Holy Priest Guide - Talents, Rotations, Races & More

As seen in the gear section, WoW Forever introduces Spell Power gear to lower Levels, which changes the Stat Priority compared to Classic. This should enable you to not only keep your Wand updated, but also your Weapon, which is the biggest source of Spell Power in a single gear slot.

Spirit

Spirit maximizes Health and Mana regeneration, syncing perfectly with talents like Spirit Tap and Meditation. It is your primary leveling stat, because it dramatically cuts down on your drinking time between combat encounters.

Spell Power

Spell Power increases the raw output of both your damaging spells and your heals. WoW Forever reduces base spell values and shifts that power directly into your gear. Hence why it is important to not neglect your Weapon, just because you are not playing a melee class.

Intellect

Intellect expands your total Mana pool, allowing you to cast more spells before running out of Mana. It also slightly raises your spell critical strike chance, ensuring your spells to occasionally heal or hit significantly harder.

MP5 (Mana per 5 seconds)

MP5 provides a steady source of Mana regeneration, even while actively casting spells in combat. But it is incredibly rare to find on low-level gear pieces.

Critical Strike Rating

Critical Strike Rating increases your chance to land a critical hit with any damaging spell or healing ability. Just like MP5, it is quite rare to be found on low-level gear.

Stamina

Stamina increases your maximum Health. It is often a neglected stat due to the power of Spirit (and Intellect) while leveling, but try to keep a healthy amount of Stamina as well, especially if you are playing on a PvP Server.

Stats such as Critical Strike Rating, Haste Rating, Hit Rating or MP5 are rarely found on lower Level gear pieces, so do not hesitate to equip pieces of gear with other valuable stats.

Endgame

Like most sections of this guide about endgame content, the Stat Priority could also be subject to change. Even though the chance of seeing changes here is quite low.

Healing Power

Healing Power increases the raw output of your heals. In previous versions of the game it did allow you to be really efficient by using lower ranked spells without much of a throughput penalty - also known as down ranking. It is still our best stat, even though down ranking has been changed by a lot in WoW Forever. Also adds ~0.35 Spell Power per Healing Power to your gear.

Spirit

Spirit is affecting your Mana regeneration in- and outside of combat and even while casting, if you are playing with the Meditation talent. This talent was changed in WoW Forever, now allowing 50% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting, compared to the 30% in WoW Classic. Spiritual Guidance will also benefit from Spirit.

MP5 (Mana per 5 Seconds)

MP5 provides a steady source of Mana regeneration, even while actively casting spells in combat. In the past this was ranked even higher than Spirit, but the already mentioned change to Meditation will most likely change that.

Haste Rating

Haste Rating reduces the cast time of all of your spells and also reduces the GCD (Global Cooldown). We will most likely not see a lot of gear with this stat, but it could end up being a desirable stat.

Critical Strike Rating

Critical Strike Rating increases your chance to land a critical hit with any damaging spell or healing ability. Talents like Inspiration will greatly benefit from this talent, but keep in mind the multiplier on critical strike heals is x1.5 instead of x2.0 as in later expansions of the game.

Intellect

Intellect expands your total mana pool, allowing you to cast more spells before running out of Mana. It also slightly raises your spell critical strike chance, ensuring your spells occasionally heal or hit significantly harder.

Stamina

Stamina elevates your maximum health pool, offering a crucial buffer against sudden bursts of damage from monsters or other players. It is often a neglected stat due to the power of Spirit (and Intellect), but try to keep a healthy amount of Stamina as well, especially if you are playing on a PvP Server.

Hit Rating is not specifically mentioned as it does not grant you any benefit as a healer in any PvE environment. Even if you are playing Dark Inspiration, you should prioritize the other stats listed above. It can be useful in PvP to increase your chances of landing a spell, especially for Psychic Scream when facing people buffed with Mark of the Wild or Shadow Protection, which should be dispelled to increase your chances of landing your Psychic Scream.

A lot of professions have been reworked, by either adding completely new items or changing already existing items. This will be covered in detail within the next section, but here is an overview of consumables to greatly increase your performance while leveling.

Buff Food: Cooking introduces new items like Roasted Boar Meat to increase experience gained from killing mobs by 5%, try to keep this food buff up throughout your leveling journey.

Elixirs: Minor Arcane Elixir, Elixir of Minor Spirit and Minor Mageblood Elixir are new as well and will turn into improved versions every few levels, keep an eye on those. Already existing elixirs like Elixir of Minor Fortitude or Elixir of Wisdom can be used as well, but the later one does not stack with Arcane Intellect.

