Priests on official servers?

has anyone tried boxing 5 holy priests on live servers? ive been playing private servers where you can instant 70 and gear just to test out different builds and 5 man groups. ive found 5 disc/holy priests to be an amazing combination.. but im not sure how well it actually works because private servers arent exactly like official.

5x circle heal rank1 costs something like 300 mana and heals for 700 normal, 1k crit, multiplied by 5.

holy nova rank1 costs almost nothing and hits for 400-700 per character.

both spells are instant cast and have no cooldown.. this group is almost impossible to kill and does really solid DPS. i could see even sacrificing one priest, adding a mage for frost nova/blast wave to keep people still while you stomp on them =)

fun.

5 priests are gonna be so low dps... multiboxing is about dps and without decent dps you will fail

also holy nova rank1 does around 30 damage, even adding spelldamage you wont get alot of damage since it is instant cast and doesnt receive 100% bonus from spelldamage

sorry to burst your bubble on private servers low ranks receive 100% spell damage/healing on real wow its more like 3%

ah.. fair enough. i thought the numbers seemed a bit off. its insane on private servers. i can literally tank 2-3 groups of alliance in battleground and, casting rank 1 circle heal, i regen mana faster than i use it heh

i guess if the damage doesnt match up on official servers the only way to manage the same effect would be 3 mages 2 priests, or 2 priests and 8 mages in a 10 box setup. i dont know if i can bring myself to pay for grindcraft anymore. especially not multiple accounts =/

the thought just occurred to me.. how long does the WoW trial last? i could 5box trial accounts, perfect questing to 20 (or whatever the level cap for BG1 is nowdays). i could probably get to 20ish in a day or so and just chain trial accounts lol

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Originally Posted by homerjunior

sorry to burst your bubble on private servers low ranks receive 100% spell damage/healing on real wow its more like 3%

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errr, no? thats more then 3% for sure. I am not sure. Thats 25% or so I suppose.

my druid had around 1.1k healing and with a rank 1 healing touch did 70-100 so its extremely low no where near 25%

3 mages 2 priests is waste, better to use 1 priest-healer and 4 mages

2 priests will reduce your dps greatly

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Originally Posted by unit187

3 mages 2 priests is waste, better to use 1 priest-healer and 4 mages

2 priests will reduce your dps greatly

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im not so sure..

5x SWP is enough to kill most people right off the bat. plus SWP is instant, can be cast on the run and doesnt require you to be facing your target.. very nice for multiboxing. mindblast does respectable damage and is fast casting.. 5 mindblasts followed by SW:D would (i think) pretty much instakill any target). if you could quickly take the enemy priest out of the game you could easily win a battle of endurance and theyd have noone to dispel your SW:P's.

granted, priests will never equal mage burst damage.. but what they lack in instant DPS they easily make up for in being able to survive ridiculous amounts of DPS. all youd have to do is keep SWP up on a few targets and heal, and eventually you will win.

but again, i havent played official in a long time so all my recent experience is on p-servers.

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Originally Posted by Jezebel

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Originally Posted by unit187

3 mages 2 priests is waste, better to use 1 priest-healer and 4 mages

2 priests will reduce your dps greatly

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im not so sure..

5x SWP is enough to kill most people right off the bat. plus SWP is instant, can be cast on the run and doesnt require you to be facing your target.. very nice for multiboxing. mindblast does respectable damage and is fast casting.. 5 mindblasts followed by SW:D would (i think) pretty much instakill any target). if you could quickly take the enemy priest out of the game you could easily win a battle of endurance and theyd have noone to dispel your SW:P's.

granted, priests will never equal mage burst damage.. but what they lack in instant DPS they easily make up for in being able to survive ridiculous amounts of DPS. all youd have to do is keep SWP up on a few targets and heal, and eventually you will win.

but again, i havent played official in a long time so all my recent experience is on p-servers.

