By All That's Holy

I've been very hard on the priest class over the past few years. I've called it the garbage class, the class you trick your little brother into playing, the warriors' training wheels, etc. I have good reason to hate the class - I leveled a holy priest in vanilla as my first character.

Back in December of 2004 the priest class was a much, much different animal than it is now. First of all, if you ask around for tips for leveling a priest today one of the first things you'll hear is 'get a good wand'. It's true, at low levels a good wand does as much damage as your smite, so there's no sense in wasting mana. Well, back in vanilla wands weren't autofire. Can you imagine trying to click-and-shoot with a wand to literally save your life? It was torture. Wands back then were a stat stick and an emergency tool.

Leveling holy - because my friends needed a healer for all their groups - meant that I didn't have the utility of discipline or the DPS of shadow, and I had to heal my way through every fight, which lasted forever. The only real benefit back then was that Inner Fire didn't run on charges, it was a cast-and-forget buff. But fights took forever, took all your mana, and if you were lucky you could fight one mob two levels above you or two mobs at the same level.

Then I got all the way to 60 and eventually our guild decided to try our hand at raiding. Now you have to understand if you haven't played a healer that there's a certain amount of guilt that comes with letting people die. You get over it eventually as you play more, but a good healer will still feel a tug of responsibility for the other players' lives even when things go wrong. Well, my first raid was a 40-man Molten Core rep run - just clearing trash - and I was the only priest in the raid.

Back then most of the healing was done by priests. I was a good one, but I couldn't keep 40 people alive, no way. Seeing 39 people die because you just couldn't pump out healing fast enough was traumatic. I decided I'd had enough, and I actually deleted my priest. I had a GM undelete it a couple months later, but I never seriously played it again. It was awful. I would be asked to heal things, I'd be a hero, then when I wanted some help with my own quests there was no one to be found to help me. I was a tool to be used to make other people enjoy the game - screw that.

So I gave up on that priest forever, and switched to other classes and loved them all. Even the hybrids that would occasionally heal, I knew that I was just a respec and a gear change away from doing something fun instead of healing someone else's adventure.

Five years later

My rogue is at 5k gear score, and it's time to play an alt. At the back of my mind I've been thinking about playing a priest again,and I finally give in and roll one. This time I make sure to give myself every advantage so the leveling process isn't painful - I buy the staff, shoulder, and chest heirlooms to give myself a 20% leveling bonus and I don't have to worry about a weapon until level 80. It's a huge difference right from the start.

Back in vanilla there was virtually no +spell on any items before level 60, and what there was was divided into two groups, +healing and +damage. In the BC expansion they combined healing and spell damage and every healer everywhere cried with joy. No longer would they have to collect two exclusive sets of gear just to be able to farm for repair bills, they could do decent damage in their healing gear. I remember the day they made the change and I took my resto druid out for a spin and giggled for hours at being able to starfire with decent damage.

Also back in vanilla the priests each had racial spells to make them unique. Dwarf priests had fear ward, which gave the Alliance a significant advantage in raiding and made Dwarf priests the preferred choice. I was a troll, so my racial was a shadow ball that did damage to things that hit me. The problem was that it only lasted three hits and it was too mana costly to maintain, so it was mostly useless. Every priest had their own special spell and I miss that uniqueness sometimes, but I wouldn't trade what we have now.

Fear Ward is now a trainable spell for every priest at low levels, and so is Devouring Plague. That gives us two dots we can pop on a target, just like warlocks. Wands are now autofire, so on a normal mob you can shield yourself (with Inner Fire up) and wand it to death, or cast Holy Fire, Smite, or Mind Blast and your mob is dead pretty quick. Even specced completely holy like I am, grinding and questing is easy beans.

And then there is the added bonus of LFD and queuing for battlegrounds from anywhere in the world. If I get into a spot where the quests are hard and I'd rather grind out xp in dungeons or mix it up with a few battlegrounds (which now also give xp) I can queue up anywhere on the fly. And priests have no movement buffs at all - no animal forms, no sprint, charge, anything - but the level requirements for mounts were nerfed down to level 20, so your priest won't have to walk everywhere forever.

All together the priest class has changed a little, but the game has changed a lot in ways that don't punish healers for their class choice as much as it did back in vanilla. If you had thought about playing a healer sometime and weren't sure what it would be like, it's a better time than ever - jump in and roll a priest.