Weapon Oils: Minor Wizard Oil and Minor Mana Oil have also been changed, make sure to check out other versions becoming available every few levels.

Armor Kits: While Armor Kits do not necessarily qualify as a consumable, it is still worth mentioning what has changed. Light Armor Kit, Medium Armor Kit, Heavy Armor Kit and Thick Armor Kit provide additional Stamina now, do not hesitate to put those on newly acquired gear you will wear for a couple of levels, such as rare quality Dungeon rewards.

And of course, the obligatory Water (and Food) and Healing/Mana Potions. Make sure to always carry a few of those, especially when heading to Dungeons. A well timed Mana Potion can save your group and prevents a painful wipe.

Endgame

Consumables play a major role in Vanilla WoW. Anyone who has played this version of the game knows about the shear amount of consumables available to players. The topic of consumables has been discussed by the Dev team, but no restrictions have been mentioned yet.

With no restrictions to consumables as of now, players might feel overwhelmed by the amount of them, especially if you are a new to the game. Here is a list of some of the new consumables introduced in WoW Forever:

Elixir of the Owl, Elixir of the Whale, Greater Mageblood Elixir, Greater Cleric's Elixir, Elixir of Greater Spirit, Elixir of Greater Intellect, Greater Arcane ElixirFlask of Natural Aggression, Major Mender's Potion, Sage's Tea and reworked Brilliant Mana Oil

Once we know more about potential restrictions, this section will be cleaned up. For now I would suggest the following consumables to be a part of every healers basic consumable list:

- Major Mana Potion and Dark Rune/Demonic Rune

- Sage's Tea

- Brilliant Mana Oil

- Elixir of the Whale/Greater Mageblood Elixir

- Greater Cleric's Elixir

We don't know yet which of the changed, new or old consumables do stack with each other. But without restrictions and no in particular order, here is an overview of what your guild could expect you to bring on top of the basic list provided above, depending on how dedicated the guild is:

Light Feather, Major Rejuvenation Potion, Runecloth Bandage, Free Action Potion, Limited Invulnerability Potion, Swiftness Potion, Restorative Potion, Potion of Poison Cleansing, Whipper Root Tuber, Goblin Sapper Charge, Masterwork Target Dummy, Thorium Grenade, Dense Dynamite, Snowball, Major Troll's Blood Elixir, Elixir of Greater Fortitude, Elixir of Greater Defense, Gift of Arthas, Greater Fire Protection Potion, Greater Shadow Protection Potion, Greater Frost Protection Potion, Greater Nature Protection Potion, Greater Arcane Protection Potion, Greater Holy Protection Potion, Kreeg's Stout Beatdown, Elixir of Shadow Power, Sheen of Zanza, Spirit of Zanza, Swiftness of Zanza, Flask of Distilled Wisdom, Magic Dust, Invisibility Potion, Lesser Invisibility Potion, Frozen Rune, Oil of Immolation

Compared to WoW Classic, professions now do offer a lot more in WoW Forever. Those changes can be experienced as early as around Level 5, when you get to the first leveling hub like Brill or Goldshire and have a chance to learn Cooking.

One of the major changes in the early levels is the addition of food that will increase your experience, provided by Cooking - such as Roasted Boar Meat. There are a ton of new Cooking recipes providing additional effects such as Spirit or Intellect on top of the 5% of experience gained from mob kills.

First Aid has also seen some reworking and will now allow you to craft Health Potions in addition to bandages (you will still need herbs). Despite the ability to heal yourself at any point, it is advised to keep this profession up to date as well - a fully channeled bandage will most likely top your Health and will keep you in the 5SR window.

Skinning is a valid option, especially for early levels to increase the amount of Gold you will have at your disposal. Often times players keep this profession to help them reach the required amount of Gold at Level 40 to buy a Mount by simply vendoring all the leather.

Mining and Engineering is also a popular combination while leveling. You get to gather ores and stones, turn them into bars or powder and then use all of those parts to level up Engineering. Bombs and dynamite will be very valuable while you are out in the world pulling 2-3 mobs a time. Plenty of other useful gadgets provided by Engineering. Most people will level this profession upon reaching Level 60 and won't trouble themselves to keep this up while leveling.

