All Holy Priest

I'm fairly new to multi-boxing, but, having already played a priest to 70 and tested various specs in both PVP and PVE, I was intrigued with the idea of starting an all holy priest group. I thought I'd share my experience for the benefit of others and to see what other feedback or advice people might have.

I'm running three accounts and am currently at level 52. Once I got the basic macros and keybinds set up, the actual control has been pretty easy, with the exception of some PVP situations that I'll get to in a minute. I've basically spec'd them all the same - Holy down to Surge of Light and so far the rest into disc and three points into spirit tap. The basic focus for all talents is improving damage, since with three priests the healing is already fine (insta-cast 3 x renew is great).

The only variations in spec have been in boosting my main's survivability (via improved inner fire) and reducing my clones' threat. This allows me to generally keep agro on the main which makes focused healing much easier. When things go into panic mode, there's still the option of fear x 3 ,shielding and HoTing all three simultaneously until things are under control again. Obviously, you also only need to spec one toon with improved power word: fortitude, if you like that talent.

Overall, my experience has been very good. I open with Holy Fire and if that doesn't kill the mob I can finish with a smite or just wand, which tripled is actually pretty nasty, and gets you back into the 5 second rule faster. I'm focusing on a spirit heavy build because of the regen and all the damage boosts. My gear is marginal, at best, but mana is basically never a problem. Although only one toon can proc spirit tap each fight, it's nice to get that rotating mana boost to keep them all topped off.

A big reason I was interested in the holy priest idea was the 3 x Holy Nova, which has not disappointed. Since I started them before thre recent patch, mana used to be an issue. With a pretty poor mana pool, I could just barely kill a group of mobs 1-2 levels below me, but it was still fun as hell to do, especially if you could successfully gather a large group. However, now that they've lowered the mana cost significantly (and my damage and pool has increased), I can normally down a group of mobs 1-2 levels above me with full health and about half mana remaining. It's also the best "Oh $&!%!" heal I have, since every cast is nearly a complete, instant heal for all three of my priests, and it doesn't require thought or targetting.

I only really need to heal in PVE if it's an elite, and even then renew is generally sufficient. I very rarely use regular heals, although I do have macros set up to drop multiple flash heals on each of my guys depending on who's getting hit. Round robin or cast sequence is also useful for sharing the top-off healing amongst the three priests. This is also useful for buffs, dispell, and especially shields since that's one spell you can't stack.

I have all three fears set up to round-robin off the same keystroke so that you can just cycle and basically have endless fears. As expected, this is especially useful in PVP, which is considerably more challenging with the 3xpriest setup. As I'd expect is true with any multi-box setup, the biggest challenge is losing control of your main, most annoyingly because of AE fear. I'm still not very good at recovering my organization after a fear bomb, although I think with further practice and the right macros and keybinds I think I can greatly reduce the impact of CC. It definitely helps having Will of the Forsaken as an undead, so I can immediately click out of the first fear. The problem then just becomes regrouping your team and getting them facing in the right direction, since everything but Shadow Word: Pain is directional.

Speaking of DoTs, I actually don't really use Pain in PVE unless it's an elite, but in PVP it's pretty devastating. 3xpain and 3xdevouring plague will pretty much kill anyone unless they can heal and/or dispell. If nothing else, it's nice being able to force people to dismount and take care of themselves, since priests don't really have another way to stop runners. I'm thinking it might be worth continuing in the Shadow tree to pick up 3 x Blackout and Improved Shadow Word: Pain. This, combined with 3 of the new Pain glyphs would make for a lot of spammable click-and-forget damage.

My overall PVP experience has been a bit mixed. If I can stand back and snipe, or at least get the first shot, I can 1-2 shot targets. My BG experience is still pretty limited, but each of my guys normally ended up in the top third/quarter in damage and healing. Judging by the numbers I felt this was respectable, but I do feel like there were times that my lack of indpendent control was a liability to my team as a whole. Since I don't want to run BGs unless I'm pulling my weight, I think I need to work on the setup and practice a bit more, and then try it again.