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well we werent talking about 5 shadowpriests
and after all swp is dot and it takes time untill it kills the target.

ofc as 5 priests you can stand on one place, dot everyone and self heal but it isnt effective timewise and also you will just use all your mana on self healing. Also reduced damage from dots because you are out of shadowform...
Also sw:death against 1 target? I assume 4 of your priests will get damage returned because only one can kill a target

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Originally Posted by unit187

well we werent talking about 5 shadowpriests
and after all swp is dot and it takes time untill it kills the target.

ofc as 5 priests you can stand on one place, dot everyone and self heal but it isnt effective timewise and also you will just use all your mana on self healing. Also reduced damage from dots because you are out of shadowform...
Also sw:death against 1 target? I assume 4 of your priests will get damage returned because only one can kill a target

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ive never found the damage difference between shadow and holy priests to be all that huge. possibly 15% or so extra damage.. but your damage is already 500% higher considering you have 5 toons. ive played and leveled 4 priests to 60 (beta and pre-bc) and have found primary disc is superior to both shadow and holy. i would only reconsider now because of how awesome multiple circle heals are in a group, which requires a large investment in holy. shadow form is a horrible ability that i never used even when i specced shadow. it completely eliminates the priests biggest strength.. ie: being able to heal.

the damage returned from SW:D will be easily healed by one circle heal and renew combos youd keep up while healing combat damage.. and mana usage from healing is far more efficient than DPS spells =) i guarantee in a caster fight Vs. DPS mages i will easily survive and have mana left long after their casters are OOM.

huh, damage yourself in pvp? thats weird, especially when it appears that 2-3 people focus on one of your clothies

shadow form is good ability since it improves your damage done, reduces phisical damage incoming and after all you can use small heals in shadow form and got vampiric embrace

I can guarantee that 5 healers vs 5 mages will fail. Basically because no one can survive 5 fireballs and 5 fireblasts. Even with bomb healing.

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Originally Posted by unit187

huh, damage yourself in pvp? thats weird, especially when it appears that 2-3 people focus on one of your clothies

shadow form is good ability since it improves your damage done, reduces phisical damage incoming and after all you can use small heals in shadow form and got vampiric embrace

I can guarantee that 5 healers vs 5 mages will fail. Basically because no one can survive 5 fireballs and 5 fireblasts. Even with bomb healing.

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its situational. if you judge the damage from 5 SW:D will instakill a priority target and you can take the HP hit, then its worth using. obviously if all your characters are low HP and casting SW:D will kill you, youd opt not to cast it. the damage increase from form is not huge.. and definately not huge enough to sacrifice the ability to heal. neither is the physical damage reduction worthwhile since youre sacrificing the ability to heal which is worth much more HP than a minor resistance to a single damage source.

as for mages and fireball.. youre assuming that PvP encounters will have 5 mages, all be focused on one target, all have synchronised casting.. which they wont. even in dedicated 5v5 PvP situations groups will have a mixed assortment of classes, wont be focusing exclusively on single targets.. and if they do.. spamming low rank flash heals (almost no mana usage) while your SW:P is ticking and i guarantee nothing will kill the target.

i understand where youre coming from, and i dont deny that mages have superior burst damage.. but survivability is equally important in PvP, imo.

the main reason i think this would be a nice combo is mostly because, with mages, youre relying on being able to drop targets fast. if you fire off your first big volley, or instacast talent, etc, and the target doesnt drop.. for whatever reason.. and theyre too spread out to spam arcane explosion, or whatever.. your mages go down fast with only one priest healing.

whereas with priests.. you can run around, cycle through targets and cast 1 SW:P on each and thats really all the DPS you need to get people down fast. youre constantly moving and keeping your shield and renew up.. hit circle heal if you need a HP boost on the move, or stop and cast flash heal if only one target is damaged and you can afford to stand still for a second.. realistically.. you can keep an entire group hp full, maintain solid DPS and never have to stop and cast, or even face in the direction of your targets..

I'm playing 5 priests and speccing shadow...they're 31 now. I'll let you know how it goes when I get a little bigger. Right now I'm owning anything within 10 levels of me with pain, plauge, and mind blast. A 5xpain will generally kill any non-healing class thats around my level and not a warrior.

In regards to sw:death, throw embraces on before you pop it and you heal any damage you would have taken on the guys who didnt get the killing blow (plus another 25% from the fifth priest).

