Mechanical Priest

Holy Priest Stuff

Holy Priest Compendium

Mechanical Priest

Welcome to the Holy Priest Mechanics Compendium. This document aims to try and build up a list of the mechanical behaviour and interactions with the spells, abilities and auras in our toolkit.

Core Holy Priest

Glossary

  • CDR – Cooldown-reduction – Typically referring to effects that reduce the remaining cooldown of an ability
  • GCD – Global Cooldown – the short cooldown that is triggered for most abilities whenever you use most ability
  • HoT – Typically refers to a Heal-over-Time effect
  • Proc – Gaming term for a special procedure or event being triggered
  • WCL – Warcraft Logs

Tags

  • [RT] – Requires further testing or confirmation
  • [Legion] – This mechanic only existed or was relevant in the Legion expansion

Core Mechanics

Mana

  • Holy Priest Mana pool at 120 is 100,000. This can be increased by racial abilities
  • Base Mana refers to the 100,000 number regardless of racial abilities
  • Base Mana regeneration for Holy Priest at 120 in combat is 4,000 mp5 or 800 Mana per second
  • Base Mana regeneration with Enlightenment (jump) is an additional 400 mp5 or 80 Mana (jump) per second
    • This brings the total to 4,400 mp5 or 880 Mana per second

Critical Strike

Critical Strike (aka Crit)

  • Holy Priest base Critical Strike at 120 is 5%. This can be increased by racial abilities
  • It requires 72 Critical Strike rating at 120 to increase Critical Strike by 1%
  • Critical Strike has a chance equal to your Critical Strike percentage of a spell healing for double it’s normal amount
  • Echo of Light is unable to Crit

Haste

Haste

  • Holy priest base haste at 120 is 0%. This can be increased by racial abilities
  • It requires 68 Haste rating at 120 to increase Haste by 1%
  • Haste modifies the speed at which we cast spells
  • Haste also modifies the cooldown of some spells
  • Haste increases the healing done by most HoT spells such as Renew (jump) by increasing the number of ticks
    • HoTs do not have haste breakpoints, any “extra” haste outside of added ticks is added at the end of the HoT as a micro-tick

Mastery: Echo of Light

Echo of Light (aka Echo, EoL)

  • Echo is unable to Crit
  • Ticks every 3 seconds regardless of being refreshed and is not affected by Haste
  • Not affected by healing increase effects such as Versatility, Intellect or buffs & debuffs. Its amount is based entirely on the healing done by the spell that procced it.
  • Can be procced by nearly all direct heals caused by the priest, including Traits, Trinkets and Enchants
  • Can not be procced by HoTs
    • Renew (jump) has an instant portion that does proc Echo, however, the HoT portion does not
  • How Echo of Light works with only one spell triggering the effect on a target during its duration:
    1. Holy Priest healing spell heals the target for 100,000 (example value)
    2. Holy Priest has 40% mastery, so a 6-second buff is added to the target that will heal for 40,000
    3. The first heal is after 3 seconds, and it will heal for 50% of the total amount (20,000)
    4. The second heal is after another 3 seconds, and it will heal for the remaining amount (20,000)
    5. Echo buff expires from the target
  • How Echo of Light works with multiple spells triggering the effect on a target during its duration:
    1. Holy Priest healing spell heals the target for 100,000 (example value)
    2. Holy Priest has 40% mastery, so a 6-second buff is added to the target that will heal for 40,000
    3. The first heal is after 3 seconds, and it will heal for half of the total amount (20,000)
    4. Holy Priest healing spell heals the target for 200,000 (example value)
      1. Holy Priest still has 40% mastery so the Echo of Light buff on the target is increased by 80,000
      2. The total Echo “pool” is now 100,000 (20,000 remaining from the first application + 80,000 from the second)
      3. The duration is extended with enough time for Echo to tick 3 times
    5. Each successive tick of Echo from now on will tick for 33% of the remaining amount of Echo on that target last time it was refreshed.
    6. Each successive proc of Echo on that target will simply keep increasing the healing pool amount and increasing the duration of the buff to accommodate 3 more ticks.
  • The Glyph of Angels which applies the Glyph of Angels effect attaches to your Echo of Light passive, meaning although the Glyph states you need Level 25 to use it, you actually require 78 as that’s when you first obtain Echo of Light

