Specs for a holy / Shadow priest

[siLk]

I've been fooling around with my talents for a few weeks now, and last week finally got a build that I probably will never change now. It allows me to be the best healer (class wise, not compared to a full holy/disc priest), but I can still solo and PvP very affectively (MUCH MUCH more affectively than a holy/disc priest can). I think the latter outweighs some of the benefits of the disc and holy trees.

Class: Priest
Level: 60

Holy Talents (20 points)

# Improved Renew - 5/5 points
Increases the amount healed by your Renew spell by 15%.

Renew increases your Healing Per Second (HPS) INCREDIBLY. The better this is, the better healer you're going to be.

# Spiritual Healing - 5/5 points
Increases the amount healed by your healing spells by 10%.

Better heals, doesn't need any explanation.

# Subtlety - 5/5 points
Reduces the threat generated by your healing spells by 20%.

Reduces your chances to gain aggro during multiple mob pulls, and helps fade work much better. A must have if you plan on doing any end game instances (and you will)

# Improved Healing - 5/5 points
Reduces the Mana cost of your Lesser Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal spells by 15%.

You don't want to run out of mana in the middle of killing Baron Rivendare do you? You're group doesn't want you to either.

That is it for the holy tree. Those 4 talents are all that is needed to be the "best" healer in the game. Some Discipline talents are ok, but those 4 are fine, and lets you have a very diverse character with the next talents.

Shadow Talents (31 points)

# Spirit Tap - 5/5 points
Gives you a 100% chance to gain a 100% bonus to your Spirit after killing a target. For the duration, your Mana may regenerate at a 50% rate while casting. Lasts 15 seconds.

I know a lot of people think spirit sucks (it's not great), but it is nice to have a 100% regen bonus after killing any mob (during solo play and if you time a damage spell right in a group). If you feel this is a waste, you can swap the points with blackout (blackout 5/5 spirit tap 2/5)

# Blackout - 2/5 points
Gives your Shadow damage spells a 4% chance to stun the target for 3 seconds.

A pretty good talent, stuns don't happen too often, but enough to make a difference.

# Improved Shadow Word: Pain - 2/2 points
Increases the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain spell by 6 seconds.

One of your most used damage spells, 300+ extra damage is never a bad thing ;)

# Shadow Focus - 5/5 points
Reduces your target's chance to resist your Shadow spells by 10%.

Resists are bad, so a talent making them 10% less likely is a good thing.

# Improved Mind Blast - 5/5 points
Reduces the cooldown of your Mind Blast spell by 2.5 seconds.

Your high damage nuke spell. When you get shadowform (+15% damage), and shadow weaving (+3% damage), this spell can crit for as much as 1300+ damage. Ouch. Being able to cast it more frequently increases your DPS by A LOT.

# Mind Flay - 1/1 point
Assault the target's mind with Shadow energy, causing 75 damage over 3 seconds and slowing the target to 50% of their movement speed.

Your main damage spell, slows and does 300+ damage at it's highest level (in 3 seconds). Great for catching runners in both PvE and PvP.

# Shadow Weaving - 5/5 points
Your Shadow damage spells have a 100% chance to cause your target to be vulnerable to Shadow damage. This vulnerability increases the Shadow damage dealt to your target by 3% and lasts 15 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.

Increases your shadow damage (your main type of damage).

# Darkness - 5/5 points
Increases your Shadow spell damage by 10%.

See above

# Shadowform - 1/1 point
Assume a Shadowform, increasing your Shadow damage by 15% and reducing Physical damage done to you by 15%. However, you may only cast Shadow and Discipline spells while in this form.

First of all, if you ever see a priest in shadowform while he is suppose to be a main healer, you should leave your group right away. This is used 99.9% of the time for soloing, and the other .1% for PvP.

Using the talent build above, you are a priest to be feared in PvP, can solo extremely efficiently in PvE, and still be an awesome healer in any instance.

[aX.Ch0sEn]

this should be interesting...i've been messing around with a shadow build on my alt :). Thx for the tips though, i didn't really know what kind of dmg a high lvl shadow priest was capable with talents :). Good to know ;).

