There are a few things that have been desired by the players ever since WoW began. Rideable pets for hunters, player housing, guild banks (now in the game! yay!), and additional classes (one coming in Wrath of the Lich King) are a few examples. Here's one more, close to my heart since I have a Holy priest main: Holyform. The dark side of the Priest talent tree has a form; why not the light side? It would supplement our legendarily bad 21/31/41-point talents with something that was truly compelling for the dedicated healer, and of course it would look awesome.
Well, Wowhead and WOWDB now have entries for a spell called, indeed, Holyform, as shown above right. It's hidden in the data files for the 2.4 patch; note that it is not currently trainable by priests on the PTRs. It could be there for any number of reasons: it could be an NPC spell, it could be an ability usable only during the Kil'Jaeden fight, like the Kael'Thas legendaries, or it could just be a cruel joke. The most compelling explanation I've seen is that Blizzard is distributing some of the Wrath patch files early, to lessen the initial download, and this is going to be the new 51-point Holy talent. Please let that be it. Update: comments are reporting that this is an NPC spell in Sunwell. Too bad.
So you're rolling your first character... or perhaps rolling the latest in a series of alts. And for some crazy reason you've picked a Priest. Maybe you just like being blamed for every instance wipe in every group you'll be in. Maybe you enjoy being yelled at for not healing in a battleground when you're at the top of the DPS chart. Maybe you enjoy leveling at an insanely slow pace (at least until you get in the level 40 range). (Okay, it's really not all that bad -- at least not all the time. After all, I've leveled two priests to level 60 and beyond and I'm a perfectly rational, sane individual. Right?) I couldn't say why you rolled a priest -- I'm only here to help you along the way. So read on as we discuss the journey from level 1 to level 15.
If this sounds like fun to you but you haven't yet rolled your priest, check out the last episode of Spiritual Guidance, where we talk more realistically about whether Priest is the class for you and cover picking the right race for your newbie-to-be.
Every Saturday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
There are lots of reasons you might want to play a Priest. Perhaps you like the idea of smiting your enemies (sure, you can pick fights with any class, but you have to be a Priest to do any literal smiting). Perhaps you want to melt faces (no class does it better!). Perhaps you want to help your groupmates by providing healing (Vampiric Embrace is healing, right?). Or maybe you enjoy the god-like feeling of being completely in control of which members of your party live or die.
Before we talk about the best way to level a new Priest, however, let's talk about what Priests can do -- and whether the class is right for you. Then, if you're really convinced a Priest is the way to go, we'll talk about picking the right race (with race-specific class skills, this can be an important choice for a Priest) and getting started.
Every Sunday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here! One of the first things you'll notice is I'm neither Eliah or Elizabeth. My name doesn't even begin with "E". It's probably not even be Sunday, either. Crazy? Yep, but that's how we roll.
It's been quite the year for Priests, just like most other classes. About this time last January, the big ol' Burning Crusade expansion rolled out, essentially taking WoW's most loved clothies (ok, maybe just mine) and turning them on their ears. Been a while since you thought about BC: The Early Months? Let's take a stroll down memory lane...
As you might expect for someone who writes a Priest column, my main is a priest. I've been Holy for quite some time (enough that it's starting to make me feel old), and I feel like I know the Holy game play style pretty well. I even leveled Holy from 60 to 70, shortly after Burning Crusade came out, and it was a blast. And I love healing. But lately I've been hearing the call of the dark side: I want to play Shadow.
But this leaves me with a conundrum. I can't really get my Shadow on without abandoning (albeit temporarily) my Holy nature. Or can I? After all, we get up to 50 characters per account; there's no reason I can't delete one of those level one alts I made to talk to somebody for a story and make a brand-new priest, destined for Shadow, instead!
So that's just what I did. I had other motivations, of course; just wanting to play Shadow probably wouldn't be enough to get me to trudge through the 1–60 levels yet again. I've never played much Horde, so I'd like to see how the other half lives a bit. I've never played a Blood Elf at all, and I'd always heard those zones were well designed. And I wanted to hang out with some people on their server, which would mean rolling a new character anyway. Several factors conspired, and Hieronymus of Draenor was born (that link is giving me an error right now, but I assume it'll go away).
Every Sunday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
This week, we've got a special episode co-authored by your two Spiritual Guidance writers, Eliah Hecht and Elizabeth Harper. In the course of emails around the WoW Insider bullpen, we noticed that there were some differing perspectives on the utility of Blizzard's favorite Priest stat, Spirit. So we decided to sit down and hash it out the old-fashioned way: an IM debate. Both of our mains are priests in a similar situation. We're Holy-specced and raiding somewhere around the middle of Karazhan. So considering how similar are gameplay niches are, it's interesting to note the differences in our opinions. On with the show, and do let us know what your take is.
Eliah Hecht: So. It's going to be a complicated issue, because you've got a lot of different kinds of priests to worry about...Holy vs Shadow, leveling vs raiding vs PvP...My take on it is that Spirit is paramount for all leveling specs, and for raiding holy priests, and not so much for the other spots on the grid.
