Holy Priest Dragonflight 10.1 guide

This guide was written by Heregellas.

Heregellas, or Alisza on his priest, mostly plays disc/holy priest or resto druid during progress. He previously raided in From Scratch, and in Impact as an officer & raid leader before joining Method.

Holy Priest brings a lot of sustain healing throughput and can spot heal quite nicely thanks to Holy Words. Their DPS is pretty good, with easy-to-maintain spells and, of course, the Power Infusion.

They don’t bring any damage reduction, though, and won’t be able to burst heal during regular windows, which their other spec will cover: Discipline.

Patch 10.1 Holy Priest Changes

In the 10.1 patch, some changes were made, impacting both the Class Tree and the Spec Tree for Holy Priest:

• Shadow Word: Death now has a 10 second cooldown (was 20 seconds).
• Improved Mass Dispel reduces the cast time of Mass Dispel by 0.5 seconds (was 1 second).
• Psychic Scream now hits all enemies within 8 yards (was a maximum of 5 enemies).
• Void Tendrils now hits all nearby enemies within 8 yards (was a maximum of 5 enemies).
• The bounce radius of Prayer of Mending has been increased by 10 yards.
• Divine Image now spawns 1 Naaru for 9 seconds that is empowered and grows with further Holy Word casts.
• Divine Image now teleports near the Priest when the Priest casts a Holy Word spell if the Image is further than 15 yards away.
• Dazzling Lights healing from Divine Image reduced by 50%.
• Empowered Renew now only triggers when casting Renew.
• Empowered Renew now causes Renew to instantly heal your target for 40% of its total periodic effect (was 10%).
• Healing Chorus now causes Renew to increase the healing done by your next Circle of Healing by 2%, stacking up to 50 times (was 1%).

First Impressions

Dragonflight is bringing back talent trees. Even though a modified version of the old trees (with a Class tree and a Specialization tree, with two distinct pools of points), we have some exciting changes/additions, such as:

• A good choice of talents, in both trees, to improve our DPS (Mindgames, Empyreal Blaze, Searing Light…),
• The return of the cheat death, which is now available via a talent (Restitution),
• The new small cooldown Divine Word in the Holy Tree,
• Thanks to Improved Mass Dispel, we can reduce the cooldown to 25 seconds, which can be pretty useful during specific encounters.
• Twins of the Sun Priestess as an easy-to-pick talent, granting the full effect of the Power Infusion on ourselves at the same time.
• The possibility to reduce Fade to 20 seconds while granting 10% damage reduction (Translucent Image) & removing snares (Phantasm).

No more Flash Heal to stack 5 times and to keep now, which was a bit boring sometimes, but overall the same healing set-up, with the addition of some Prayer of Healing build (since the spell was kind of never used during Shadowlands).

The fact that we still can have the damage reduction from Fade (10% via Translucent Image), another one with Flash Heal (10% via Protective Light), and another 3% reduction on magic damage (Spell Warding) from talents is really most welcome.