Unusual (Valid) Priest Builds

[Kevin]

If you could pull it off, ditching blackout (iirc virtually everything in MC is immune to it, doesn't do anything while you're healing, though you'll miss it solo and in pvp if that's your thing) for spi tap and mental strength for the last 2 shadow affinity, darkness and a shadowform would greatly boost your dps and vamp embrace hps, while keeping your threat-reduction on par.  Shadowform in particular is going to be a big win (vs MS) for dps and damage-till-oom in everything but the straight-healer role, the damage reduction is great for soloing, and people seem to overstate the cost of not being able to heal--it only takes a global-cooldown cycle to drop it in midfight.

-- frink
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First A link to play with it that I forgot in the original post.

Next my biggest priest is currently only L26. :) I've been in Molten Core, BWL, and ZG with a Warrior, Druid, and Paladin. This is food for thought down the road and possibly thought sparking for some of our current priests.

The real issue isn't mental strength, it's inner focus which requires 21 points in discipline and thus locks out shadow form. Giving that up would just make you a full shadow priest, which I do think is perfecrly viable in MC now and as a 5 man healer. Though I imagine you have to limit your DPS in 5 mans a lot I was just trying to give a few more tricks to the healer while being able to throw out DPS too since you don't need all the healing you bring with you on trash mobs and shadow weaving will help with DPS (and with the change to CoS in 1.9 it will be probably be even a bigger deal). Since inner focus will allow you to land a high crit chance heal for free (seems huge in a 5 man for a big prayer of healing at the right time) that just seems like a good thing to have around, since you will still be trying to do DPS and burning your mana pool faster the inner focus trick seems like a way that you could help avoid a wipe if you don't estimate the damage/healing balance correctly.

Getting reach means either no imp fade and silence or dropping even more disc talents. And while I can live without imp scream, I just like the utility of a priest that can silence. Imp fade my not really be needed though and I did debate on it. I'm also not sure if 24 yard flay is really much different than 20 when dealing with MC mobs. That is still too close on Mags, Geddon and Shazz. You would be pushing it on Rags but you should be able to get in range and not be in range of others. Not a problem with Luci, Gehennas, Sulfuron though. So I figured that on bosses I would be more likely to be a weaker healing priest with the rare damage spell on the boss and the buff for the locks, probably not flaying on them at all, even for ones where range shouldn't be an issue.

I did think about swapping blackout and tap, but as you mentioned blackout is nice solo and PvP. I really need to see the reliablity of tap in a 5 man. I know that even in a duo it goes way down. Of course even if you only get it on one of 5 or 8 kills it still helps cut down time or provide you with more mana in a pack fight.