Welcome to Skill Capped’s Holy Priest PvP Guide for Dragonflight 10.2.6
To make it easier to navigate, we’ve divided the guide into the corresponding sections, covering everything from race and talents to gear and macros. These will give you a good idea about what to expect from Holy Priest in PvP in Dragonflight, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to get your character ready to conquer the arena.
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Table of Contents
In this section, we will cover the biggest changes to the design of Holy Priest in Dragonflight and some of their playstyle implications. Obviously, the main driving force for all adjustments this expansion comes from talents, and we will dive deeper into them a bit later. For now, let’s focus on the bigger picture.
What’s New for Holy Priest in Dragonflight?
Overall, Holy Priest has access to a very similar toolkit to the one it had in Shadowlands. A lot of the same crucial talents and legendary effects have now been added to the updated talent trees.
The most notable change comes in the form of Power Word: Life, giving Holy Priests access to another very strong heal that does more healing when targets are low on HP. This provides Holy with additional throughput and a great way to recover outside of being solely reliant on Holy Word: Serenity.
Not only that, but Holy Priests also had their overall casted healing throughput increased thanks to talents like Lightweaver. This one greatly empowers Heal when used after Flash Heal.
Another huge change is the ability to pick up additional utility like Improved Mass Dispel, Twins of the Sun Priestess and even Void Shift, which once again gives us a button to recover in difficult situations.
There is one big loss, however, which is the removal of Greater Fade. Although this is definitely a hit for us, we make up for it with additions like Phantasm and Void Tendrils.
Holy Priest Playstyle in Dragonflight
In Shadowlands, Holy Priests were incredibly reliant on Holy Words and cooldowns in order to sustain through any level of consistent pressure. When out of cooldowns or charges of Serenity, you were left with next to no consistent healing throuhput as casted heals and HoTs didn’t really contribute to the level we needed them to.
This has now changed. Holy Words, specifically Serenity, have been slightly toned down. That healing has been shifted into abilities like Renew, Prayer of Mending and casted heals. It contributes to the playstyle that you would expect from a conventional healer where you’re going to have to cast more often to deal with incoming damage.
This in combination with throughput cooldowns like Apotheosis and Guardian Spirit make for a very fun and interactive playstyle. If you enjoy the offensive side of healers, you will be excited to hear that Holy Priest still has the option to play this way. The spec provides numerous viable offensive talents that you can pick up depending on the matchup.
This gives you a perfect mixture of both high overall and strong burst damage with the combination of Shadow Word: Pain, Mindgames, Holy Fire and Smite.
The loss of Greater Fade has also altered the way we look to survive. Now we want to kite more by rotating Fade to remove slows with Void Tendrils to keep melee out of reach.