Enchanting can be tricky or time consuming to level while also leveling yourself. Hence why a lot of players usually pick up other professions while leveling. Keep in mind that items like Lesser Magic Wand, Greater Magic Wand and all the different versions of Weapon Oils, such as Minor Wizard Oil, are not bind on pickup.

Combining Enchanting with Tailoring is a valid option, though. Use the cloth you are looting to craft useful bags such as Red Linen Bag or Green Woolen Bag or craft gear pieces to then disenchant to level your Enchanting skill.

Tailoring provides plenty of newly added items in WoW Forever. It used to be a popular profession pick even in Classic WoW, for casters specifically. If you want to be able to constantly upgrade your characters gear by using the cloth you will find, Tailoring is an excellent pick to do that.

In the end it is more about personal preference and how much time you want to invest while leveling. If you do not care about your leveling efficiency and speed, it is perfectly fine to gather some rested experience in a capital city and level your professions and start crafting some of the desirable bind on pickup pieces Tailoring can offer, such as Novice Arcanist's Sash.

However if you do care, then Skinning might be the only profession you can keep up to date while trying to be as efficient as possible on your way to Level 60. Most people will end up changing and leveling their professions once they have hit Level 60 anyway.

Lesser Magic Wand on a fresh Server

Every time a new server launches, thousands of people start flooding the servers and try to hit Level 60 as fast as possible. I want to give you a brief overview of how you can craft your own Lesser Magic Wand way before Level 10. I will use Dun Morogh (Dwarf/Gnome Priest) as an example, but this can be applied to all the other races as well.

Learn Skinning by using Pelt Collecting for Beginners in your races starting zone. Acquire a Skinning Knife and an Apprentice's Skinning Satchel in the starting zone as well. Progress your way through the early levels until around Level 6 or 7 (don't even think about it) while skinning every beast you come across. You will also end up with a lot of meat you can turn into experience buff food. Once you have around 20 to 25 Light Leather (and maybe a few Ruined Leather Scraps), head your way to Ironforge.

Learn Leatherworking and start crafting Handstitched Leather Vest. Once you have crafted around 8 to 10 of those depending on how much Light Leather you had available, drop Leatherworking, learn Enchanting and disenchant those Handstitched Leather Vest. You can also drop Skinning instead of Leatherworking, but I prefer to keep Skinning (you should be way past skill 50 by now) and improve my Gold gains while leveling.

Now you basically pray to get a Lesser Magic Essence from all the disenchanted Handstitched Leather Vest. If you somehow have gotten unlucky and did not get a single Lesser Magic Essence, you can always disenchant the robe you have gotten from your Class Quest at around Level 5. Once you have gotten a Lesser Magic Essence you should have everything you need to craft your very own Lesser Magic Wand - congratulations!

Or you take the more relaxed approach and just wait until people start selling those in low level hubs such as Brill or Crossroads or buy one off the Auction House.

Endgame

Without knowing how professions will look like in endgame, even thought there has been a lot of data mining going on, you are essentially deciding whether you want to pick professions which are improving your gameplay or allowing you to farm materials and selling/using those. Crafting professions can be a great source of income as well, especially if you have access to desirable and rare recipes.

From a raiding perspective aiming for the most optimal combination of professions, you will most likely want to pick any combination of Engineering and either Tailoring or Enchanting, assuming there is going to be useful bind on pickup gear you can not buy.

Engineering has always been a no-brainer pick, if your goal is to play in a competitive way, for both PvE and PvP. Items like Gnomish Cloaking Device, Goblin Mortar and all kinds of gadgets like Advanced Target Dummy, Dense Dynamite or Thorium Grenade are not only helpful, but also fun to use.

Depending on whether items crafted by Tailoring will be bind on equip or bind on pickup, this profession could essentially be your second best pick. Think about Mooncloth gear in phase 1 of The Burning Crusade, if you have ever played it.

Enchanting will allow us to craft items like Torch of Light or Idol of Swiftness, which seem to be bind of equip. Without any perk that increases your characters performance, such as ring enchants, this profession might also be an optional pick as Tailoring, if all the gear is going to be bind on equip.

All the other crafting (and gathering) professions will most likely not offer anything useful from a Holy Priests point of view, that can not be provided by other players.

While talking about professions, it is also worth to mention all the buffs associated to each profession while sitting down at a campfire. Keep in mind that the buffs listed are the tier 1 buffs. While you are progressing your professions, you will be able to provide even better buffs than the ones listed.