Leech

Leech

  • Leech heals you for Leech% when you do damage or heal someone, with the following caveats;
    • Self-healing does not cause leech
    • Overhealing does cause leech
    • Echo of Light (jump) does cause leech
    • Absorbs do not cause leech
    • Leech cannot crit, it heals a flat amount based on what triggered it
    • Leech is not affected by Versatility (jump) or other healing increases such as Guardian Spirit (jump)
  • Leech healing that fully overheal do not generate combat events

Baseline Spells

Flash Heal

Flash Heal (aka. FH)

Focused Will

Focused Will (aka. FW)

  • Nothing of note to mention about FW

Guardian Spirit

Guardian Spirit (aka GS, Angel)

  • “Massive Damage amounts will kill the target despite this effect” – The threshold for this is 200% of the target’s maximum HP in overkill. This means if the target is at full HP they can take up to 300% of their maximum HP in damage before dying
  • This effect works by providing the target with a special absorb once their HP hits 1. This special absorb doesn’t absorb damage before the health pool like regular absorbs, instead absorbing damage once the health pool of the target has been reduced to 1.
    • Example: Target has 10% HP left and takes a hit for 30% of their maximum HP. The first 10% of the incoming hit reduces HP to 1, and the remaining 20% of the incoming hit is absorbed by Guardian Spirit which then heals the target for 40% of their maximum HP.
    • This heal is capped at 200% of the casting priests maximum health. This doesn’t affect normal usage and was introduced to prevent it from being abused on NPCs with high health pools.
September 18, 2018 – GS can only heal for 200% of the casting Priest’s max HP
  • The increased healing effect increases all incoming healing on the target, not just healing from the target priest
  • Taking damage that causes the life-saving effect to proc causes Guardian Spirit to be removed from the target immediately, including the increased healing received buff it provides

Heal

Heal

  • Heal does not need a lower cast time. It’s fine. In fact, it’s handy for when people say “HEAL ME!!!” you can reply with “Are you sure? It’s got a really long cast time!”
  • Nothing of note to mention about Heal
  • Jump to Trail of Light to see the Heal interactions with ToL
  • Jump to Holy Words to see the Heal interactions with Holy Words and Holy Word: Serenity

Holy Fire

Holy Fire (aka. HF)

  • Holy Fire’s cooldown has a chance to be reset when casting Smite (jump) or Holy Nova (jump) thanks to the passive Holy Fire commonly referred to as “Holy Fire Rank 2”
  • The Holy Fire debuff can stack twice on an enemy thanks to the passive Holy Fire

Holy Nova

Holy Nova (aka. Nova)

  • Holy Nova has no damage or healing cap, scaling linearly with the number of targets in range of the cast
  • Holy Nova has a 20% chance to reset the cooldown on Holy Fire through the passive Holy Fire when it hits at least one enemy target. This chance is not increased by the number of Holy Nova targets hit.

Holy Words

Holy Words (aka Serendipity, HW CDR)

Mind Vision

Mind Vision (aka. MV)

  • Can be cast while already channelling Mind Vision on a new target, effectively letting you chain it infinitely. This lets you explore continents or raid/dungeon zones so long as you can target (or /target) new enemies to Mind Vision.

Prayer of Healing

Prayer of Healing (aka. PoH)

  • Prayer of Healing hits only the target and their 4 closest allies. There is no smart healing that targets injured or most injured allies.
    Thanks for Chaoly for the following diagrams
No smart healing – Even though B1 is more injured, PoH heals the closest allies.
No smart healing – even though A1, A2, A3 and A4 are all at 100% hitpoints they are all still healed as they are the closest allies to the PoH target.