[-=LeGenD=-]

shadow priests are pretty sick when it comes to pvp and solo. I only use shadowform to solo, cause in pvp you will get screwed if someone interrupts your casting from the shadow school, and you cant cast any holy magic. Anyway good solo build. I always go a good solo build to 50ish then I do mostly PvE build with some PvP thrown in for variation. Thats carebear server. If its on a PvP server I would go holy/discp at 60 instead.

[vD.Gummy]

To use shadow from to PvP is up to the user's choice but if you are going to make sure you start the duel with shadow form on. You can always swich back out.

Im not sure how well your talents piont will go like. Its really hard to get the best out of the 2 worlds. You might want to consider taking some pionts out of the shadow tree (maybe improved shadow word: pain ?? since it only adds in an extra 2 ticks of damage) for Unbreakable Will and Improved: Power word shield.

Unbreakable Will
Rank 5/5
Increases your chance to resist Stun, Fear, and Silence effects by 15%.

Improved Power Word: Shield
Rank 3/3
Reduces the duration of your Power Word: Shield's Weakened Soul effect by 15 sec.

This will improve your soloing, your abilty to PvP very well and can help out a fellow group member severals times if you cant heal fast enough.

[Dance]

sorry to bump old threads, but im interested in making a priest( i cant decide between priest or frost mage), just wondering if these talents have changed, and is silence worth getting?

[Sapphire]

Well I am sure siLk has changed that talent build now. At 60, shadow is fine for 1v1 and skirmishes, but for real intensive battlegrounds/raiding healing a mixture of disc and holy is best.

For leveling, you might want to go rather heavily into shadow, perhaps getting improved renew from the holy tree and maybe 15 points in discipline up to inner focus.

Put your first five talent points in spirit tap. It will reduce your mana downtime considerably.

[StonedMan]

I'm a big fan of improved mana burn, but w/e.

[Dance]

well considering im only playing with like 3-4 of my friends, and not all of them are able to play at the same time, and my play times are also very scattered...i mmostly gonna be playing solo, and i kinda wanna make a pvp priest, ive been reading up on the battle.net forums, and shadow priests seem to do very well in 1v1 combat according to them.

[CraZyKoKeNo]

personally, i find shadow priests worthless...i've grouped with shadow priests before and they're just annoying. the one i was with didn't know how to manage aggro and kept getting focused, that may have been the crappy warrior's fault as much as his but it's just annoying to have to heal 3 different people at one time because they're all aggroing. i might add it seemed like he wasn't doing a whole lot of damage, either. i realize that shadow is higher dps and they can level faster by doing that...but ya know, i'm a (lv53) druid and i sacrificed feral and balance for the sake of restoration so that i'm useful in instance groups while leveling; i don't see why priests can't just play healer in instance (gimped though it would be at that point) and be shadowform or whatever when they aren't with other people if they feel they have to spec shadow or something. and maybe that guy was just an idiot or something...i'd hope that shadow spec priests dont try to do shadowform in instance all the time; or if they do hopefully they do a better job of the one i was with. my $.02~

edit*

[StonedMan]

Shadow priests aren't bad in instance groups at least until some of the harder end-game instances. Hell, in many places having a silence could actually help. It's not hard to heal, it's really not.

If more than 1 person is getting aggro it's probably a number of people's fault.

If he's in shadowform you can kick him from the group, but that's a different story.

[Dance]

yeah, even with no talents in holy tree, they are still the best healers....besides for any of the harder later game instances, id prolly respec just for healing, but the shadow priest is for pvp/ solo pve, not instance pve, and he shouldnt be using damage moves in an instance anyway..

[klikkzero]

I didn't read any of the replies so this was probably already mentioned but I would take 5/5 Blackout, 2/2 Improved Shadow Word: Pain and 3/5 Shadow Focus and go from there to form a 33/18 shadow/disc or 34/17 shadow/disc build. Reason being is at high level, you will hardly ever get the killing blow for Spirit Tap to activate.

[Dance]

Dick around until level 40, and then respec (using spirit tap). Once u hit 40 a lot of ur leveling is done via groups/quests. That and dickin around allows u to better understand the class ^_~

[Myth]

Shadowpriests melt faces in pvp.

[Dance]

yeah melting faces is often what occurs when a shadow priest decides to pvp


edit: sorry the administator has said you can only have 1 witty comback every 60 seconds