The lack of any tracer or other indication of where priests' nukes are coming from is very useful, but it takes some extra planning on where to park yourself so you aren't public enemy #1. If you do become a primary target, which happens quickly when people realize you're multi-boxing (and even more qickly when they realize you're multi-boxing 3 holy priests!), things become tricky very fast. Obviously, smart players will take out my main right away. Priest's lack of armor really shows in these situations, because opponents can often kill one of my guys before I can even recover from a CC. Although shield and 3xrenew are nice in these situations, most classes can still dps through this fairly easily, so you'll need to get some other kind of heals in somehow.

I've run a few instances with a friend dual-boxing his pally and shaman, and we never had any problem. Although we lack CC, the high dps and 5xhealing made it irrelavant. It's also very nice to have a whle team that can rez. The risk of the hearler stealing agro is basically negated because of the split healing, but most of the times the mobs died before they could even damage the tank.

I'm looking forward to getting Prayer of Mending and Shadow Word: Death, since I think both of these will provive good synergy with multiple priests. Depending on how I feel at higher levels I may also open another account and transfer my main level 70 priest to it so I can try 4 x priests. For now I'm having a blast, and despite some nervousness about the survivability of priests in pvp, I'm still looking forward to giving it a shot again. If nothing else, it's fun to see people's confusion/fascination when they see the barrage of Holy Fires come blasting from the heavens. :)

Please let me know if you have any advice, thoughts, or questions. There seems to be a lack of experience related to the multi holy priest setup on the forums, so I'm looking forward to seeing more discussion.

~Soothe

I ran 5 shadow priests way back when and toyed with the idea of 5 holy/shadow, but never did it. The primary thing I wanted out of shadow for this build was mind flay which is the best possible spell you can use on dancing melee (autoface for the win). Obviously with holy you'd have overwhelming healing, sniping ability with smite, cc with chain fears, and mind flay for close up action. Try it out.

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Originally Posted by 'Soothe',index.php?page=Thread&postID=142383#post1 42383

As I'd expect is true with any multi-box setup, the biggest challenge is losing control of your main, most annoyingly because of AE fear. I'm still not very good at recovering my organization after a fear bomb, although I think with further practice and the right macros and keybinds I think I can greatly reduce the impact of CC. It definitely helps having Will of the Forsaken as an undead, so I can immediately click out of the first fear. The problem then just becomes regrouping your team and getting them facing in the right direction, since everything but Shadow Word: Pain is directional.

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Would fear ward help? If you see an enemy running in, and it's a class with an aoe fear then pop fear ward across your group.

I'm not sure what the cool down is, but it should help. Eat the first fear, fear back and kick their butt. Save WoTF for when you actually do get feared. Get the pvp anti cc trinket too.

For fear recovery, trinket or WotF then run your main round mashing the follow key. if you've accessed your fear breaking quick enough your clones shouldn't have got too far away.

At one point I toyed around with a Holy-Crit build, for a solo priest.
Took the talent for faster casting of Smite, Holy Fire and heals.
I'd open with Holy Fire, SW: Pain, Mindblast and then Smite spam.

Use PW: Shield to get spells off without too much spell pushback.
They had a talent where you had a 50% chance to get an instant cast smite from any crit.
I'm not sure if the talent is still around or not, but did not notice that when I was messing around with priest builds recently.

Assuming I finish my RAF leveling prior to WotLK, I'll be doing a priest team next.
The shammies are mid way through 68th and will go to 70th before I do anything else.
The hunters are 55th will RAF 300% exp's and will stop at 60th for now.
The priests will go as high as they get to, but RAF will likely run out, while I'm leveling my shaman and pve teams from 70 to 80.

Pretty sure my priests will be mostly discipline, two points in holy for the pushback resistance on heals, and 11 in shadow for mind flay. A mix of Holy Fire/Smite, Mind Flay/Mind Blast, SW:Pain/Devouring Plague for the dps.

To counteract fear on your priests, you can use Fear Ward on a castsequence with a reset.
Fear Ward is a 3 minute reset normally, but is 30 seconds faster with the Glyph, probably worthwhile to negate Fear-Bombs. 2.5 min buff with 2.5 min cooldown.