Prayer of Mending

Prayer of Mending (aka. PoM)

  • Cooldown is reduced by Haste
  • Stacks to a maximum of 10 stacks
  • When bouncing to or cast on a target with PoM already, it increases the stacks up to 10 and refreshes the duration to 30 seconds
  • Does not collide with other Holy Priest’s PoM
  • Heals immediately after the target takes damage
  • Prefers bouncing to injured targets without PoM already
  • Can leave renew when talented into Benediction (jump)
  • Is left on targets hit by Salvation (jump)

Purify

Purify (aka. Dispel)

  • Casting purify on a target that doesn’t dispel any magic debuffs does not cause Purify to go on cooldown, but still costs mana
  • Confusingly despite being called Purify, it is most commonly referred to as Dispel and sometimes even Dispel Magic (not to be confused with the Holy Priest spell Dispel Magic of the same name), or the paladin magic dispel Cleanse

Renew

Renew (aka “Don’t cast Renew”)

  • The initial heal component of Renew only procs Echo of Light (jump)
  • The amount of Renew ticks are modified by haste. Haste doesn’t increase the duration of Renew, just increase the number of ticks inside its regular duration
  • Renew scales linearly with haste with no breakpoints, resulting in a micro-tick of Renew to account for additional haste outside of added Renew ticks
  • Due to an effect commonly referred to as Pandemic, if renew is refreshed with less than 3 seconds remaining, that time is added on to the regular 15 seconds
  • [RT] Refreshing renew with more than 3 seconds remaining will only increase the remaining duration of Renew to 18 seconds (15 base + 3 extra)

Resurrection

Resurrection (aka. Res)

  • Resurrection casts are cancelled if you enter combat during the cast

Smite

Smite

  • Smite costs 0 mana
  • Smite has a passive increasing its damage (Smite), commonly referred to as “Smite Rank 2”
  • Smite has a 20% chance to reset the cooldown on Holy Fire through the passive Holy Fire
  • Smite does not give a damage absorb debuff to affected enemies for Holy. That’s the discipline passive Smite
  • Jump to Holy Words to see the Smite interactions with Holy Words and Holy Word: Chastise

Symbol of Hope

Symbol of Hope (aka. SoH, Symbol)

  • Restores a percentage of missing mana only, not total mana
  • Only affects friendly healers within 40 yards at the time of the cast

Talents

View our current talent tree on WoWhead.

Enlightenment

Enlightenment (aka. Enl)

  • Enlightenment at 120 adds 400 mp5 or 80 Mana (jump) per second
    • This brings the total base regen to 4,400 mp5 or 880 Mana per second

Trail of Light

Trail of Light (aka. ToL)

  • Heal amount of Trail is 35% of Flash Heal or Heal including when it critical strikes
  • The additional heal provided by Trail of Light is its own healing spell Trail of Light
  • Does proc Echo of Light (jump)
  • Always heals the previous target, it will not heal your Flash Heal target
    • Flash Heal Player A, ToL heals the previous target
    • Flash Heal Player B, ToL heals Player A
    • Flash Heal Player B again, ToL heals Player A again

Enduring Renewal

Enduring Renewal (aka. ER)

Angel’s Mercy

Angel’s Mercy (aka. AM … ?)

