Home » Blogs » jeff's blog

Impressions on Priests

Sat, 09/06/2008 - 19:37 — jeff

Haven't done high level boxing on any class yet, but I'd like to lay some quick impressions on my experience with priests so far. Also, I'm using my priest solely for DPS so in terms of healer potential, you'll either have to wait or look else ware.

more after the break.

In terms of DPS, you begin with smite Smite spamming.

/cast [target=targettarget, exists, harm] smite[code]

At level 10 you get Mind Blast. I've found I really like any class spell that's spammable and/or has a cooldoown. My DPS macro then gets upgraded to this

/castrandom [target=targettarget, exists, harm] Mind Blast, Mind Blast, Mind Blast, Mind Blast, Mind Blast, Smite

I can't be 100% sure that adding extra instances of mindblast to a castrandom macro makes it more likely to fire, but I do know that castrandom passes over any spells that are on cooldown meaning this macro will default to smite if Mind Blast is on cooldown.

At level 20, assuming you are specing into shadow, you get Mind Flay which is your bread and butter.

/castrandom [target=targettarget, exists, harm] Mind Blast, Mind Blast, Mind Blast, Mind Blast, Mind Blast, Mind Flay

When killing non-elite mobs, Shadow Word: Pain doesn't really do you much good depending on the size of your group. It takes a good ammount of mana and needs to tick for a while to be helpful.

For instances, you might move to a castsequence something like the following.

/castsequence [target=targettarget, exists, harm] reset=5/combat Shadow Word:Pain, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay, Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Flay

This should work well. I'm still working on a good way to reset the macro between targets in an instance but it's a minor hangup.

A small note I'd like to make on talents. I think up to level 20, lots of people would default towards Spirit Tap. This is natural, especially for anyone who's leveled a priest solo. However, I find that in terms of multiboxing, Blackout is a much more beneficial ability.