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Your right - yet still... (Aulus)

It pays to have played a pally (i havn't)and i think your exactly right. Although the page (if you scroll down to holy talents) still claims the priest to be the best healing class in the game. Each class has each of its own benifits, my main point was priests wern't the ultimate healing class.

In reguards to shadow priests - I think its something we all agree on that they are extremely usefull. Guilds are really looking for not only holy priests but shadow priests as well. Instead of the page saying that many guilds feel they should be holy, it should read something opposite - stating that they are wanted. G0g

Priest Page reflects outdated thinking about shadow priests

As a 70 shadow priest raiding Karazhan on a regular basis, I don't think the priest page is "all wrong". But it does need updating to get rid of remnants of "holyist" comments. While formerly discriminated against, the Shadow Priest has come into its own as a fully accepted dps class.

We wouldn't spend time talking about racist guilds that don't allow players of particular ethnic groups. Similarly, we shouldn't spend time talking about out-of-touch guilds that only allow priests to be holy. Comments to the effect that holy priests are always popular with pickup groups, while shadow priests are "just another dps class" may be reasonably appropriate. But any end-game raiding guild worth it's salt wants both holy and shadow priests.

=CaptC 16:30, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to have to agree with this philosophy. The old thinking about the shadow tree being for leveling purposes only basically went away with the introduction of the Burning Crusade and the Vampiric Touch top-tier shadow talent. Shadow priests have an extremely vital and vibrant role in raids now, and most raiding guilds worth their salt actively seek out shadow priests to raid with them. While the health return from Vampiric Embrace is good, the biggest utility a shadow priest brings is to be a "mana battery" for the healers in long boss encounters through Vampiric Touch.

-- Teni 18:24, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

On Priest and Paladin Healing (in response to G0g)

I speak as a 70 Priest and 61 Paladin who were both at 60 for a long time prior to the expansion release. Both have been specced Holy in 5-man, PvP, and raiding situations. So no one gets the wrong idea, my conclusion in advance: They're both great.

I can't even begin to say how wrong the poster above me is about Holy Priests. The Priest class is without a doubt the most powerful overall healer in WoW. True, Paladins are superior at spamming single-target heals by a noticeable margin while things are going smoothly, but Priests can still do that just fine and then some. It's not the Priests' absolute dominion over one minor aspect of healing that makes them superb healers, it's their domination of the whole of the field of healing. Priests have reliable spike healing, steady healing, float healing, AoE healing (not to mention the only AoE heal that can effect a group other than their own! (Circle of Healing)), heal-over-time effects, aggro and AoE damage control with the mana-efficient Prayer of Mending, the super-efficient Lightwell, reliable mana regeneration with Shadowfiend, and many ways to salvage a situation that's going badly (Power Word: Shield, Flash Heal, Binding Heal, and Spirit of Redemption come to mind).

By contrast, the Paladin has unreliable spike healing (depends on crits going off), steady single-target healing, float healing, and in many cases he admittedly does the latter two better than the Priest due to his superb, if slightly unreliable, staying power. The only HoT he potentially gets is a racial on a 3 minute cooldown, his ways to salvage a bad situation can be powerful, but are very limited (Blessing of Protection on a 3-5 minute cooldown, and Divine Intervention, presuming there's someone else who can resurrect, on a 1 hour cooldown). In fact, he only gets three healing abilities total, all of which are single-target. So yes, he deserves to be very good with them, because that's all he's got in the way of direct healing.

Also, having access to Plate proficiency is nice, but for healing purposes, cloth offers all the stats the Priest needs, and he has plenty of ways to deal with the low armour he has (Psychic Scream, Fade, Power Word: Shield, powerful survivability talents, etc.). That's not to say that Plate isn't nice, it is, but it's not the be-all end-all. Also, Plate healing gear is there exclusively for Paladins, and is therefore given the stats the Paladin needs, which are often different from the stats the Priest needs most. Cloth healing gear, by contrast, is itemised for the Priest, the only exclusively cloth-wearing healer, giving him the stats he needs most, some of which the Paladin would feel to be a bad use of itemisation points for him (Spirit comes to mind here).