  • Specific CDR provided for different damage amounts is unknown at this time
  • It is confirmed through testing and logs that more damage taken does, however, result in more cooldown-reduction

Perseverance

Perseverance (aka. Pers)

Angelic Feather

Angelic Feather (aka. Feather)

  • Prefers the casting priest if cast underneath them, meaning if a group is stacked together then feather should still speed-boost the casting priest as a priority and not pick a target at random.
  • Can’t be used with macro conditions like @target, @focus, @mouseover and @targettarget
  • Can be used with both the @cursor and @player macro conditions
    • @player is most commonly used as it immediately applies the speed boost to the casting priest
#showtooltip 
/cast [@player] Angelic Feather 
/stopspelltarget
  • @cursor can be used to directly cast it under the mouse cursor 
#showtooltip Angelic Feather 
/cast [@cursor] Angelic Feather 
/stopspelltarget

Cosmic Ripple

Cosmic Ripple (aka. CR)

  • Behaves like a smart heal, preferring injured health allies within 39.5 yards when triggered

Guardian Angel

Guardian Angel (aka. GA)

  • Cooldown of Guardian Spirit (jump) is set to 60 seconds if Guardian Spirit expires on a target without the life-saving portion coming into effect

Afterlife

Afterlife (aka. RIP Legendary Cloak)

  • Increases the duration of Spirit of Redemption from 15 seconds to 22.5 seconds

Psychic Voice

Psychic Voice (aka. PV)

  • Nothing of note.

Censure

Censure (aka. Stun)

  • Talenting into Censure replaces the incapacitate effect that Holy Word: Chastise usually has
  • The stun shares stun DR

Shining Force

Shining Force (aka. SF)

  • The knockback and snare effects are separate, so you can knock back snare-immune enemies, and slow knockback immune enemies
  • The radius of Shining Force around the friendly target is 10 yards

Surge of Light

Surge of Light (aka. SoL)

  • SoL proc does not make Flash Heal cast faster, it just moves the healing portion of a Flash Heal to the start of the GCD rather than the end (The cast speed of Flash Heal is the length of the GCD)
  • Flash Heals that consume SoL can also proc it

Binding Heal

Binding Heal (aka. BH)

  • Has 3 components
    • Heal on the target you cast it on
    • Heal on yourself
    • Smart heal on a nearby injured ally to your target
  • Only the direct heal component will refresh renew on a target with Enduring Renewal (jump) talented
  • BH is affected by Holy Words (jump)

Circle of Healing

Circle of Healing (aka. CoH)

  • The cooldown of CoH is reduced by Haste
  • A smart heal, healing the target and the 4 most injured allies within 30 yards of them
    Thanks for Chaoly for the following diagrams
Circle of Healing Target Example
Circle of Healing heals the target, then prefers injured targets within 30 yards of the target
Circle of Healing Target Example 2
Circle of Healing heals the target, then prefers injured targets within 30 yards of the target

Benediction

Benediction (aka. Bene)

  • Renew (jump) placed by Benediction do not count as a cast, and therefore don’t count as a cast on WCL
  • Benediction Renews include the initial heal component of Renew
  • Benediction Renews initial heal component does proc Echo of Light (jump)

Divine Star

Divine Star (aka. DivStar or DStar)

  • Has a mind of its own in regards to when it will hit a pebble on the ground and return to you early
  • Each direction the star is thrown, the healing is AoE capped, capping the total healing done and splitting it amongst targets healed
    • At the time you cast Divstar, each ally within 40 yards performs a clump check
    • This clump check looks to see how many allies are within 18 yards of them
    • The total number of allies within 18 yards of them then determines how much that target is healed by Divine Star if hit by it
      • The amount healed is the amount shown on the tooltip, if there are 6 or fewer allies within 18 yards of them
      • The amount healed is the tooltip_amount * 6 / number_of_targets if there are more than 6 allies within 18 yards of them
    • This aims to try and prevent Divine Star from doing more total healing per cast when hitting 6 people or more, instead it’s just spread out amongst targets hit.
    • There is potential for the amount to be slightly more or less depending on people moving between the clump check and divine star actually hitting them, however, it’s situational enough it’s virtually impossible to play around
  • A blue post on the topic back in 2014 can be found here
AoE Capping
Blue Post by Celestalon in 2014

