Holy PvP (The usual help with my build thread)Follow

It's a very unusual build for PVP. On the plus side, you get Circle of Healing, instant AOE healing that in theory would let you scoot along while healing your nearby teammates. On the negative side, you've skipped many of the talents that would give your priest a measure of survivability and offensive utility in the battlegrounds and arena.

Blessed Resilience is infinitely better than Blessed Recovery. Blessed Recovery never gives back more than a sliver of your life over a pathetically long time. That said, some PVP priests (including me) put one point it as a dispel buffer--one more thing that might get purged or whatever instead of your Shield, for example. Blessed Resilience, on the other hand, greatly reduces the crit-heavy damage you'll take in many PVP scenarios.

Better still than Blessed Recovery is Focused Will. This talent is a large part of why Discipline builds are so popular for PVP. It reduces all incoming damage, not just crits; it stacks, making it tougher to purge/dispel/arcane shot/devour; it gives a great buff to incoming heals.

Other great reasons to go Discipline are Improved Mana Burn, which makes Priests feared by anything with a blue bar; Focused Power, which makes the Priest's dispels much more reliable and makes Mass Dispel fast enough to use in reaction to bubbles and ice blocks; Reflective Shield, which causes a surprising amount of damage over the course of an arena fight and causes serious pushback issues to anyone using DoTs; and Pain Suppression, a terrific oh-crap button and the best spell in your book you can use on Drek/Van.

Healing Prayers is great for Prayer of Mending, but you won't be using Prayer of Healing effectively in PVP. It's too slow. Also, your party members are likely to be moving out of range or LOS, and experienced opponents are more likely to be focusing your weakest party member than spreading damage among five or more of you. (That's also why Circle of Healing doesn't live up to its potential).

Martyrdom is a must, as you guessed. The other tier 2 discipline talents are largely a matter of taste. I prefer Silent Resolve myself, but can claim no great performance advantage over people who take Improved Fort or Improved Shield.

The builds I would recommend to you would be:

1) up to Focused Power in Discipline, up to Blessed Resilience in Holy.
2) up to Focused Will in Discipline, up to Spiritual Healing in Holy.
3) up to Pain Suppression in Discipline, 17-20 points in Holy.

Note that Spell Warding is an amazing PVP talent--take it over any of the tier 3-4 Holy talents.


Edited, Apr 22nd 2008 6:31pm by emmitsvenson

Also, just spit balling, would Lightwell really get its real usage in pvp, or could it be placed elsewhere.

I'm definitely not an expert though!

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe Blessed Resilience allows non-critical hits to proc on-crit abilities the same way that ordinary resilience does, i.e. it figures that a certain percentage of the non-crit hits you're taking would have been crits were it not for the BR/resilience, and based on that percentage randomly procs your on-crit abilities. That's why with a 490 resilience I'll see, for example, my Martyrdom proc off a normal hit, but not my Focused Will. They all still proc on actual crits, of course. But even if it does block your Blessed Recovery, you just don't care, believe me. When you get jumped by a Rogue, Blessed Resilience will cut the damage you take by 20% or more, while Blessed Recovery *might* give you back 1% of your health before you drop dead.

My suggestion is simply to try out all the builds we've talked about for 3-4 battlegrounds each. That way you'll find out if you really do enjoy your deep-holy build over one of the healing + survival builds. I think you'll probably find, as many Priests before you have, that PVP is more fun the less time you spend watching the countdown timer in the graveyard.