We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Holy Priest in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Holy Priest!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Blood DK
Feral Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Priest Tier Set
Why You Should Play Holy Priest in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Holy Priest is the quintessential MMO healer, with a distinct theme of wielding the Light and always having a tool for every situation. In Dragonflight, Holy Priest features some Shadow spells to deal damage but mainly holds true to its core Holy theme and now features a wide variety of ways to play. The most common build in raiding involves playing massively around your Holy Word spells, even being able to hold two charges with the Miracle Worker talent and having a pet naaru cast helpful spells with the Divine Image talent. The talent tree revamp in Dragonflight gives you flexibility to play for more AoE healing in raiding and more single-target output for Mythic+ with a variety of routing options along the way to give flexibility.
For those who have played Holy Priest at any point over the last 10 years, there will always be something familiar to you coming back to the spec. Holy Words in Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify are powerful and plentiful, you feature multiple raid cooldowns to heal your allies in Divine Hymn and Holy Word: Salvation but also a raid cooldown to give allies their personal defensives back in Symbol of Hope. Additionally, old favorite legendaries are added into the talent tree with iconic resources like Restitution making an appearance, allowing Priests to resurrect without incurring a battle rez. Below is a table summarizing why you should (and shouldn’t) play Holy Priest in Dragonflight:
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Holy Priest in Dragonflight Season 2
Why should players bring Holy Priest to Raid/M+?
Starting with all the things that haven’t changed from Shadowlands, Holy brings a suite of spells that range from the niche to life saving utility any group could have use for including:
Besides the things Holy has had for a while now there’s the big one: Power Infusion / Twins of the Sun Priestess.
Twins of the Sun Priestess has been a solid addition for Holy but also all specs in Dragonflight. As a healer you would always cast Power Infusion on a DPS, you FINALLY have access to Power Infusion for yourself! While Holy often does not prefer heavy Haste in its gearing, it is a nice feeling to have some benefit from this spell after an entire expansion of just handing it off to other people to make them feel powerful.
With the addition of Class talent trees, Holy has access to a new and powerful ability in Power Word: Life. It is easy to target in your class talent tree and gives Holy access to powerful triage healing with minimal cost. Whether it is dungeon or raid healing, this is an excellent ability that can easily save the lives of yourself or your allies. Since Holy is often very immobile and lacks many instant cast abilities, Life does an excellent job of providing spot-healing on demand.
What role does Holy Priest play in a party/raid?
Including the utility mentioned above, Holy Priest also brings two major raid cooldowns in Divine Hymn and Holy Word: Salvation while also having the flexibility to talent out of these abilities and select more dungeon-focused talents like Apotheosis and Burning Vehemence. In addition to these Symbol of Hope is a remarkably helpful cooldown for both types of content returning mana for your fellow healers when raiding and reducing the cooldowns of defensives for allies in raid and mythic+.
In a Raid, Holy Priest is often a very AoE-focused healer with multiple cooldowns that can provide spot-healing as desired in Holy Word: Serenity (with two charges) and Power Word: Life. Weaving between Holy Word cooldowns and low-cooldown hyper-efficient spells like Circle of Healing and Prayer of Mending to increase output and give the spec powerful buffs to increase output, mana efficiency and Holy Word generation. In Season 2 in the Aberrus raid, the final boss Sarkareth casts Infinite Duress which triggers Dread. This looks to be knocking players away from the dispelled allies location much in the same way that Remnant of Ner’zhul in Sanctum of Domination’s Malevolence ability knocked back players. With Holy’s immobility and channel requirement for Divine Hymn and Symbol of Hope, this encounter could prove challenging for Holy players to overcome.
In Dungeons, Holy Priest plays very similarly to Shadowlands where it provides excellent single-target healing that is extremely mana efficient. It has received constant damage tuning to keep the spec competitive with other healers with the main damage source being Holy Fire that cleave multiple enemies. The primary challenge for Holy in dungeons is dealing with extremely bursty damage that hits the entire party. The spec is usually only focusing one ally at a time with light cleave healing onto allies from Trail of Light so dealing with heavy burst onto multiple allies is a known weak spot. In Season 2 of Dragonflight, Neltharion’s Lair boss Ularogg Cragshaper has a lengthy intermission where players must kill the correct idol while rocks fall from the sky on the party. This heavy burst damage from Falling Debris could be a hefty challenge for Holy Priest in the incoming season.
Level 70 Talent Points for Holy Priest
Holy’s spec tree has a veritable wealth of iconic and interesting capstones to improve their healing. Outlined below, these major capstones have also received frequent tuning throughout Season 1, offering the spec flexibility in how you can play.