Halo

Halo

  • Can be cast immediately before Divine Hymn and any targets hit by Divine Hymn before the expanding Halo reaches them and heals them, will be healed by Halo by 10% more.
  • For the Halo cast, the healing is AoE capped, capping the total healing done and splitting it amongst targets healed
    • At the time you cast Halo, each ally within 40 yards performs a clump check
    • This clump check looks to see how many allies are within 30 yards of them
    • The total number of allies within 30 yards of them then determines how much that target is healed by Halo if hit by it
      • The amount healed is the amount shown on the tooltip, if there are 6 or fewer allies within 30 yards of them
      • The amount healed is the tooltip_amount * 6 / number_of_targets if there are more than 6 allies within 30 yards of them
    • This aims to try and prevent Halo from doing more total healing per cast when hitting 6 people or more, instead it’s just spread out amongst targets hit.
    • There is potential for the amount to be slightly more or less depending on people moving between the clump check and Halo actually hitting them, however, it’s situational enough it’s virtually impossible to play around
  • A blue post on the topic back in 2014 can be found here
AoE Capping
Blue Post by Celestalon in 2014

Light of the Naaru

Light of the Naaru (aka. LotN)

Apotheosis

Apotheosis (aka Apo, Apoth)

  • On the GCD as of BfA

Holy Word: Salvation

Holy Word: Salvation (aka Salv)

Traits

Trait Stacking and Scaling

Azerite traits all scale from the item level of the item they’re on. This means a trait on a 370 item will have a higher value than the same trait on a 355 item.

You can obtain the same trait on multiple items, doing so will cause certain attributes of the trait to stack. The general rule for things that DO stack is:

  • Stat Increases – For example, “increases your intellect by 123”
  • Healing effects or increases – For example, “heals for 123”
  • Absorb effects – For example, “absorbs 123 damage”
  • Damage effects – For example, “deals 123 damage”

There are many effects that DO NOT stack, these include:

  • Cooldown reduction – For example, “reduces the cooldown of SPELL by 2 seconds”
  • Duration of buffs and effects – For example, “lasts for 10 seconds”
  • Number of stacks – For example, “stacks 2 times”
  • Number of targets – For example, “heals 4 nearby targets”

Holy Priest has a few traits that don’t stack in a somewhat linear fashion.

  1. Sacred Flame – The first trait you get with Sacred Flame doesn’t provide much benefit as the bulk of the mana gained is offset by the cost of the Holy Fire cast Sacred Flame was removed in patch 8.1.
  2. Word of Mending – Only the heal amount stacks. The cooldown reduction on Holy Word: Sanctify does not stack so successive traits give significantly decreased value
  3. Promise of Deliverance – Only the healing amount stacks. The cooldown reduction on Holy Word: Serenity does not stack so successive traits give significantly decreased value.

Holy Priest Traits

Blessed Sanctuary

Blessed Sanctuary

  • The healing provided from this trait doesn’t scale with anything and is always a flat amount
  • The additional healing provided

Trinkets

Lady Waycrest’s Music Box

Lady Waycrest’s Music Box

  • Potential procs per minute shared between damage and healing events, meaning damage procs take away from the number of potential healing ones
  • Dealing no damage and only healing will cause all potential procs to be healing ones
  • The set-bonus Waycrest Legacy means any damage procs do produce a small amount of healing still, reducing the “wasted” healing from damage procs

Revitalizing Vodoo Totem

Revitalizing Vodoo Totem

  • Heal amount is affected by Versatility, Haste and Crit. Not Mastery
  • Haste reduces the time between ticks like any other HoT effect
  • Because the trinket caps the healing amount at 13 stacks, additional ticks heal for the 13-stack amount
  • There is a micro-tick at the end caused by haste nearly always leaving some leftover healing value after the full ticks

Essences

The Well of Existence

The well of existence stores it’s healing in a buff Well of Existence.

  • Echo of Light does contribute to this stored healing amount

Major

Refreshment

  • Hea

Minor

The Well of Existence

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