covenant abilities do not change our healing rotation, instead they should be used in a situation that makes the most sense depending on which covenant you have chosen. To read more about each Covenant ability and situations theyare best used, check out the Holy Priest Covenant page and for fight-specific tips, the Holy Priest Sanctum of Domination page.

• Flash Concentration Legendary Power.
• Benediction talent.
• Halo talent.
• Divine Star talent.
• Holy Word: Salvation talent.

1. ** Holy Word: Salvation when the majority of the raid is heavily injured.
2. ** Divine Hymn when the majority of the raid is heavily injured.
3. Holy Word: Sanctify when a cluster of your raid is injured.
4. Holy Word: Serenity on an injured ally.
5. Circle of Healing on cooldown when at least 4 allies are injured.
6. Prayer of Mending on cooldown, usually on the active tank.
7. Halo when most of your raid is injured.
8. Divine Star when most of your raid is injured.
9. Flash Heal for emergency triage on an ally near death.
10. Prayer of Healing for general purpose raid healing.
11. Heal for general purpose raid and single-target healing.
12. Flash Heal for emergency triage on an ally near death, general purpose raid or single-target healing until you reach 5 stacks of Flash Concentration.
13. Heal for emergency triage on an ally near death, general purpose raid or single-target healing.
14. Shadow Word: Pain an enemy when no healing is required and the enemy will not die in 16 seconds.
15. Smite an enemy when no healing is required.

**Note on raid cooldowns: While Divine Hymn and Holy Word: Salvation are listed on the rotation above, you will typically coordinate your raid cooldown usage with your raid leader, healing officer or healing team to try and maximise their usage to counter dangerous parts of the encounter without overlapping or wasting them.

Be mindful when using Halo as this spell not only heals your allies, but also damages enemies it hits. On some encounters you may have dangerous enemies that are being crowd-controlled and the damage from Halo may break this crowd-control.

Patch 9.2 introduced a tier set with 2-set and 4-set bonuses.

• 2-set Holy Priest 2-Piece — Your Holy Words begin Divine Conversation, increasing the cooldown reduction of your next Holy-Word-affecting spell by 15 sec.
• 4-set Holy Priest 4-Piece — Divine Conversation increases the effectiveness of your next Holy-Word-affecting spell by 60%.

Optimising usage of the tier set revolves around using a priority system to make sure you are consuming the Divine Conversation buff with the most appropriate spell to get the most out of the 15 second cooldown reduction and the additional healing bonus.

Cast Priority with Divine Conversation buff and Flash Concentration

1. Holy Word: Sanctify
2. Heal
3. Holy Word: Serenity

Cast Priority with Divine Conversation buff and Harmonious Apparatus or Divine Image

1. Holy Word: Sanctify
2. Circle of Healing
3. Prayer of Healing (with Prayer Circle buff up)
4. Prayer of Mending
5. Holy Word: Serenity or Prayer of Healing without Prayer Circle buff up

Regardless of the legendary you are using avoid accidentally consuming Divine Conversation with a Smite cast as it will consume it with no meaningful healing benefit.

Flash Concentration slightly changes your rotation. Ideally with Flash Concentration, you have the Trail of Light and Surge of Light talents. You then prioritise casting Heal as your primary filler spell, replacing Flash Heal and Prayer of Healing. You should only cast Flash Heal often enough to prevent the Flash Concentration debuff from dropping off. For more information on properly using Trail of Light check out the section below on Tier 1 Talents

When playing with Harmonious Apparatus, your primary method of raid healing is to leverage the periods of time your Prayer Circle buff is active to squeeze in as many Prayer of Healing as needed. This also means where possible you should look to use other spells prior to casting your first Circle of Healing. For example, if you have Holy Word: Serenity off cooldown and the raid takes heavy damage, try to use Serenity before Circle of Healing, to allow for more Prayer of Healing casts during your Prayer Circle window.

This amount of casting is obviously not sustainable all encounter, so you should look to continue to utilise Prayer of Mending and Smite to stay active during periods of low damage.

Dungeon healing is primarily focused around Heal and Flash Heal healing multiple allies at once through the Trail of Light talent, and supplementing this with regular use of your cooldown-based abilities. A lot of your decision making will be based on incoming damage and the cooldowns you have available. It is better to use your cooldowns early and often than it is to save them for unknown future situations.

Below is the priority you should follow in dungeons. 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 overhealing.

