Hydra’s basic Priest Guide

Intro

This is the basic section of the guide. For more advanced 1 to 1 coaching, why not head over to the coaching section here: where you can get exclusive 1on1 coaching with me, guarenteed to improve your play the quickest way possible!

This guide covers a basic general role in arena no matter what setup or bracket you’re playing (depending on setup or bracket you are playing you will want to prioritise certain things more than others but i’ll go over that more in the advanced section of the guide). It also covers the binds i use, the macros that are good to use in arena as priest as well as addons that can be helpful to a beginner arena player.

The general idea behind disc:

So  with the release of cata, disc was largely simplified and no longer requires you to think about as much at any one time. You basically have two states of play, offensive and defensive, sometimes they overlap and you need to do a bit of both at the same time – that’s where it gets tricky.

Defensive play: you should be near a pillar, firstly to give your team mates a point of retreat if they are low. If they dont have a cooldown to get to you then a grip is great (be wary, gripping on roots currently bugs it out and causes it to fail while using the cooldown!). Secondly it allows you to los any incoming cc as much as possible – much easier since they nerfed fear cyclone poly cast times in cata! Thirdly so that if the enemy team decides to swap to you, you can easily kite around the pillar while getting peels from your team and avoid taking too much damage/having to use too many cooldowns. The more defensive cooldowns you save for going offensive with, the less you have to heal then, and the more damage you can put out to assist your team!

Offensive play: you should be aiming to land fears on as many people as possible but especially the healer (if you have another cc class in your team such as a mage, you should be fearing the third player that your mage isnt ccing and your team isnt trying to kill). Once you land the fear you should be mind spiking the kill target 3 times followed by a mind blast and repeat as often as possible (within reason, if the target isnt going to die, dont waste mana mind spiking senselessly). Be aware of dispelling any cc off your team mates to allow them to put as much damage out as possible, this is more important than doing damage yourself since priest damage is severely nerfed in cata compared to wotlk!

Discipline Bindings

The following binds are what i use as disc in arena, i have spent a lot of time analysing them and am personally highly comfortable with them. Feel free to copy them exactly however it is important to note that they are by no means perfect for everyone; there are a lot of variables such as keyboard, hand size and sitting position which will affect how comfortable certain binds are and thus you should tweak them to suit you. The most important thing to remember is that binds are personal to you and you should aim to pick quick binds for spells that require quick reaction and use time such as swd and dispel. Frequently used spells such as shield and flash heal come next in priority, all of the above should be off modifiers. Add your long cooldowns on modifiers since you’ll be using them a lot less often.

Shadow Bindings

The following binds are what i use as shadow in arena, they are predominantly based on my much more tried and tested disc binds which i don’t want to corrupt by perfecting shadow binds, they are by no means ideal but instead very easy to switch to after playing disc. Bear in mind i’ve played much less shadow than most other shadowpriests at high rating so you may want to check elsewhere if you simply have to copy a top tier shadowpriest’s binds.

General Binds

Some general binds that i use which arn’t shown on screenshots:

• I run with Q W E

• Target Self = Mouse Forward Button/F1

• Set Focus = Shift + H

• Target Focus = Mouse Back Button

• Target Party1 = Mouse Scroll Up

• Target Party2 = Mouse Scroll Down

• Dispel Party1 = Shift + Mouse scroll up

• Dispel Party2 = Shift + Mouse scroll down

Macros

The following macros are for both disc and shadow, use as appropriate. All macros have #showtooltip infront of them so that i can mouse over them to see the cooldown to the second if i need to.

Note: i have a fairly unique playstyle in that i dont use auto self cast. I have a macros for things that need to be done quickly like shield self and dispel self, i can then target myself using f1 or mouse forward during the global cooldown so that i dont waste time targetting. You may wish to simply create a modifier in interface options that causes every spell using ‘shift’ for example to be cast on yourself. That is entirely personal preference once again and i encourage you to find what suits you best rather than copying other people. It will be better for you in the long run. (by all means look to other people for inspiration, i do this too all the time – but focus on creating your own macro set and playstyle)

Shield/Shield Self – Allows you to shield yourself without targetting yourself using shift modifier of normal shield bind.