Leatherworking - Camp Tent gives bonus rested experience, up to 5% of a level, as long as you have used up all your rested experience already. You can only get this buff once every hour.

Herbalism - Incense Candle gives Intellect, does not stack with Arcane Intellect.

Alchemy - Mana Well gives MP5, does not stack with Blessing of Wisdom.

Enchanting - Enchanted Lute gives Armor, all primary stats and resistances, does not stack with Mark of the Wild.

Tailoring - Faction Banner gives Spirit and apparently also stacks with Divine Spirit.

First Aid - First Aid Kit gives Stamina, but it does not stack with your own Power Word: Fortitude.

Until WoW Forever was on the horizon, the decision of which race to play was quite streamlined - Dwarf on the Alliance side and then Undead or Troll on the Horde side, if you wanted to play the best PvE (and PvP) race.

Now things have changed and all races will have access to Fear Ward (instead of Dwarf only) and Devouring Plague (instead of Undead only).

The difference between all the race specific abilities and their impact is now small enough to not feel pressured to pick that one race that used to be way ahead of others. Now it is more about which content you primarily want to focus on and what role you want to pursue.

Keep in mind: we do not know how endgame will look like and all the races except Dwarf and Troll are really close to each other in terms of performance. Some focus on healing throughput, while others are relying more on Mana preservation / regeneration.

Alliance

Gnome (new for Priests):

Eureka! lowers the Mana cost of your next 3 casts and adds 10% damage and healing. Expansive Mind gives 5% more maximum Mana and Escape Artist frees you from roots and snares (basically a mini Blessing of Freedom). Engineering Specialization has also been reworked.

Priest spells: Confounding Flash and Contingency Plan.

Human

Ruthless is a new racial trait that increases your Critical Strike Chance with all spells and attacks by 1%. Will to Survive is a new racial coming with WoW Forever. Some of you may have played Wrath of the Lich King and are familiar with the "PvP Trinket" racial that was added to humans - this racial is now available in a changed version and allows you to remove stun effects on a 3 minute Cooldown. While Perception remains unchanged, The Human Spirit offers a 10% increase to Spirit instead of 5%.

Priest spells: Divine Grace and Feedback.

Night Elf

Great for leveling thanks to Wisp Spirit and Quickness, a small movement speed bonus. Elune's Light is a really strong racial ability allowing you to improve your healing throughput for a short period of time. Shadowmeld has been reworked and is basically a Feign Death 2.0, it does not work like the Wrath of the Lich King or Retail version.

Priest spells: Starshards and Elune's Grace.

Dwarf

A strong leveling pick, with a damage bonus against beasts from Big Game Hunter. From a healing perspective @Artisan's Precision is not really going to improve your performance. Stoneform on the other hand is a great pick for any PvP activity, especially when encountering a Rogue using Blind. There is also Find Treasure which has been buffed in the last Beta build, but does not affect any combat activities.

Priest spells: Desperate Prayer and Chastise.

Horde

Undead

Both Cannibalize (also grants Mana on top of Health now) and Will of the Forsaken (still breaks Charm, Fear or Sleep effects, but does not grant immunity for a short period of time anymore) have been reworked. Touch of the Grave is a new racial ability and adds a little damage and survivability boost to your combat activities. Underwater Breathing is unchanged as well.

Priest spells: Touch of Weakness and Dark Sacrifice.

Troll

Berserking increase your spellcasting speed by 10% for 15 seconds, Beast Slaying helps against the many beasts you will encounter while leveling and Regeneration helps you with in combat health regeneration. Rapid Regeneration is the new racial ability and basically works like a bandage provided by First Aid. Overall pretty good racial traits for any class that lacks self healing like a Warrior or a Rogue, not that interesting for a Priest.

Priest spells: Hex of Weakness and Shadowguard.

Ranking

As mentioned before, most races available to a Priest are really close in terms of performance and as long as you are avoiding Dwarf and Troll, you will not regret your choice. This is obviously from a PvE endgame point of view.

We do not know yet how Raids are going to look like. If we are going to struggle with Mana despite chugging Potions on Cooldown and really high uptime on Dark Inspiration, Human or Undead might be the best race. If the changes to Meditation and introduction of Dark Inspiration are enough to never worry about Mana again, then Gnome and Night Elf will most likely outperform other races. We can only assume and rank each race based on two factors:

- Mana/Regeneration: Dark Sacrifice is a strong ability which also scales with your Spirit. The Human Spirit may not be changed or new, but will have a lot of impact in longer fights. Do not forget the passive impact of The Human Spirit to still increase your throughput if you are playing Spiritual Guidance.