• Flash Concentration Legendary Power.

1. Holy Word: Serenity on an injured ally.
2. Holy Word: Sanctify when most of your group is injured.
3. Flash Heal if your stacks of Flash Concentration are about to drop off or until you reach 5 stacks.
4. Flash Heal for emergency triage on an ally near death.
5. Heal for emergency triage on an ally near death.
6. Divine Star if talented, when most of your group is injured.
7. Circle of Healing when most of your group is injured.
8. Heal for regular healing, utilising Trail of Light to heal multiple allies.
9. Prayer of Healing when your whole group is injured and no individual is in danger of death.
10. Prayer of Mending when little healing is required.
11. Renew while moving and healing is required.
12. Shadow Word: Pain an enemy when no healing is required and the enemy will not die in 16 seconds.
13. Smite an enemy when no healing is required.

For heavy single-target damage, use Apotheosis with Heal and Holy Word: Serenity as it comes off cooldown. If this is still not enough, you also have access to Guardian Spirit.

For heavy AoE damage, use Apotheosis with Heal, utilising the multi-target healing that Trail of Light provides to keep your group alive. If this is still not enough, you also have access to Divine Hymn.

For heavy single-target damage, use Apotheosis with Heal, Flash Heal and Holy Word: Serenity as it comes off cooldown. If this is still not enough, you also have access to Guardian Spirit.

For heavy AoE damage, use Apotheosis with Prayer of Healing and Holy Word: Sanctify to keep your group alive. If this is still not enough, you also have access to Divine Hymn.

Dealing 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. Smite is your main damage dealing ability, costs very little Mana and can proc Surge of Light, if talented.

Damage spell priority for 4+ targets:

1. Divine Star
2. Holy Fire
3. Shadow Word: Pain (if the target will survive for the full duration)
4. Holy Nova

Damage spell priority for 1-3 targets:

1. Holy Fire
2. Shadow Word: Pain (if the target will survive for the full duration)
3. Holy Word: Chastise (if you do not need the incapacitate/stun for cc)
4. Divine Star
5. Smite

Shadow Word: Death can be cast as extra damage while on the move in place of Smite on the priority list, just be mindful it does do damage back to you when cast. If the target is below 20% health, Shadow Word: Death has a similar priority to Holy Word: Chastise.

When playing as Kyrian in dungeons, especially with Spheres' Harmony or Memory of Unity, it is important to try and maximise your usage of Boon of the Ascended. You will primarily use this for damage, and you should ideally be using it in larger packs as often as possible.

Before casting Boon of the Ascended make sure you have an enemy targeted to maximise the benefit from the Mikanikos Soulbind's Effusive Anima Accelerator. During Boon you should be near melee range of the pack, prioritise Ascended Blast on cooldown (5 stacks), and fill in-between with Ascended Nova (1 stack per enemy hit). This maximises your Boon of the Ascended buff, which not only increases the size of the Ascended Eruption at the end of your Boon, but also grants up to 60 seconds of cooldown reduction on Boon from Spheres' Harmony/ Memory of Unity. Combined with the Mikanikos soulbind, you can reduce the cooldown of Boon by up to 2 minutes, potentially reducing it to a 1-minute cooldown. Couple this with the Decrypted Urh Cypher from the Encrypted affix and you can cast Boon very often.

As a Holy Priest, you have three main cooldowns. Here is how you should use them:

Divine Hymn will heal all raid members within 40 yards over 8 seconds, and also increase the healing they receive during that time by 10%.

Keep in mind that the spell is channeled, so you cannot perform other actions while casting it.

Generally, your raid leader will assign you to use this spell at a certain time in the fight, in order 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.

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 who is about to take a large amount of damage. You should make sure to communicate with the tank and other healers, in order 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 have otherwise 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.

Symbol of Hope is a unique cooldown that provides all healers in your raid with Mana when you channel it. It also reduces the remaining cooldown on a defensive ability for all targets.

The amount of Mana gained by each target is dependent on how much Mana they are missing so this ability is often best used toward the end of encounters. Exceptions to this are when you are asked to use it earlier in order to help members of your group have their personal cooldowns available again much sooner.

If you are unsure of when to use it, a general rule of thumb is to use it either when your remaining Mana is below 20% or the boss' remaining hitpoints are below 20%

The above information should allow you to perform at a high level as a Holy Priest. In the following sub-sections, we offer a few additional pieces of information and we expand on some concepts further.