#showtooltip Power Word: Shield
/cast [nomod] Power Word: Shield; [mod: shift, target=player] Power Word: Shield;


Spawn Shadowfiend – Normally shadowfiend spawns on passive so a macro is needed to stop it running straight back to your feet after you spawn it, spamming this macro a few times will spawn shadowfiend and tell it to attack the target you spawn it on (be aware you need to spam the macro a few times)
/cast !Shadowfiend /petaggressive /petattack
Mass Dispel – Stops the ring disappearing when you spam the mass dispel bind.
/cast !Mass Dispel
Shadowcrawl – Ports your shadowfiend to your target and starts attacking it, i spam this bind to micro my pet.
/cast [target=target] Shadowcrawl /petattack
Dispel Self – Dispels yourself while targetting anything.
/cast [target=player] dispel magic
Target party1/2 – Target the first and second player in your party without swapping to their pet if you spam it (like the bind in keybindings does)
/target party1
/target party2
Fearward self/pet – Fearwards yourself without having to target yourself, also fearwards pet with a different modifier, uses pom with no modifier. (my bind for pom is 3, fw self is shift3 and pet is ctrl3)
#showtooltip [nomod]Prayer of Mending; [modifier:shift/ctrl] Fear ward;
/cast [nomod] Prayer of Mending; [mod: shift,target=player] fear ward; [mod:ctrl,target=shadowfiend] fear ward;
Death removing shield – Uses death and removes shield and dispersion so death will break poly w/o shield absorbing dmg back
note: you may wish to have two death binds, one for deathing players to get a kill and a quicker one for deathing things like poly.
/cancelaura power word: shield
/cancelaura divine aegis
/cancelaura dispersion
/cast shadow word: death
Focus Silence – Uses silence or focus silence on a shift modifier
#showtooltip Silence
/cast [nomod] Silence; [mod: shift,target=focus] Silence;

Simple Macros

Innerfire/innerwill same bind – /castsequence !Inner Fire, !Inner Will

Rocket – /use 10

Belt Bomb – /use 6

Dispel Party1 – /cast [target=party1] dispel magic

Dispel Party2 – /cast [target=party2] dispel magic

Dispel Shadowfiend – /cast [target=shadowfiend] dispel magic

#showtooltip [nomod] Pain Suppression; [mod:shift/ctrl] Innerfocus;
/cast [nomod] Pain Suppression;
/cast [mod: shift] Inner Focus;

#showtooltip
/cast !power word: barrier

#showtooltip [nomod]Prayer of Mending; [modifier:shift/ctrl] Fear ward;
/cast [nomod] Prayer of Mending; [mod: shift,target=player] fear ward; [mod:ctrl,target=shadowfiend] fear ward;

/cast [nomod] shadow word: pain; [mod: shift] devouring plague;

#showtooltip
/cast shadowfiend
/petaggressive
/petattack
/cast [target=shadowfiend] dispel magic;

#showtooltip
/cast shadowcrawl;
/petattack

CS timer macro

/run AID={};for i=1,5 do AID["arena"..i]=1;AID["arenapet"..i]=1 end;GSI=GetSpellInfo;INTIDS={[GSI(2139)]=24,[GSI(19647)]=24};StopwatchFrame:Show()

/run local f=CreateFrame("Frame");f:RegisterEvent("UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEEDED");f:SetScript("OnEvent",function(f,e,u,s,_)if((u=="target" or u=="focus" or AID[u]) and INTIDS[s])then Stopwatch_StartCountdown(0,0,INTIDS[s]);Stopwatch_Play();end end)

Addons

I dont personally use any addons due to the fact that they do not allow the use of them at live tournaments so it would be somewhat less than ideal to get comfortable relying on them during online play.

Note: Due to the reason above some of these addons may well be out of date, for a more detailed addon list check our syeren’s addon guide here:

Currently using:

Grid - A very customizable raid frame far superior to the default one – i use this for bgs and raiding.

Recommended addons:

• ag_unitframes – Simple to set up and easy to see, far superior to the standard blizzard unit frames in terms of how easy it is to see health, mana, buffs and debuffs. Any similar unitframe is also great.

• Bartender – Allows bars to be customisable and movable, great for creating and positioning a bar with your cooldowns on.

• Spellalerter – Allows you to select the spells you choose to track and tells you when the opposing team is casting them.

• Interrupt Bar – Shows Cooldowns of things like kick, cs etc and when they’ve been used.

• Omnicc – Shows a number to display your ability cooldowns instead of the regular ‘dial’

• KGPanels - If you need to learn to stop clicking frames use this, you can great an invisible box infront of frames that you cant click through forcing you to use the bind.

Talents & Glyphs

Disc – http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bdhcrosbforoMubZ0b:qmkrqozMm

Key points:

• I put two points in Veiled Shadows to reduce the cooldown of fiend by 1 minute, you can put these in twin disciplines if you are playing a faster paced setup.
• I don’t take Evangelism or Archangel since you use mind spike for nuking anyway

Shadow – http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bcGoZZGrMdbkrdzfo:sMkokVm0z

Key Points:

• In the above build i’ve left out imp mindblast, this build is used for if you play with another class that has the MS effect, if you are playing shadowplay for example then you should probably take imp mindblast and take some points out of darkness/mental agility to compensate.
• You can use either glyph of mind flay or glyph of sw:p, it depends on what type of setup you’re playing once again, i use glyph of sw:p for shadowplay since it’s a lot about spreading dots and this increases my damage output the most.