Glyphs for the Discerning Holy Priest

Glyph of Dueg Rocks

For the past few weeks I’ve been hitting up Ulduar pretty hard with about five nights of raiding per week being par for the course.  During this time, i’ve been able to re-examine the class, see what works best, what works less and adjust my playing style accordingly.  Through it all, however, I’ve had the same glyphs popped into my spell book and I’m beginning to ponder the usefulness of one in particular, prompting me to do a full review of all of them.  The more I did so, the more I realized that I simply could not keep my precious opinion to myself any longer!  So let’s take a look at some of these and try to sort out the best route, shall we?

First off, let’s take a look at what I currently have equipped for my holy spec:

Glyph of Circle of Healing – This one is fairly obvious and a staple for any holy priest.  As CoH is your bread and butter spell, there’s absolutely no reason not to add to it’s capabilities and give it that extra dose of awesome.

Glyph of Flash Heal – Another staple, this one for both healing specs of a priest.  Anything to increase mana efficiency on one of our quickest heals is a plus for any healer.

Glyph of Renew - This is the one I’m beginning to reconsider.  With the advent of Empowered Renew, I thought that this glyph would truly shine, especially considering that it can crit for up to 2k health when glyphed and helps to proc your other talents.  However, you can still gain the procs from regular and it will drop the healed amount from around 1200 to about 900 or so (that’s quick and dirty math, so don’t consider it an authority on the numbers).  I do use Renew fairly regularly, though it’s only around fifth or so on my list of most used spells.

But what to replace it with?  There are two contenders right now to take over the third spot, and they are:

Glyph of Guardian Spirit – At first I thought that this was a fairly useless glyph but the more time I’ve spent in Ulduar, dealing with “oh shit” moment after “oh shit” moment and even popping Guardian Spirit on trash pulls as well as bosses, the more I’ve come to reconsider this glyph.  On certain bosses (Mimiron and the Assembly of Iron come immediately to mind), this spell can literally be a raid saver and there has been a few times where I’ve popped it and wished I still had it up while the timer was ticking down.  3 minutes is a pretty short cooldown for such a powerful spell, but 1 minute would be even better.

Glyph of Prayer of Healing – This one is another that I initially pooh-poohed, but am starting to think might actually be fairly useful.  Though I don’t cast PoH all the time, I’ve noticed that I do cast it often enough to possibly make this glyph worthwhile.  Anytime the raid is taking a lot of AoE damage, which is the type of situation you’ll see this spell used in, any extra bit of healing can be a god send.  Mix this with the two piece effect on the tier gear, and you’ve got a very powerful group AoE heal indeed.

But those two aren’t the only options, just the most useful and obvious ones for PvE healing.  For posterity’s sake, let’s take a look at a few more that I glanced at, but ultimately deemed too useless to bother with:

Glyph of Dispel Magic – Anything with an added heal is nice, but the fact is that this glyph would only truly be useful in the Hodir encounter where there’s a lot of dispeling going on.  For the most part, however, all this glyph will do is take up a slot in your book.

Glyph of Holy Nova – This glyph is actually not too shabby.  It turns your Holy Nova spell into a very decent group heal.  However, in a raid environment, there are better glyphs out there.  I would recommend this for a priest who runs a lot of five mans.

Glyph of Lightwell – If you have Lightwell in your spec, you might want to consider this, but I would really recommend reconsidering your spec first.

Glyph of Power Word: Shield – This one is really more for Discipline Priests, but if you use shield a lot, you might want to take a look at this.  I just simply wouldn’t recommend it since there are better options for holy priests out there.

I would pretty much file all other glyphs under the useless category for a Holy PvE Priest.  Of course, you should always try to tailor your glyphs to your particular play style, and this is based off of my particular style.  So now I turn to you, gentle jerkwads, because I just can’t decide.  What glyph works best?  Should I go with Guardian Spirit or Prayer of Healing?  Or maybe I’m missing out on the Lightwell parade?  If you have an opinion, I’d love to hear it because I prefer to let the masses do my decision making for me.