Heal and Flash Heal have a passive ability that reduces the remaining cooldown of Holy Word: Serenity by 6 seconds. Prayer of Healing reduces the remaining cooldown of Holy Word: Sanctify by 6 seconds and Renew reduces the remaining cooldown of Holy Word: Sanctify by 2 seconds.

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.

When talented into Trail of Light, your goal should be to move your healing from Heal and Flash Heal around to get the maximum benefit from the trail that is left behind. Repeatedly healing the same person with Heal or Flash Heal will cause the previous target to receive Trail of Light healing for each cast. This means your priority should always be to move on to a new target once your Flash Heal or Heal target has reached 75%+ hitpoints. This way the Trail healing from your new Heal or Flash Heal casts will top up the remaining amount of their missing health.

The goal is to pay attention to who your previous target was so that when they are fully healed up you move along to the next player. Below are some examples on spell usage showing how Trail of Light would heal. For the sake of keeping the explanations concise, using Heal or Flash Heal is referred to as "Heal/FH"

An example of how Trail of Light behaves when you are healing different people:

1. You last used Heal/FH on The Tank
2. You Heal/FH Player 1, Trail of Light also heals The Tank.
3. You Heal/FH Player 2, Trail of Light also heals Player 1.
4. You Heal/FH Player 3, Trail of Light also heals Player 2.
5. You Heal/FH The Tank, Trail of Light also heals Player 3.

As you can see, Trail of Light is only ever present on one player at once, and simply follows the last person you cast Heal or Flash Heal on that wasn't your current target:

1. You last used Heal/FH on The Tank
2. You Heal/FH Player 1, Trail of Light also heals The Tank.
3. You Heal/FH Player 2, Trail of Light also heals Player 1.
4. You Heal/FH Player 2, Trail of Light also heals Player 1.
5. You Heal/FH Player 2, Trail of Light also heals Player 1.

These two examples of how Trail of Light works should help explain why it is often ideal to cast Heal or Flash Heal on new targets frequently to maximise the healing done by Trail of Light, and use Trail to top up higher health targets that are no longer in danger.

When talented into Guardian Angel, you should be aiming to use Guardian Spirit regularly throughout the encounter on high-damage targets, which are usually the tanks. The additional healing provided by having Guardian Spirit on them benefits not only their self healing, but also healing from other healers.

You should make sure to use a Surge of Light proc quickly if you reach 2 stacks, so that new charges are not wasted.

Prayer Circle does provide additional throughput in a shorter window but be mindful not to hold Circle of Healing unless you know there is about to be some raid-wide damage that would really benefit from Prayer Circle. It is still important for your throughput and efficiency to keep casting Circle of Healing as often as possible.

When using Benediction, it is important you focus on casting Prayer of Mending as often as possible to maximise the benefit this talent provides.

Both Halo and Divine Star when talented, should be cast as often as they will do group healing as they are both efficient and do a large amount of healing.

Holy Word: Salvation is a potent raid cooldown that heals everyone within 40 yards of you, as well as applying both renew and 2 stacks of Prayer of Mending to each. While this ability does have a very long base cooldown of 12 minutes, each of your Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify casts reduce its remaining cooldown by 30 seconds. Due to this interaction, it is important you aim to efficiently use those holy words as often as practical to lower the cooldown of Holy Word: Salvation when the remaining length of the encounter allows for a second cast

Apotheosis is a powerful cooldown, which you should save for moments of heavy damage. Below, we list the spell sequences you should use to maximise your healing-per-second.

To maximise your single-target HPS:

1. Cast Holy Word: Sanctify.
2. Cast Holy Word: Serenity.
3. Cast Flash Heal until Holy Word: Serenity comes off cooldown.
4. Cast Holy Word: Serenity and repeat step 3.

Note: With Flash Concentration you should cast Heal in place of Flash Heal, unless the Flash Concentration buff will expire soon.

To maximise your AoE HPS:

1. Cast Holy Word: Serenity.
2. Cast Holy Word: Sanctify.
3. Cast Prayer of Healing until Holy Word: Sanctify comes off cooldown.
4. Cast Holy Word: Sanctify and repeat steps 2 and onward.

Note: With Flash Concentration you should stick to the single-target HPS rotation above, and utilise the multi-target healing from Trail of Light to keep your group healthy.