Top 11 Holy Preist Skills at level 70

It's Xandiaver a Undead Holy Priest of the Odyssey Guild in Nagrand and I just DINGED! level 71 and to celebrate this occasion I'm going to make list of my top 11 Holy priest spells so far from my journey from level 1 to 70. This does not exclude Discipline and Shadow spells, but as a Healer it will be mostly Holy for me. I'll also include some detailed information why each ability is either really useful or just fun.

11 - Levitate

This is why I had to have 11 on the list I couldn't go without mentioning the amount of fun I have had with the spell, especially after I got my flying mount. It simply causes you to glide slowly towards the ground whenever you go off a cliff or dismount at 100 feet above the ground. It looks really cool to dismount miles above my target and float down while I cast my self buffs on my way down and although it is very hard to control where you land, through practice I found myself parachuting on to my target most of the time. Another thing is that when I am running from mobs I don't want to fight and I jump off a huge height I then levitate while in the air and the mob will normally give up on chasing me. Anyone else would either go splat or have to turn back towards the mob they are running from. Another cool thing is that I can walk on water again causing land based mob to stop chasing me and keep me from having to move really slow through water. In actual 5 man dungeons it's uses are really limited the only drops from heights that you are meant to go down only to a little bit of damage anyway.

In fact I once used it on me and another player after the rest of the party dropped down to a platform below and I thought cool let's try and be useful. So I cast it on the dude first then myself and jumped off after him and LOL we both floated past the platform and into lava and died. So although it has no real multiplayer application I just wanted to mention it.

10 - Resurrection

Well... It's handy to be useful, but it's not very unique as every class capable of healing has a similar spell and is simply extremely useful for obvious reasons, more then anything though it's just a time saver. Unlike I think the paladin's one which can be used in combat, that's what can really save your ass.

9 - Flash Heal

At first I avoided this spell in favor of greater heal, but realized that it is more mana efficient to use this often rather then greater heal occasionally and for a while seemed like a very viable heal. But now I've gone back to kind of thinking this spell is to weak, lately it only seems to heal someone for a few pixels of health each time and there are so many spells that I'm better off using my casting time on then this. But it is handy for whenever everyone is at nearly full life and I have nothing better to do to just top up slightly damaged life bars while I'm waiting for real damage to heal. Plus later on you get a binding heal spell that almost entirely replaces any need for this spell.

8 - Greater Heal

This is the spell to use whenever someone is below 50%. But because of the other spells I use that rank higher then this that doesn't happen very often. Still in certain relatively rare situation this spell is absolutely essential and is required to heal people that have taken a lot of damage from a single attack and then keep their life stable, but if they are continuing to take damage quickly I am better off using other spells because they are faster. Not to mention that although this spell is the surest way to ensure no one dies, it's too mana expensive to be used that often, especially since tanks don't like letting me have a decent amount of mana I've had to get used to being efficient with cheaper spells.

7 - Prayer of Fortitude

This is one of the best buffs in the game that I know of. I think King's Blessing is the only buff that people ask for more. But this is perfect for the healer because it increases everyone max hit points so that you have more margin for error in any of your healing spells. Best of all is that the Prayer of Fortitude lasts for an hour, so you can cast it at the beginning of a dungeon and forget about it until you either wipe or finish. Only problem is that it requires a reagent that while not very expensive requires you to have to regularly go to a reagent store to stock up.

6 - Binding Heal

This is the spell I mentioned that practically replaces the need for Flash Heal. This spell is just as fast, requires 50% more mana, nut heals both you and your target for twice the amount flash heal does. So it's pretty unanimous, you only use Flash Heal over this if your life is full and your target hasn't lost much life. In any relatively intense fight I never use flash heal and instead use this to counter the aggro damage that gets to me while still healing people in my party. This helps me to not worry about about my own life and concentrate on everyone else. As an added bonus it even causes less threat then Flash Heal, omg amazing.

5 - Prayer of Healing

This is a very important panic button spell. Often a boss will wipe the entire party's hit points to 40% or below and that's when this spell heals the entire party back up to almost full. The only downsides are that it is twice as slow as greater heal and twice as expensive. But when you do the math for that this is a much better spell then greater heal. Because you get the same value if only 2 people in the party are at low health and if there are 3 this spell turns out to be a cheaper heal then greater heal. It is also one of the safest heals to use when you are panicking cause you can either have a chance of making sure everyone will live or you can ensure 2 live with the single target panic button spells, but if two people are dead the party is normally screwed anyway so your better off trying for this.

