Who the hell are you?

If you don't read the Priest forums on Arena Junkies or play on BG9, you might be asking this question. I'm Arterian, and I've been playing Priest in the arena scene since Season 2 and have achieved Gladiator each season since I made arena my main focus in S3, and also achieved Furious Gladiator in 3v3 on Rampage running RMP. Anyways, I'm one of this week's guest writers, so let's get to it.

 

I have always loved playing a Priest.

Something about finding that perfect balance between offensive and defensive play has always appealed to me. I don't think it's possible to do something more fun in arena than to swap to a target that is on top of you when you're at 30% HP and start chain casting damage into them to assist your partners for a clutch kill. However, my favourite part about playing a Priest this season is that now more than ever, Priests need absolutely zero raiding gear to be viable. Last season, I had to go through the unsavory business of pugging and "reserving" a Solace of the Defeated and picking up PvE leggings to help push my Warrior/Mage/Priest comp to it's potential. This season, as both Shadow and Discipline I am not using a single piece of gear obtained from raiding on my Priest besides the rep ring that almost all serious PvPers can be found wearing. In fact, I have only killed the first boss in Icecrown Citadel on my Priest, and it was only to help a friend's raid so he could grab a Bryntroll.

I replaced my Solace with the Purified Lunar Dust trinket from badges, as it is much better for a Disc Priest where you often spend up to 20 seconds without casting a single defensive spell, where stacks of the Solace's buff would fall off, and it also isn't gimped when you're being CC chained. The trinket is also great as Shadow, as it provides the perfect amount of regen needed to last between mana cooldowns without gimping your damage by using the regen main set pieces over the crit pieces. Before using this trinket, I was advocating using Mooncloth main set pieces spec'd into meditation because of some of the long games I've had against some of the top teams, including games against Ming's RMP where we lost a few times because I went oom using zero regen gear. With Lunar Dust and Full Satin main set, I can take as long as I need to set up a kill, and still drop someone in only a few seconds with crits that come fairly often. As a PvP only player playing as a class that uses almost exclusively PvP gear, I am very happy with the resilience changes and how competitive non-raiders can be with PvPers that also raid.

There has never been a better time to play a Priest.

Even though it's only been three weeks into the season, and you can't take much from the SK 100, we're sitting at the top of it as for the first time since Shadowplay and RMP were popular during TBC, both Disc Priests and Shadow Priests have at least one Rank 1 viable comp. While Discipline has been good the entire expansion, Shadow has suffered from being a TBC spec in a WOTLK game, with only a handful of Shadow Priests having success in Season 5 and 6 and not a single Rank 1 team with a Shadow Priest until Season 7.


Everyone seems to have a different reason why Shadow Priests are finally thriving now, some will credit it to haste effecting dots, increased mana efficiency, or survivability, however I personally credit it to the discovery of the lineup of Shadow Priest/Frost Mage/Resto Shaman. Having played the comp quite a bit this season, it is pretty damn insane. It has amazing CC, longevity, and durability from all classes both by themselves and assisted from each other. Against most teams, it feels like they never have a good target to train. If they try to train down the Shaman, they leave a Mage and Shadow Priest open which can easily 100-0 a target with a single CC or lockout on a healer, and if the team tries to focus one of the casters, the Shaman seems to have an incredibly easy time keeping either target up. So far this season, I'd say this is the best comp as a Priest, period, especially when you consider how similar the playstyle is between Shadow and Disc, it is very easy to be successful at one spec if you've been successful at the other, so any Priest can pretty much pick up this comp and go if they've got a Mage and Shaman to play with.

Where does that leave Discipline Priests? I think we all know the answer to that. Disc Priests have always had and always will have RMP as their go-to comp. On every Battlegroup and in every climate of arena, RMP has survived and will continue to survive. While I wouldn't go so far as to call it the best comp in the game as it so clearly was during Season 6, it feels pretty strong this season with Wizard and Prot comps becoming less popular and always has the feeling of the sky being the limit, with any team being beatable with perfect play. It also happens to be one of the most unforgiving comps in arena, as a botched vanish or slightly mispositioned Priest against a cleave team can result in a loss. On the opposite end of the skill spectrum, one of the most popular comps for Discipline Priests is the grouping of Disc Priest/Holy Paladin/Arms Warrior. Dispel Cleave, as some call it, is a comp that will only get better as more overpowered PvE gear becomes available from Icecrown. If you're wondering what 277 ilvl weapons feel like, I've already felt it and am asking what 284 DPS Weapons with 3 red sockets are going to feel like. The viability of this comp is that it has two dispellers that allows a PvE geared Warrior to train wreck a target of his choice while being backed by the two strongest healing classes in the game. The comp is definitely top tier, even in the hands of less than top tier players so long as the Warrior participates in the required amount of scripted encounters every week.

Currently, if you see a Priest in arena at the highest level of play, you're most likely going to see them playing one of those three comps. The arena season is still young, however, and anything can happen especially with 3.3.3 on the way. Will we see the pairing of Shadow Priest/Rogue/Healer return to top tier viability with the buffs to the Subtlety tree, and will the spec contend with the Envenom variant of Mutilate Prep for RMP? Although the only change for Priests announced from the new patch is a change to Renewed Hope that will go unnoticed, a change to one class almost always directly affects another, which leads us to possibly the most important change coming in 3.3.3;

 

Unholy Blight now prevents any diseases on the victim from being dispelled.