- Throughput: abilities like Eureka! or Elune's Light can make the difference of keeping a player or even multiple people alive. Despite the x1.5 factor on critical heals (instead of x2.0), a Night Elf Priest using an one-use trinket like Zandalarian Hero Charm (as an example) combined with Elune's Light can top multiple groups in a short period of time.

Alliance

Gnome = Human > Night Elf > Dwarf

Anything but Dwarf is close in terms of overall performance and without knowing a lot about endgame content, this is the ranking based on what we know so far.

Horde

Undead > Troll

We have a clear winner on the Horde side due to Dark Sacrifice and Cannibalize.

Some useful tips & tricks have already been embedded into other sections of this guide. Nevertheless, here are some general tips & tricks to help you throughout your journey in Azeroth.

- Visit your trainer regularly. New spells and ranks appear every two levels starting at Level 2, but you do not need to rush back the moment you hit a new Level. Use an AddOn to display the spells available at each Level.

- Think twice before deleting or selling an item you might not be familiar with. In the mid to high Level range you will encounter items like Skull of Impending Doom or Nifty Stopwatch. Make sure to not sell those items and if you aren't sure, you can always take a look at one of the many databases and read some comments, if it is an item that already existed in previous versions of the game.

- Buff other people crossing your path, often times you will get buffed as well.

- Keep an eye on active campfires to refresh your current campfire buffs or even get new ones. This is also the perfect time to start crafting buff food via Cooking or bandages via First Aid.

- For some unknown reason, Dispel Magic can now be casted on a target even without a magic debuff present. Do not spam this ability if you are anticipating a debuff to land, you could potentially end up wasting a lot of Mana.

- Do not underestimate Mind Soothe. Often not utilized by Priest players, it can be quite handy to have bound to a hotkey you might not use that often.

- Use Mind Control to your advantage: if you are encountering a small group of mobs, especially elite mobs, use this ability on a humanoid and have the surrounding mobs kill the mind controlled mob for you. Once the first mob is dead, repeat with another humanoid. This trick allows you to take down groups of mobs you would otherwise struggle with or simply won't be able to kill.

- Shadow Word: Death is primarily a damage spell, but the backlash damage inflicted to your character can be used to break crowd control effects like an incoming Polymorph, if casted at the end of the enemies cast. You can also break Blind or even Psychic Scream (not guaranteed to break), if you manage to time your Shadow Word: Death cast right before the enemies spell lands.

Disclaimer

Keep in mind that anything written in this guide is subject to change, especially during the remaining days leading up the launch of WoW Forever. The Beta is not available anymore and it is very likely for Blizzard to implement changes before and after the game has launched. Even though this guide will be updated, there is always a chance for undocumented changes as well.

While we can already map out certain talent builds and anticipate the gameplay based on chosen talents, other aspects will be shaped during the first few weeks of reaching Level 60. BiS lists or information about professions and their impact on endgame content will be implemented during the upcoming weeks leading up to the release of the first raids.

Leveling Overview

Disclaimer: If you are looking for the most efficient and optimal way of leveling, especially if you are solo leveling for the majority of the time, you should be aware that Holy is going to be the weakest option out of the three Priest specs. Compared to a Discipline Priest, your playstyle will not change a lot, but you will be missing out on a couple of talents like Meditation and Mental Agility which greatly improve your Mana management. On the other hand, you will be picking up lot of healing-oriented talents which will increase your healing throughput, which is great if you plan on leveling with a bigger group or do a lot of Dungeons.

Despite often described as boring and stale, especially if you are not going for a deep Shadow build, the Priest class should not be underestimated when it comes to leveling. While other classes have to spend a fair amount of talent points, Priest has access to powerful talents the second you will unlock your first talent point at Level 10.

The efficient and safe playstyle combines strong defensive abilities such as Inner Fire and Power Word: Shield with offensive abilities like Shadow Word: Pain and using your Wand, which does a lot of damage in the early Levels, especially when combined with Wand Specialization.

Often people tend to rush one of the three talent trees to have access to talents that can be unlocked at Level 20, 30 and 40 - such as Penance, Prayer of Mending or Shadowform. But there are two talents you should always pick before advancing into any of the trees, even if your goal is to access Shadowform or Prayer of Mending as soon as possible.