In regards to shadowform (not there yet, but these are my thoughts), I'm willing to sacrifice the chance to throw out an instant heal and use embrace and shields as my primary heal until I absolutely cant. At that point I'll pop out ONE priest and flash heal with him. Popping out all 5 to do holy nova's and removing melee damage mitigation and spell damage doesn't sound too smart to me.

In regards to priests kill slow because of dots: mind blast, mind flay will end someone pretty quickly too (go check the thread in the movie forums where the Ugh 4 boxes priests and talks about some pvp). If I were wanting something down fast, mind blast, sw:death and take the health hit and VE,SW:P the next guy I see and let it tick on him (I'm thinking BG's here....open world pvp should typically be a slaughter for a multiboxer).

In regards to comparing the 5 priests to 5 mages: it's just a different playstyle. If you're going for max burst dps I agree the mages got it. There are situations though where priests would play differently and both have some wild strengths and weaknesses. I look forward to 5 individual fear bombs on GY flags, doing fire and forget dots on each ally I see runniny by me that I'd normally have to stop and engage (I love drive by's), and various other fun scenarios. It's apples and oranges...no sense in comparing them because they're not equal in much of any area.

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Originally Posted by Morganti

In regards to priests kill slow because of dots.

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he was talking about throwing dots and self heal all the time

i really like the ability to cast on people outside your field of vision. ive tested mages on p-servers and the two things that i felt really held me back were having to stop to cast and needing the target to be infront of me. the way WoW manages /follow, your alts are not always going to be facing the same direction.. so you cant reliably mouse turn them and guarantee they have a 100% identical field of vision.

plus.. 4x mana burn on healers = win.

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Originally Posted by Morganti

In regards to comparing the 5 priests to 5 mages: it's just a different playstyle. If you're going for max burst dps I agree the mages got it. There are situations though where priests would play differently and both have some wild strengths and weaknesses. I look forward to 5 individual fear bombs on GY flags, doing fire and forget dots on each ally I see runniny by me that I'd normally have to stop and engage (I love drive by's), and various other fun scenarios. It's apples and oranges...no sense in comparing them because they're not equal in much of any area.

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i think one strength priests have over mages is the ability to recover. if things go bad with a primarily mage-filled group, youre pretty screwed. one priest can heal, but not fast or well enough to keep a group alive with any serious focus fire. whereas one circle heal from each priest restores 30-50% of the entire groups HP instantly. fear, circle heal, dots, run.

plus.. a nice little trick.. not sure if this would work on live.. but its great on pservers.. rank 1 SW:P doesnt overwrite your higher rank SW:P's, but it still counts as a hit. if you dot someone then stand and spam rank 1 SW:P with 5 priests and 5 points in blackout.. you can pretty much keep someone chain stunned while your higher rank SW:P kills them lol great for stunning people so you can slow them down if theyre trying to run, too.

you can do the same thing quite effectively with scorch.. but you have to be facing and you cant move while youre casting. with imp fire talents it causes them to burn, has a huge crit rate and exposes like 15% extra fire damage, too.

when for example, there is rank 3 sw:p on a target. When u try to use rank1 - it says "more powerful spell is already active" I think


btw lower ranks of heals doesnt receive full bonus from +healing either

and also I wanted to say, usually it isnt 5 mages but 4 mages and healing specced priest so recover ability is great

Well, I'm a fan of the 5 shadow priest idea too and would like to see how Morg does with it, but honestly the healing priests is intriguing too. Best way to tell how it would go is to try it. It's a a big investment to get 5 guys up but then again, that's what I call "playing the game". If you get it going, keep us informed as to the pros/cons.

On a related note, a bunch of us were playing priests and were taking the "long walk" to Badlands which for Horde involves crossing several ally zones. We had a comical pvp fight with 3 lvl 22-25 priests against one lvl 30 warrior. No matter who he attacked, they would turn "run away-kite-tank" and the others would stop and heal and dps. He'd stop, turn on the healer and we'd all switch roles. It took like 5 full mins to kill him but it was SO funny to watch. It was like watching a bear trying to fend off bees running around in all directions. Different, I know, from a single player but it still brings up an interesting question of whether it's a viable group build. Personally, I think it would be fun to try.