In conclusion, both the Priest and Paladin are very capable healers, but they are very different classes. If you set as the basis for judgement their respective proficiency at the thing the Paladin is designed to do best (spamming single-target heals), yes, of course the Paladin will seem like a better healer. However, if you look at their overall capabilities, you'll see that they both bring a lot of wonderful things to a group (as do the other two healing-capable classes!), and that the Holy Priest does have far more versatility with his healing, not to mention very useful buffs, while the Holy Paladin adds other benefits, such as versatile auras and blessings to keep the party running efficiently, plate armour and an emergency taunt to go with it, wipe prevention, and the like. In less words, the Priest who is specced to heal is a pure healing class who does it superbly, while the Holy Paladin is a support class who can main heal quite well.

All that said, I happen to agree with you overall about Shadow Priests in that they deal very strong DPS, and the benefits they provide are quite helpful.

Aulus

Can someone check whether this is actually true: The first section says shadow priest's damage scales well with gear. I'm not a shadow priest, so I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that the fact that it doesn't is a major annoyance to Shadow priests. - Cheers, Longitude

on Shadow damage

Shadow damage calculation is no different that other schools of damage on other classes. This means that the damage bonus you get from gear is calculated before talents are, which means they scale with the talents.

So far the statement, in reality a Shadow Priest's damage becomes less and less interesting compared to a Mage's once you get to somewhat serious gear level. At 500 +damage a Holy specced damage priest will effectively outdamage a Shadow priest. Simply because the main damage spell of a Shadow Priest (Mind Flay) takes so very little (43%) bonus from gear. Specific shadow damage gear that gives a larger bonus to just Shadow damage compensates this up to a point, but not endlessly.

The versatility and power of a well-played Shadow Priest in PvP is of course, not much affected by slightly weaker spells!

Effects of shadow damage talents on spell damage gear

There are three talents that increase the damage of your shadow spells: Darkness, Shadow Weaving and Shadowform.

Shadow Weaving applies a debuff to your talent which increases its shadow damage taken by 15%, and Shadowform applies a buff to yourself which increases your shadow damage output by 15%. Theses two talents DO scale +dmg gear.

Darkness increases your shadow spell damage by 10%. This talent DOES NOT scale +dmg gear.

Passive talents are applied first, then +dmg gear is considered, then the effect of all buffs. I'm not sure if buffs are additive or if they compound to actually give the combination of Shadowform + Shadow Weaving together an effect of (1.15 * 1.15 = 1.3225) +32.35% on shadow damage.

Recent Image Edits

Is there any real reason to prefer a Horde priest versus an Alliance priest? It's not like there's favoritism here. --Hobinheim 11:34, 23 December 2006 (EST)

Put the Human Priest trainer back in, it was unbalanced with Alliance anyways, but no need to unbalance it with all Horde. --Zeal (talk - contr - web) 11:41, 23 December 2006 (EST)
And lo, we have both images :) -- Kirkburn (talk) 18:13, 23 December 2006 (EST)

what hord race makes the best priest

ok so my friend is telling me that undead priests are the best on the hord side and that troll priests (which is the one i have) are just retarted along with blood elf. so is he right? well i don't personally agree with him. so i would like it if you guys would give me your personal opinions.

    depends. in aspects of healing or shadow? for example the undead priest has an ability "devouring plague" which does just under the damage of a SW:P, thats a whole extra DoT for a shadow priest, but this dosen't help healing wise.

Removed comment from body of article

I just removed from the body of the article the following text:

*Note: Lately I have received more and more invites to places like Karazhan, being a shadow priest. I would recommend, if you would like to heal well without respeccing out of shadow completely, for a 0/18/43 talent spec. All of the talents for mana reduction and cast time on heals, crit and improved renew, with none of the damage loss in shadow - just a few things handy for PvP like increased range and crits will be lost. If you want to be available to fight in a raid and grant those warlocks your shadow damage bonuses (which make them happy regarding the damage charts) as well as supporting your healers and giving back mana - or being ready to main heal a 5 man with no problem, maybe a few pieces of gear swapped out, then this is the spec for you. Joining a raiding guild not necessary.