4 - Guardian Spirit

OH CRAP THE TANK'S GOING TO DIE! IT'S BEEN TOO SOON SINCE I USED SHIELD. HE'S SCREWED THE PARTY IS SCREWED HE'S ONLY GOT 5% OF HIS HEALTH!!!! Wait what am I yelling about I can just cast guardian spirit on him and suddenly everything is fine. This spell is awesome. Any time things are looking bad this is the spell that saves everyone. What it does is it puts a buff on the target that increases any healing on them by 40%, but that's not the cool part. It also costs next to no mana, but no that's not the cool part. It is cast instantly, but that is still not the cool part. The really cool part is that if the tank drops to 0 hit points and would die, he instead destroys the buff and goes instantly to 50% of his health leaving me with plenty of time to cast a prayer of healing or greater heal and get everyone back to full health. The only part that isn't cool is it has a 3 minute cool down meaning I can only cast it once per encounter maybe But who cares it will pretty much be available to use in every boss fight. Only problem I have with is is that it is very subtle despite it's impact. I have never had anyone comment about how the tanks was dead and then suddenly alive again and how close they were to wiping before this one spell followed by a few others piratically got us back to being as refreshed as when we started the fight. As I am the only one watching the lifebars most of the time.

3 - Spirit of Redemption

That's it the battle has been going for ages and I am out of mana. So what do I do, normally I would just have to throw my hands up and say, "that's it no more healz good luck guys". But no even in this situation there is a great option and that option is to die. Yep if I'm out of mana I might as well deliberately jump into the boss's mouth and kill myself, because dead I am of a lot more use. For 15 seconds after I die I can cast any healing spell free of mana and since I have a Glyph on this it is a huge 21 seconds that I can cast all my biggest heals, greater heal, Prayer of Healing and stack another renew on everyone and then die. This is about the same amount of value I would get out of another 40% mana and is a huge contribution. It's also great that since this is automatic and I accidentally die I can still contribute a lot the the group. Even when the tank screws up and let's aggro get to me it's still not quite the end of the heals. This has made that difference between either me dying or the entire party wiping so many times it's unanswerable.

2 - Renew

This is it. This is the single most important heal spell in my arsenal. I always use it all the time because it heals everyone for me at a surprisingly decent rate. When I first had this spell available to me I thought it was stupid how it only healed people a tiny bit at a time and how if i really wanted to use it to any decent effect I would have to keep casting it on every in the party every 15 seconds and that I would rather concentrate on heals with more impact and that I don't have to keep maintaining. That was my attitude all the way up until past level 60. I downloaded barkeeper and decided to make my HUD a lot easier and assessable and I put renew on it and decided to give it a go in a couple of fights. These were relatively easy instance that I was a high level for and I noticed that renew was all I was casting, I never had to cast anything else. At this point my strategy was very different I would just wait for someone to be hurt enough and cast greater heal. But it was after using renew that I discovered that it had a lot more overall effect then I thought and I changed my entire strategy to focus almost exclusively on renew and then other spells would be cast afterwards. Every single fight now starts with the tank charging in while I cast shield on him, then prayer of mending and then renew on everyone in the party, which thanks to my improved UI only takes a few second since I have all my buttons right next to the characters faces. Sure I could have a good muscle memory and macro everything to keys but I'm not good at remembering which key I attached to which skills. Instead I have them laid out on my screen and I just click away, with the renew spell being the closest and biggest button because I must cast it 50 times in each encounter and while this is a bit of a pain I have now gotten used to it and it has now effectively made me a 300% better healer then before I used this landmark spell and now that I have spent my talents on everything to do with it, it is now so very powerful and there are green numbers popping up all over the screen all the time. So what what could possibly beat this, I think even n00b preists will know what's next.

1 - Power Word: Shield

OMG! this spell is mapped to my mouse button, even though I have it on the screen I don't click on it ever I have known ever since I first started playing and I got this spell it has always been on my middle mouse button. Ever since the very first time I got his spell as a human priest that I stopped playing at 16th level before I started this one, I knew it was awesome for everything. In soloing it is almost the sole reason my priest who doesn't use any shadow spells except shadow protection is able to solo. without this spell it would be pretty much impossible and in dungeon it is even more important. I cast it on the tank over and over whenever the debuff that prevents it from being recast to soon goes away and it makes a huge difference to the amount of damage they take and on top of that it is also the single best panic button. Oh crap someone is about to die, middle mouse button then side mouse button and they are back to full life, cause my side mouse button is greater heal. Also the Body and Soul talent makes it even better even outside of battle, as whenever I cast it my target gains 60% running speed and gets cured of a disease. Wow I did not even remember it did that until I looked up the talent just then, who know how many diseases I've unknowingly cured. So I can use it to run around place I can't use my mount a lot quicker including instances. So I die and there are no rezers so I have to run back in, well at least I can get back to the party almost as fast as a hunter can. I will always have it mapped to my mouse. Even though it has a fairly long cool down I have probably used this spell more then renew in the whole game, although I know that will change in the future. So there it is. I'm sorry but although I haven't said much negative stuff for once on this post I'm going to have to fix that by saying if you are a priest and you don't use this spell all the time you are an idiot.