Wand Specialization will buff your damage output by a lot and will be your number one source of damage while leveling.

Spirit Tap will allow you to navigate from mob to mob with almost no downtime, saving money you would otherwise spend on drinks while also increasing your leveling speed.

These two talents are available in the first tier of the Discipline and Shadow tree, making those easily accessible.

Even though Holy is the least desirable spec when it comes to leveling, your leveling playstyle will still be the same as Discipline - focus on preserving Mana while constantly using your Wand, at least if you are going for the most efficient way to level. Missing out on talents such as Meditation will have an impact on your efficiency, but maybe you want to grab Holy Nova (the only AoE spell available to a Priest, if you don't count Devouring Contagion) or Prayer of Mending (new to WoW Forever) as soon as possible, which is more than fine.

Dungeons give far less experience in WoW Forever than they did in WoW Classic, hence the leveling parts of this guide are built around questing and solo or small group leveling including the occasional Dungeon run. Healing Dungeons is still fine in any spec until the late 50s, but if you are also planning on leveling in a small group thanks to the improved Quest drop behavior, you may as well pick one of the two healing builds to support your group as much as you can.

Class Trainer

While leveling your first character it is also advised to keep an eye on your Gold. You will want to buy your Mount as soon as possible, because Priest does not have any movement speed abilities - except Quickness, if you are playing a Night Elf Priest.

Therefore, it is advised to skip certain abilities provided by your Class Trainer. I could see Blizzard lowering the cost of the Mount and needed training at Level 40, but it is still reasonable to filter out certain spells.

Mana Burn - usually does not have much of a use in any PvE environment, can be skipped, even if you are on a PvP server.

Holy Fire - a spell you will rarely use during your leveling journey. The long cast time and mediocre scaling makes it an easy choice to not learn any rank of and save your Gold.

Mind Soothe is one of the spells I will list here as well. If you are a new player and aren't familiar with this spell, you could get away with not buying this spell off of your Class Trainer. For experienced players who have made use of this spell in the past, I would suggest to not save Gold on.

Shackle Undead could be skipped as well, but will also has its niche uses just like Mind Soothe.

Mind Vision - rank 1 of this spell is pretty underwhelming. Rank 2 is available at Level 44, so it is advised to wait on learning both ranks until you have been able to buy your Mount.

Past Level 10 you will most likely use Smite way less often than before. You may not need to have the highest available rank trained, but remember to keep it somewhat up to date. Whenever you encounter a mob that is immune to your Wands school of magic, you have nothing to use except your two Shadow spells. One of them is a DoT, the other one is linked to an 8 second Cooldown if not talented - keep that in mind.

Make sure to keep your core abilities such as Power Word: Shield, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Pain and Renew up to date.

Leveling 1-30

2/2 Wand Specialization - your Wand is a major part of your damage profile and costs no Mana to use. At Level 10 and 11 chances are quite high that you will have acquired your first Wand already, to take advantage of this talent right away.

5/5 Spirit Tap - to increase your Mana regeneration after killing an enemy that grants experience. It has also been changed in WoW Forever and has the added effect of Meditation already built in.

There is also a valid argument to put two points into Improved Shadow Word: Pain after getting Spirit Tap, instead of going into the Holy tree and rushing to Prayer of Mending. This talent will be very strong whenever you are pulling 2-3 mobs at a time and take full advantage of the additional six seconds.

3/3 Twilight Focus - now requires three talent points instead of two (compared to WoW Classic) to reach 70%, but also counts towards damaging spells, not only heals. Very helpful, if you are fighting 2-3 mobs at a time and you need to top yourself.

3/3 Improved Renew - usually not picked in previous Level 60 iterations of the game, it now has a better multiplier which works well with the fact that Renew can crit now - like any DoT or HoT.

4/5 Divine Fury - while Holy Specialization is a valid option as well, even if you consider that the multiplier on critical strike heals is x1.5 instead of x2.0 as in later expansions of the game. It will synergize well with Inspiration. I'd suggest to go with Divine Fury, because in the later stages of your leveling journey you will also add up to two Smite casts whenever you are pulling a mob, before you start wanding. Both Twilight Focus or Improved Renew are also flexible talents, if you would rather pick Holy Specialization instead of those.

1/1 Holy Nova - a Mana-intensive spell giving the Priest access to its only AoE spell in the game.

3/3 Inspiration - arguably not needed in the earlier Levels, but still helpful, especially on a PvP server.