- Lightweaver: Offering an alteration on the Flash Concentration legendary from legion, this talent option helps Holy focus on a more single-target healing build and is remarkably mana efficient. Primarily used in 5 mans but it is nice to have the option available for raiding.
- Lightwell: Competes with Lightweaver and brings back an old favorite without the need for clicking!.
- Divine Image: This favorite from Legion has returned and been tuned up substantially over the course of Season 1 to offer excellent passive output for damage or healing. It is a flexible and easy talent to utilize.
- Divine Word: Holding true to Holy’s theme as a flexible healer this is a competitive talent option against Divine Image but requires more setup and interaction to utilize.
- Miracle Worker: Allows Holy Words to hold an additional charge which can be excellent when there are lulls in damage on encounters, allowing you to hold one charge and regen another while you wait for incoming raid damage to spike again.
- Restitution: Competes with Miracle Worker and can be a reliable safety net as you learn new encounters or even can be utilized to immune mechanics without incurring a battle rez.
Holy’s capstone talents all offer slight deviations or focuses in how you can play with multiple passive options that don’t require any extra interaction. This is a huge positive as the spec in general uses a massive amount of active spells so having more passive options can be great for cutting down on button bloat.
Holy Playstyle: Holy Word’s (and Buttons) Galore
One of the most fun parts of Dragonflight Holy Priest has been the wealth of Holy Words the spec now has access to and your spells feeling very unified in their support of Holy Word gameplay. Miracle Worker allows your to hold more Holy Words, Divine Image spawns a Naaru and empowers it the more Holy Words that are cast, Harmonious Apparatus provides additional Holy Word cooldown reduction and synergizes well with Miracle Worker and Answered Prayers which grants Apotheosis uptime when enough Prayer of Mendings heal. This also will synergize extremely well with the incoming tier set bonuses for Season 2, granting Holy Priest a powerful mix of passive and active healing, with excellent impact on our raid cooldown Holy Word: Salvation bringing the overall cooldown lower and lower with each patch.
The downside of Holy’s gameplay is that there is a large amount of button bloat with the spec. With multiple low-cooldown abilities to juggle between, passive buffs to track, proc effects like Apotheosis to identify and maximize, the gameplay of Holy is not difficult but it requires a large quantity of keybinds to effectively maximize.
Season 2 Tier Set
The new incoming tier set, listed below, continues to amplify the dominant raid build allowing for an even larger increase in Holy Word generation thanks to the spell synergy described above.
A relevant complaint on this tier set is that Prayer of Mending is not always the most reliable spell to use in dungeons as there can be very inconsistent damage spikes on players with large downtime in between. This can make for Prayer of Mendings expiring early which thankfully the 4pc keeps in mind. After recent tuning this set bonus feels much stronger for Season 2 dungeons and should be a relevant, albeit moderate, increase to our dungeon output while it will be a powerful raid healing increase. It is also strictly passive with no tracking or interaction required which is perfect as the spec, in my opinion, already has more than enough buttons and buffs to track.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Holy Priest in Dragonflight Season 2
Holy’s gone through a lot of work during Dragonflight’s development period, and while most of the iteration and design ideas have been positive they have left the spec feeling a bit overloaded with various active abilities to juggle.
Dungeon Talent Limitations
Prayer of Mending has always been historically strong to utilize but in Dragonflight it is particularly incredible. Raid talents provide for excellent Holy Word synergies with PoM and increase the effectiveness of the spell itself. A major problem facing the spec at present is the inefficiency of the spell in a 5-man environment and the lack of powerhouse options that could help dungeon healing.
Prayer of Mending is only as effective as its bounces and dungeons is the primary area where the spell can expire, half-used on a frequent basis. You have the option of taking PoM-synergistic talents which will do well on boss encounters like Khajin the Unyielding which feature constant ticking damage but at the same time you’re liable to have many PoMs expire when on Rira Hackclaw in Brackenhide which features Grievous-like DoTs that must be healed to full in order to remove, leaving minimal time for steady damage to consume charges.
Lastly, healer damage is always a point of emphasis in Mythic+ and while Holy has received consistent tuning to raise the quality of its damage, the talent tree is quite unfriendly to reach it. Pathing into Burning Vehemence for example makes you choose between Prayer of Mending-synergies which have their issues, or near-useless talents like Rapid Recovery which is never fun.
About the Author
For more information on playing Holy Priest, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Holy Priest Guide
