What’s the cookie cutter ideal raid build for a holy priest in Classic? Are there any resources still on the web?
It depends on your raid comp. Moreover, most of the time you don’t want to perfectly optimize for raiding because the trivial additional benefits you get from a ‘perfect’ selection de-optimizes you for everything else.
In general, raiding in Classic is about threat and mana management, not throughput. As a Holy Priest, your job tends to be either:
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Tank healing. You have some rank of Greater Heal is that is most efficient. You mindlessly spam this spell until oom and then rotate out to regen mana while some other Holy Priest rotates in. In theory, you can also bring Renew into the equation but most of the time it’s going to yield sub-optimal results because you can’t let damage sit on the tank.
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Mass AE healing. Certain specific raids require healing mass AE. Here, you throw Prayer of Healing until you’re oom (at which point everyone dies if they haven’t won yet).
Classic is not like retail where all healers are created (more or less) equal. Holy Priests are leaps and bounds better at basically every aspect of healing. As a result, a healing team is largely a matter of the Holy Priests doing the heavy lifting and the supplemental healers taking care of the tasks that would be a waste of time/mana for the Holy Priests (such as raid spot healing).
A perfectly optimized raid team would thus bring a battery of deep Holy Priests (33+ in Holy) with a single Discipline to provide Divine Spirit. In practice, you’re far more likely to have 21/30 splits for all your Holy Priests because its a more sensible spec for anything outside of 40-man raids.
For a ‘sensible spec’, you need to understand how Holy Priests heal at 60 (for PvE; PvP is a different story). Basically, you have three key spells: Greater Heal, Prayer of Healing and Renew. You want to do everything you can to optimize those three spells.
That means Divine Fury, Improved Renew, Improved Prayer of Healing, Spiritual Healing, Mental Agility, Meditation, and Improved Healing. You also probably want Inner Focus, Healing Focus and Inspiration.
Holy Nova is dealer’s choice. It’s a horrible spell, but still worthwhile in some (rare) circumstances (one particular spot in BWL comes to mind). Since it’s only 1 point for the difference between being able to use it at all and not, it’s often a decent choice.
Divine Spirit is, of course, most of the reason you went 21 points in Discipline. Improved Power Word: Fortitude is an expected talent.
The two talents that players often take but aren’t actually that good are Spiritual Guidance and Silent Resolve.
Spiritual Guidance just doesn’t return much value for the points invested. While spellpower is good, you just don’t get enough of it from Spiritual Guidance.
Silent Resolve may sound like a good choice, but lowering threat on a healer normally doesn’t do much of anything. You will rarely ever pull threat off the tank on the target on their tanking since healing has half the threat of dps. Where you’ll pull threat is on secondary targets - and the reason you pull that threat is that no one else has any threat at all. That’s why Fade does almost nothing to protect you - you Fade, reduce your threat… and you’re still top of the threat list because everyone else has zero threat.
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https://classic.wowhead.com/guides/priest-healing-talents-builds-classic-wow#pve-talent-builds-for-healing-priests
Critiquing that build a bit, there are a few points I would move around.
Full points imp renew is fairly good if you are not worried about stacking issues, and healing focus is not a min max thing, but when it matters it is not infrequently the difference between life and death. It is also good in PvP as you will not hard cast without it, even with pws up.
Imp prayer of healing and max holy reach are also worthwhile for dungeons, depending how you heal.
Holy spec (+crit), imp renew, healing focus, holy nova, holy reach, and imp prayer of healing are the optional ones you can move points between to fit your style. Holy spec and imp renew are better numbers, the rest are utility.
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