You can also visit your Class Trainer at Level 30 and reset your talent points to get Prayer of Mending and miss out on Spirit Tap and Wand Specialization. Personally, I would not recommend this and progress further into the Holy tree.

Leveling 30-60

5/5 Divine Fury - one last talent point in here to unlock Binding Heal.

1/1 Binding Heal - new to WoW Forever, it basically replaces Flash Heal, because it has the same characteristics as Flash Heal. You will also learn the same ranks of each spell at the same level. It is an option to skip the new Flash Heal ranks at Level 32, 38 and even 44 to save up for your Mount.

3/3 Improved Healing - 15% Mana cost reduction on two of your most used healing spells.

1/2 Holy Reach or 1/5 Divine Fury - both options are fine and won't have much impact on your leveling experience.

5/5 Spiritual Guidance - a great talent increasing your spell healing based on your Spirit. If you are following the stat priority listed in a later section, you will benefit a lot from this talent.

3/3 Spiritual Healing - a flat out 10% buff to any healing spell, a no-brainer to pick.

1/1 Spirit of Redemption - not as strong as other keystone talents, but worth a talent point compared to anything else you could get at this point.

1/2 Litany of Light - an interesting talent first introduced in WoW Forever. Even though we have access to Prayer of Mending now, this talent could still enable us to have a more proactive healing rotation other than casting down ranked Greater Heals on a tank. More about this talent in the Gameplay & Rotation section.

1/1 Prayer of Mending - first introduced in The Burning Crusade, we will now also have access to this spell in WoW Forever. In this iteration of the game it will also jump to another player, if the player affected by this receives a direct heal.

2/2 Litany of Light - finalize this talent with a second talent point before advancing to the Discipline tree.

5/5 Twin Disciplines - a flat 5% damage and healing increase to spells like Renew or Prayer of Mending.

3/3 Mental Strength - kind of a filler talent while running this spec. Only a couple of talent points left and this one is the most reasonable pick to advance further down to Meditation.

3/3 Meditation - buffed in WoW Forever (30% -> 50%), this is a must have talent for every Priest running a healing focused build.

1/1 Inner Focus - keeps the five second rule active (more on that later), because your next cast will not cost any Mana. Great to use in combination with Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing.

Congratulations on reaching Level 60 - most people will now reset their talent points while also learning Level 60 spells at the Class Trainer. At this point you will most likely have around 200-300 Gold, spend 1 Gold to reset your talent points. You don't want to show up to farm your Pre Raid BiS with Wand Specialization and Spirit Tap, but no Meditation or Mental Agility.

Endgame

Priest is widely known for being one of the best healing classes in the game, with access to two high performing healing specs - Discipline and Holy. With dual spec in the game, you will want to have one of each spec available, especially in a raiding environment, if your goal is to play the most optimal spec based on the encounter.

Despite the addition of a couple of new talents known from other WoW expansions like Binding Heal and Prayer of Mending, the Holy tree still consists of a lot of familiar talents known from WoW Classic. Which is per se nothing negative, as Holy has always been able to perform really well. The capstone talent Prayer of Mending is a great addition to the Holy toolkit and the interesting new talent Litany of Light encourages some sort of "heal-weaving" playstyle.

Holy may not be the best-performing Priest spec on every single encounter we will ever face, but it will be the go-to spec for the majority of the game, unless we are going to see some changes to Discipline. In comparison to the support-focused Discipline tree, Holy will likely be played much more often.

Downranking

Downranking, using lower rank healing spells to preserve your Mana, has been changed in WoW Forever. Several "penalties" have been added to a bunch of lower ranked spells to encourage the usage of higher ranked spells.

The most Mana-efficient spells are:

1. Rank 4 Binding Heal if you are utilizing it you heal both yourself and the targeted player
2. Rank 7 Renew - not linked to a cast time, but a full duration not over healing has a really good Mana efficieny
3. Rank 2 Greater Heal
4. Rank 4 Heal
5. Rank 5 Flash Heal

Feyo has been playing WoW since 2005, transitioning from Retail Raiding to competitive Speedrunning and multi-class healing in every version of Classic WoW that Blizzard has thrown at us since 2019. He joined Progress during the summer of 2025 and has been playing multiple Priests at Level 60 and 70 ever since, including a couple of noteworthy achievements with Progress in WoW Anniversary.

Guided added on Oct 28th, 2026.