Elizabeth Harper: See, I'm of a couple of minds on it for leveling. On one hand, you get more benefit from less spirit at lower levels, so leveling, I think you get more out of it. But it's still an issue of practicality -- leveling up, i'll grab spirit if it happens to be on something I otherwise want. But the size of mana and health pools is still more important. (And if you have spirit tap, a little bit of spirit can go a long way)
There's a lot of content in World of Warcraft that you can do all by yourself -- you can easily get to level 70 without ever joining a party. But there's plenty of content along the way that can only be accomplished in groups, and group play is, well, a bit different from solo play. To succeed solo, all you really have to do is kill your target before it kills you -- but in a group, every player has a specific role to fufill to make the group as a whole function. You've got someone to absorb damage (your tank, decked out in gear to help him or her mitigate damage), several someones to do damage (your DPS, which can come from nearly any class), and someone to prevent everyone from dying in the meantime (your healer). And regardless of whether you're healing or flaying minds, you're cloth-wearer who can't take a lot of hits. What does this mean? Well, my friends, it means you need to know a little something about keeping monsters on your tank and off you. And you're in the right place, because today we're going to talk about threat.
If you've ever taken the time to peak on the official forums, you've probably noticed more than a few complaints about Priest healing ability and viability. And you have to admit that when one of the game's top guilds tells us that they bring priests to their raids for DPS, something must be wrong with the class that Blizzard calls "the masters of healing." However, I take the opinion that there's nothing wrong with the priest's healing abilities -- except that perhaps Blizzard's raiding strategy (or players' drive to min/max to beat it). Priests heal differently than paladins, druids, and shamans -- but I can't honestly say they're bad healers. Before saying that one class is the best or worst at healing, I think we all have to ask ourselves what kind of healers we are.
Every Sunday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
The archaic stuff out of the way, in part two of this two-part series we turn to the hot new stuff: the Priest sets from the Burning Crusade. BC made one tremendous improvement in the way class sets were handled: raid gear for off-specs. For us men and women of the cloth, that means Tier 4, 5, and 6, as well as Arena gear, are available in versions befitting both healing and shadow priests. As before, I'll start with the epic raid gear, T4, T5, and T6, pictured above from left to right. They really went crazy with the shoulders, didn't they?
Every Sunday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
Priests are an unusual class, because they're the only class in the game that has different skills available to them depending on their race. Each race gets two racial skills, most of which are minor, making minimal impact on your gameplay, but some of them are great skills that you'll find exceptionally helpful as you level up -- or at end game. The fact that some of them are useful and others are -- well, to be nice we'll just call them "less useful" -- is a point of contention amongst Priests. Priests who picked a race with a poor selection of racial skills complain that the skills are unbalanced, while Priests who selected a race with useful skills say that complainers simply lacked foresight when first creating their character.
Today we're going to look over the different racial abilities available to Priests and discuss whether the selection is really fair to Priest players.
Every Sunday (yes, we've moved), Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
Alright, I admit it. This post is just an excuse to look at all the pretty armor we priests get. And if you ask me, we get some of the best sets -- reminiscent of neither Power Rangers nor...um...whatever this is, priestly gear tends to look priestly. In this two-part series I'll be taking a look at our class sets, from Dungeon Set 1 (a.k.a. Tier 0) right up through Tier 6, with stops to comment on the graphics, stats, and set bonuses. This post will cover the PvE sets prior to the Burning Crusade, and part two will take on the rest of them (including Arena gear).
Every Saturday (usually), Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
Priest is, in all honesty, my favorite class to play. I couldn't quite explain why, except to say that I've tried other classes and none of them resonate with me on the same level that Priests do. However, the class isn't perfect -- I've got to say that there are some legitimate concerns about the classes' abilities. So today we're going to discuss the Priest's top class concerns.
Every Saturday (usually), Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
Healing spells are to a priest what fire spells are to a mage. Other schools tend to be more efficient in raids (shadow for priests, frost for mages) and are generally thought superior for leveling, but when you think of a priest, you probably think of heals first, just like when I think of a mage, the first thing I think of is a nice fat pyroblast headed right for me. So it comes as no surprise that we have quite a variety of heals.
Every Saturday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
This post may not be terribly useful to old-school Priests -- it's for up and coming priests or people who have been through one too many attempted instance runs that were abandoned after an hour of "need healer for Ramparts, PST!" (That's the reason I decided to roll my first Priest -- we could never find healers for our groups!) And, while I'm certainly a fan of the class, I'll be the first to say that they aren't the easiest class to level. But there are some tricks and talents that can make the process easier for you -- and, since I'm in the middle of leveling up my third Priest, that's what we're going to talk about today.
Every Saturday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
Priests always seems to be in demand. Exploring or questing in any area of the game, at any level, whether Horde or Alliance, a Priest player can expect to be pestered with whispers for instance runs. Some polite, some demanding, some who need to be put on our ignore lists, and some who don't make any sense at all, but seem to be asking for something. What's a Priest to do when being asked to go here, there, or elsewhere? And what's a player to do when they need a Priest's help? Well, I'm going to try to explain here, in something of a how-to guide for grouping, for the Priests and non-Priests among us. So whether this is your first time partying with a Priest or your hundredth -- keep reading. There's plenty to know about how to act in a group, and we're only going to scratch the surface.
There are a few things that have been desired by the players ever since WoW began. Rideable pets for hunters, player housing, guild banks (now in the game! yay!), and additional classes (one coming in Wrath of the Lich King) are a few examples. Here's one more, close to my heart since I have a Holy priest main: Holyform. The dark side of the Priest talent tree has a form; why not the light side? It would supplement our legendarily bad 21/31/41-point talents with something that was truly compelling for the dedicated healer, and of course it would look awesome.
Every Saturday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with 
As you might expect for someone who writes a Priest column, my main is a priest. I've been Holy for quite some time (enough that it's starting to 
_thumbnail.jpg "Flash Wand")