Subjective commentary like this probably doesn't belong in an article, especially as written (C'mon, referring to self?). Despite being primarily a holy priest (it's been over a year since I played shadow, having switched holy at the request of my raid quite some time ago!), however, I do agree that the shadow priest sections do need heavy revision in order to reflect what the original poster probably inteded to write. If I have the time and inclination later, I'll be bold and take the initiative to rewrite that section to hold less bias and emphasis the new respect and acceptance shadow builds have garnered in raiding. If anyone wants to take a stab before I do so, I welcome them! User:Cynra/Sig 16:11, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

I lied - I didn't do this later. It was nagging me so I sat down and rewrote the section. It's now split up between Healing and DPS, since the original section was heavily focused on asserting shadow priests' right to raid without really emphasizing how they can be beneficial. I've hopefully organized it a little better, removed a lot of the bias that was there, and made positive contributions to the article. I'll probably be returning to this in the near future to clean up some other areas that caught my attention; the blasted thing seems poorly written in some areas while full of unsubstantiated bias (and countered in the same statement by another editor!). I don't want to unnecessarily lengthen this article, but I was considering fleshing out the raiding section with specifics. An idea? User:Cynra/Sig 17:16, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

I was about to say something about how the wiki exaggerates the healing importance of priests, when I see that someone else beat me to it already. Being blunt, the wiki sounds like TBC never happened. At level 70, all healing classes are nearly equal in overall healing potential with situational differences, while shadow priests are strongly desired even when their damage scaling starts suffering at tier 6. Holy priests aren't the ultimate healers, and shadow priests aren't a side note. The wiki should reflect this so that people don't get the wrong idea about the class. Since 2.0, holy priests have been largely relegated to clean-up duty or shoved out of 25-man raiding entirely. This can cause a lot of frustration to someone who has the wrong idea of what a priest is supposed to do in endgame. I'm not saying that my opinion should be inserted, but that the exaggerations of Holy's importance should be removed.

wiki exaggerates holy, downplays shadow

I was about to say something about how the wiki exaggerates the healing importance of priests, when I see that someone else beat me to it already. Being blunt, the wiki sounds like TBC never happened. At level 70, all healing classes are nearly equal in overall healing potential with situational differences, while shadow priests are strongly desired even when their damage scaling starts suffering at tier 6. Holy priests aren't the ultimate healers, and shadow priests aren't a side note. The wiki should reflect this so that people don't get the wrong idea about the class. Since 2.0, holy priests have been largely relegated to clean-up duty or shoved out of 25-man raiding entirely. This can cause a lot of frustration to someone who has the wrong idea of what a priest is supposed to do in endgame. I'm not saying that my opinion should be inserted, but that the exaggerations of Holy's importance should be removed. Rbx3 19:01, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

however tt's unclear what is the idea of the priest YOU have --N'Nanz 19:12, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Be bold and make a change! I'm considering adding a bit more of the negative (realistic) aspects of raiding as a priest; I added a lot of what I hoped was neutral information on Shadow priests since the article originally seemed to be working under the antedivulian impression that it isn't a viable raiding spec, but I haven't played a high-level Shadow priest in about two years (though I'm a-working on leveling my neophyte Shadow priest!). Actually, I was also concerned originally with how much Shadow [b]was[/b] being portrayed in some areas and in a very opinionated way that didn't see to embrace the neutrality that WoW Wiki advocates.
I currently raid as a hybrid healing priest (more Holy than Discipline) and I agree that we need to add some of the criticisms that the class and spec gets in competative raiding. It's a fact that most competative end-game raiding guilds prefer to stack paladins and shamans over priests due to their added utility, though this article seems to go back and forth in painting priests as the ultimate healing class - and, despite preferring priests as healers and having leveled multiple priests, I'm not that dedicated to my class to espouse that kind of drivel. The lack of priests isn't as common in casual-to-moderate raiding environments, so maybe I'll make mention of the tendency to have difficulties as a healing priest in competative raiding while the problem seems to decrease as your start examining more casual raids.
I hope to get some stuff posted either today or this weekend (in addition to cleaning up some other stuff that waffles back and forth and contradicts itself in the article). Cheers! User:Cynra/Sig 15:13, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
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