So you'd have:
Press 1 = Priest 1, protect Priest 1.
Press 2 = Priest 2, protect Priest 1.
Press 3 = Priest 3, protect Priest 1.

And Priest 1 would protect the rest of your team, by having Mass Dispel on a very easy to activate keybind. Not sure the level you get mass dispel, but its not early in your career. Until then, you'd probably have two hotkeys for Dispel Magic, with each priest dispelling each of the other two. It could be a single macro if you wanted:

1:
/castsequence [target=priest 2] Dispel Magic,,
/castsequence [target=priest 3] ,Dispel Magic

And the same on priest 2 and 3, except change the targets.

Thanks for the pointers. I definitely use Fear Ward, but I've been having each priest cast it on themselves, which, as you point out, is not as useful as having it on my main at all times. I'll also come up with some kind of dispel hotkey/macro for when my clones eat the fear bombs... just have to be quick on the dispel, but I guess that's true for anything in multiboxing.

The instant cast Smite talent, Surge of Light, is still in the Holy Tree and I've spec'd it on all my toons. It may not be a huge dps boost, but it's a lot of fun and with 3 priests it procs just about every other cast. Plus, for Holy Nova you can get a proc (or multiple procs) on just about every cast, depending on how many targets you're hitting. I've gotten in the habit of hitting three hotkeys in sequence whenever I'm AEing now - Holy Nova, Smite, Stopcast. This allows me to take advantage of a quick, free Smite should any of them have critted on the previous Holy Nova.

damn, i can't wait til you catch up to my drooz, soothe. with your novas and all the new instant AE for balance (typhoon and starfall are so sick) plus all the instant hots and dots we'd have between us, i'm pretty sure it'll be a slaughter.

and as awesome as shammy totems are, its really nice to never have to worry about staying in the same place. if we keep on the move, its much harder for the alliance to hit us all at once with their ret-squad.

tho in AB and EotS we'll prolly want to split up, since zerging is not generally the winning strat.

I'm finally catchin up, Dodar, although I know things are much slower from 60-70.

One of the main points the drew me to priests was their instant cast abilities, so I agree if we can stay on the run we'll be less squishy. Although, on the flip side, posting yourself on the edge of the opponents roof in WSG and one-shotting the flag carrier and his entire group of defenders is pretty damn fun.

We should get together prior to running serious pvp to see how the two teams work together and come up with some basic strategies.

i love 27 point holy priests! my pewpew caster group is holy priest, fire mage, dest/demon lock, boomkin. their buffs stack really well. as far as the priest is concerned... i don't know why, maybe it's the surge of light, but even with lock spamming searing pain priestess grabs agro pretty reliably. all crits all the time! the aoe button is fun too... nochanneling macro for hellfire and holy nova keeps the health up.

I have 4 priests sitting on a PVE server I'll xfer over and start a group of 10 holy priests (5x60, 5x70) after the new year and new job.

I finally got to xferring most of my other characters from my old server, and now I can do 3x priest along with 2 paladins, or 3 paladins 2 priest, or 3 priests, one paladin, and a moonkin. I'd imagine a ret paladin "tank" with a moonkin and 3 holy priests would be fun to try :)

I've got waaaay too many combinations however, I keep dreaming of combos, but haven't gotten around to playing them yet (or even talent speccing yet lol) I guess I'm kinda waiting until Wrath, so outland will be filled with less 70s to deal with :)

I leveled my shaman's 60-70 after the 3.x patch, with the changes to experience needed.
I pretty much follow the Kopp alliance guide for leveling.

Prior to this patch, my toons would reach 70th towards the end of the Netherstorm quests (because rested makes you level faster then the guide assumes).
You have 10% of the netherstorm quests remaining and all of the shadowmoon valley quests.

After this patch, my toons reached 70th towards the tail end of the blades edge mountain quests. I still have 10 or so BEM quests.
The its rack up gold in netherstorm and shadowmoon vally.
I was actually mid 63 after hellfire, instead of not quite 62.
Halfway through 65 in Terrokar, and into 68 by the end of Nagrand.

The exp changes are really nice for 60-70 play in Outlands.