There probably isn't a better example of a change for one class affecting another. Although Priests benefit from bouncing Prayer of Mending off diseases and often don't bother dispelling targets affected by diseases from Pestilence, there is going to be an extremely noticeable increase of damage on the DK's focus target. It is going to be interesting to see if this change will propel Death Knights back into viability at pinnacle of arena competition. Personally, I think this is a great change as it no longer allows Priests and Shamans to passively shut down a Death Knight's damage by randomly removing one of their diseases periodically. Will we see comps like double healer Death Knight return to viability from this change? Will TSG return to top tier as it was in Season 6? Either way, the game needs more reaction and less randomness put into abilities, and this seems like a step in the right direction.

 

There are so many elements of arena that exist outside of the 2-5 minute matches you play when you que up,

especially at the highest level of play. One of which brought to light by Hoodrych's team being the first of the season to break the 3k mark is gear smurfing. Even though he logs out with almost full PvP gear on, you can see from his recent activity on the armory that he has collected quite a few PvE pieces he doesn't choose to log out in on the armory. As someone who tries to take every advantage possible in arena, I make a note of monitoring what type of gear most of the top PvPers on BG9 are wearing as it can often influence how we'll play against that specific team. As RMP, are we less likely to train a Warrior if we know he's stacking resil versus seeming like he forgot to swap out of his raiding gear when his guild finished up in Icecrown? Of course we are. It really isn't a surprise that some players, including my own partner from last season go about faking out their armory to give themselves any sort of extra advantage they can get. Those guys weren't the first to bluff their armory, in fact, I remember looking up the top team on Ruin during S4 2v2, and noticing Veex's Shaman partner, our old friend Ooi, was wearing mostly Season 2 gear. I couldn't believe how amazing an achievement it was at first, until I was informed that he was not wearing his real arena setup when he logged out, something he has continued to do to this day. The act of gear swapping even carries over to the tournament scene, as we often hear commentators in stream informing us that someone has swapped all of their gems in between matches. It is this and other aspects of the meta-game of arena that make WoW so interesting to me personally.

Trance posted a few Priest tips mostly related to gearing,


I have a few cool things you can do that I notice even some of the top Priests forgetting to do at high ratings.

Coverbuff your Fear and Silence.

Against Warlocks, often times you'll want to fear a target other than the Warlock, such as a Druid so you can clean his hots off and then swap to him. If you don't Fear the pet as well, your Fear will often get Devoured. Throwing up a Shadow Word: Pain right before you fear will give a 50% chance for your Fear to not get dispelled, and some Warlocks with itchy dispel fingers will see you going for a fear and spam Devour Magic on their teammate and get your Shadow Word: Pain before you fear. The same thing applies for Silence, which is great to remember if you're speccing Shadow for the first time!

Mind Sear, de-stealthing and de-snaking!

As a Shadow Priest, one of the most frustrating things in the game is a Hunter's snake trap. Using two GCDs and a ton of mana to Holy Nova and Shift back into Shadowform is a waste, when you can simply Mind Sear a target near, or one of the snakes themselves. If you choose to cast it on a snake, you can melee the remaining one afterward. Against Rogue teams, most Rogues fall back to their partners when they get sapped to try and sap the opposing Rogue when he tries to resap. If you're playing RMP for example, and your Mage gets sapped while your Rogue saps their Priest, you can Mind Sear the Priest to get a chance at popping the Rogue out. You probably won't get to do it more than once against the same team, but speaking from personal experience, it is very nasty to be sapped in a RMP mirror and have my Rogue opened on because he got popped from Mind Sear.

Some cool Mass Dispel tricks.

We've all seen and done Mass Dispels around LoS to get our partners out of CC, get Innervate off a cocky Druid with no coverbuffs, and keep players in combat. One thing I've noticed a lot of Priests don't do or know about, including my partner on my alt Rogue, is that you can Mass Dispel a Succubus out of Invis so you can set it as your focus to Shadow Word: Death out of Seduce before it's too late. This is a trick I find extremely useful, as often against Wizard Cleave comps I am more annoyed by a Succubus than a Fel Hunter. Watch out though, if you Mass Dispel a Rogue in stealth, not only does it make you unsappable,  it puts him in combat and makes him immune to your partner's sap, so be vocal if you notice yourself entering combat while throwing out a random Mass Dispel so your Rogue doesn't chase a Rogue he can't sap!

If you play with addons that track abilities as I do,


you've no doubt been frustrated more than once by a bug that has been around since the most recent patch that causes your combat log to stop working. Addons like Afflicted or Interrupt bar that read the combat log and inform you when certain abilities are used, may suddenly stop working in the middle of a match, and stop working until you relog. Thankfully, the author of Gladius has come up with a simple addon that spams a macro to refresh your combat log, which allows your addons to work normally and reliably. Until someone figures out what is causing the bug, this fix should do the trick in making sure all your tracking addons run smoothly.

I hope you've enjoyed reading my blog. Have a great weekend!