-Dueg

The Why of Dueg, A History of Healing

I may have mentioned it a few times, but I’ll state it again for those not paying attention.  I like healing, no, let me rephrase that, I love healing.  The thrill of seeing a health bar go from green to almost completely red and then back to green within a few seconds because of a well timed heal just does “things” to me.  Things both awesome and terrible.  But there’s more to it than that.

Just another day at the office

Now as I’ve stated before, my first character was a smelly ol’ dorf named Duegan who also a priest.  When I originally created him, I just sort of arbitrarily chose priest without a thought to the class dynamic.  I was aware that it was a healing class and assumed that I would most likely be doing some healing at one point or another, but I didn’t choose the class for that reason.

Now back then about 95% of my time was spent soloing with Duegan.  I got to do some of the dungeons such as the Deadmines and Scarlet Monastery, but those were usually isolated runs when a friend of mine absolutely had to have a healer.  I was specced shadow the whole time, even when healing so I wasn’t exactly the master of heals that I am today. 

Then came Dire Maul.

Some may not know this, but Dire Maul was not initially in the game.  It was released a few months after the launch in a content patch and for a time was the most difficult zone in the game.  So one day I was putzing around in Badlands, working on getting level 59, when I get a tell from one of my friends saying that they were at king, their healer had bailed and they needed me for the final fight.

At first I was somewhat reticent to do it.  I mean, I was shadow specced, I hadn’t run an instance since Mauradon about 10 levels previous and quite frankly, I was intimidated by it.  But my friend was insistent, saying that if I didn’t come the group would have to break up and a whole evening was wasted.  So I pulled on my big boy pants, hopped a gryphon (summoning stones were but a distant dream at that point) and made my way to Dire Maul.

The fight was crazy nuts for me.  With me getting thrown through the air and everybody and their mother taking insane damage left and right.  I seriously thought I was going to throw up, my heart was pounding so much.  However, in the end we pulled it out in one shot, downing the King and grabbing our due tribute from those cranky ogres (they just needed a hug really).  And then it happened.

Everyone in the group started talking about how awesome the heals had been and why that other healer, who had allowed three wipes, sucked so hard.  I basked in the glow of their praise, feeling even better about myself when I revealed that I was shadow spec and we had still been able to one shot one of the toughest encounters at that point.  Being level 58 when the previous healer had been 60 an unable to pull it out didn’t feel too shabby either.  It’s honestly one of my favorite memories from WoW.

A few days later, unfortunately, I had to quit the game for monetary reasons and Duegan sat at level 58 for about another year and a half or so.  When I came back after BC was released, he remained shadow spec so I could level through Outland easily, but soloing just wasn’t appealing to me anymore.  A lot of my friends had moved to Horde side, but I was being stubborn because I didn’t really want to start all over again.  But something was just missing from Duegan.  Shadow spec and soloing just didn’t appeal to me anymore.  I was bored.

At first I thought this boredom was from the priest class itself.  So when I did finally reroll horde, I figured I’d try a new class and spent a little while leveling up a warlock.  Eventually I became bored with that class, not really enjoying it either till I realized that it wasn’t the classes that were boring me, it was the soloing.  Since I had made a baby priest to explore the new (at the time) Blood Elf starting area, I figured I’d level up with him.  I was passingly familiar with priest healing and I knew that being a  healer meant getting groups.  So I dedicated myself full time to being a dungeon diver and healer.  I had finally figured out what part of the game I fit into.

Maybe it’s a bit of narcissism or maybe I just have an overwhelming urge to be useful.  At first I thought it was simply a matter of wanting to be able to get a group when I needed one mixed with the familiarity of the priest class, but since then I think it may be more of a reflection of my psyche.  I can’t get into other roles such as tanking or dps, but healing has just always felt right to me.  I can’t really explain it, all I can say is that it’s my role and I relish it.

So what about you?  I know not all of my readers are healers, but a majority are, so what brought you to healing?  Is it just because you love the color green?  Or are you a superstar and want everyone to know it?  What about those who aren’t healers?  What’s drawn you to the role that you play in WoW?  Could I possibly ask any more questions in one paragraph?  Drop me a comment and let me know.

-Dueg