Spiritual Guidance: How to play an Atonement priest
by Matt Low 
Aug 1st 2011 at 8:00PM
Playing a discipline priest is all the rage these days, it seems, especially now that many raiders are busy messing around in Firelands. There is a small selection of discipline priests who exercise the Atonement and Evangelism style of healing to great effect. In the past, I wasn't really a fan of it at all because I felt that there were better options. The buffs Blizzard made to Atonement back in patch 4.1 involving Holy Fire made it increasingly more attractive. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance.
So the past few weeks, I've been trying to master this style of play. It isn't easy, and I definitely wouldn't recommend it for a priest who is new to the game or new to raiding. This week, I'll share with you a few tricks about what I learned and picked up.
The glyphs
Make sure you have Glyph of Divine Accuracy and Glyph of Smite active under major glyphs. You'll need both. For the third slot, I like to use the Glyph of Prayer of Mending, mostly because there isn't another choice better than that, anyway.
Your primary glyphs will be whatever makes you feel comfortable playing discipline. You probably want to use the Glyph of Penance, Glyph of Power Word: Shield and the Glyph of Prayer of Healing.
The spec
I'm offering an incomplete 31/3/0 spec for you as a baseline to start with. There are seven points left that for you to invest in other talents that you feel can help you or your raid. The extra haste from Darkness is nice and so is the faster Shadowfiend from Veiled Shadows. Or you can go for Strength of Soul, Train of Thought or other holy talents.
The style
Let's look at the cost of Penance. Penance at maximum level will cost me around 2,882 mana (for a dwarf). With five stacks of Evangelism, the cost of Penance drops to 2,017 mana instead. That's pretty darn cheap, if you ask me. This is one of the main benefits that the Atonement spec will net you. You also gain the added benefit of having a pseudo-healing cooldown at your disposal that increases the potency of your spells by 15% and nets you back some mana.
Evangelism stacks can be maintained indefinitely, purely through Holy Fire. What you want to do is cast it whenever it is off cooldown. The rest of the time, just stick to using normal healing spells as the encounter demands. I like to use Power Auras to track when Holy Fire is available. It also helps to create a focus macro so that you don't lose track of your current healing target.
From a positioning standpoint, I like to stay within range of the tank. I figure if I can heal the tank, then that means the boss is close enough that it can be hit with offensive spells, allowing me to refresh and maintain the stack.
Now, should there be any downtime during an encounter where there is little to no healing required, you won't get penalized for casting Smite. When we go up against Lord Rhyolith, I just open up on one of his legs immediately. Periodically through the encounter, I'll hit one to volley my Evangelism stacks up and not lose them. I should be targeting one of those large fire elementals or other adds that spawn, though. They usually die fairly quick before I can get around to them, and there's a ton of raid damage going on as it is.
Just play conservatively and watch your mana bar. If you think you're going to get dangerously low, stop casting Smite and stick to Holy Fire only until you regenerate some mana. You have a Shadowfiend and a Hymn of Hope? Use them!
Great! So when should you activate Archangel? Use it if you know that your Evangelism stacks are about to fall off and you have no hope of maintaining them. If the effect is going to wear off, you may as well make use of the mana return and then gradually rebuild it back from zero.
The other method (which is way better) is if you're anticipating some heavy damage coming on soon. Bust Archangel and go to town while healing every player who is still moving. Cast Power Word: Shield on a player, then follow it up with a Penance and a Prayer of Healing over and over until things become stable again.
Do trinkets matter?
Yes and no. Trinkets by themselves won't exactly make or break your class, but they may alter your playstyle a little bit. Most healers will use some sort of spirit trinket, a mana regen trinket or a throughput trinket.
- Shard of Woe
- Eye of Blazing Power
- Fiery Quintessence
- Jaws of Defeat
- Moonwell Chalice
- Core of Ripeness
- Darkmoon Card: Tsunami
Those are just some of the trinkets that practically scream "healing" all over them. But I'm going to add two more to that list that just might surprise you.
Wait a minute! Aren't those DPS trinkets?!
Why, yes! Yes, they are! The only offensive spell you'll really be using is Holy Fire. You've got a pretty good shot of proccing both of those trinkets just from the Holy Fire ticks, anyway. If I noticed Theralion's Mirror activating and boosting my mastery (almost over 70%), I'll load up and start casting Power Word: Shield on players around me or cast Prayer of Healing to force Divine Aegis through. If I see that my Volcano card has activated, that's an additional 1,600 intellect I'll have temporarily. Resort to actual healing spells, though, to take advantage.
Anyway, you don't need to go out of your way to get those two trinkets. But just keep in mind that you can (and should) take advantage of them when they proc.
Before I close this one out, I want to remind you that I consider this style of play a fairly advanced one. If necessary, test drive your settings at the target dummies. Practice keeping one focused while healing various players around you. Try to get a feel of how much mana it cuts away from you and what else you can do to get it back (or at least, make it mean something).
Spiritual Guidance has the inside line on pre-raid gear, valor point and raid gear, and healing strategies for bosses such as Atramedes and Chimaeron. Newcomer to the priest class? Look into Discipline Priest 101 and Holy Priest 101.
Filed under: Priest, Analysis / Opinion, (Priest) Spiritual Guidance
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Michael Aug 1st 2011 8:22PM
Aside from the trinkets, are there any other gear or stat choices for a Atonement priest?
ayanamilily Aug 1st 2011 8:46PM
There isn't really any difference stat-wise for an atonement priest compared to a priest without AA.
myst Aug 1st 2011 9:01PM
An easy way is to take the breakdown of your healing via recount, most of the time you will find crittable heals taking a greater % of your healing then mastery effected heals, so at the moment, after 4.2's crit healing buff, i would say.
CRIT! (It also helps you do more atonement healing)
Celeane Aug 1st 2011 10:05PM
Haste is the strongest, or second strongest, stat for most Disc playstyles. Crit falls to last if you rely heavily on PWS, Mastery falls to last if you don't, and Haste benefits both playstyles.
Yrael Aug 1st 2011 8:59PM
I don't play my priest all that often, so forgive me if this is a silly question. But if you're not healing via smite, and just holy fire, is it really worth two talent points for atonement, when in actual fact all you're getting is a mediocre HoT? You can still take evangelism and archangel to get the mana return and healing buff, or am I missing something really obvious?
Artemisian Aug 1st 2011 9:37PM
It's not just the HoT (that's quite insignificant), but the 15-20k heal I usually get off Holy Fire is very nice for such a quick cast.
Aurilia Aug 2nd 2011 7:23AM
Atonement's about flexibility in how you heal. Keeping Holy Fire on CD provides a decent, cheap heal and smart-hot, and helps maintain the Evangelism buff for popping AA during a heavy damage ability, as the post described. It's usually possible to do this during most fights, even if there's a lot of healing to be done.
Smite is a filler spell, the Atonement equivalent of Heal. It's viable to use in fights with periods of low healing - although it also does well in fights where there's a buff or debuff that increases damage done to a target. If you can be casting Heal, you can be casting Smite. If Heal isn't strong enough to heal, then you probably shouldn't be casting Smite.
myst Aug 1st 2011 9:01PM
i play a slightly different style of atonement priest.
Similar to arcane mages, i use holy fire and smite spam when massive healing is not yet necessary, to conserve mana, how? I macro archangel to the big heals in order to return mana and increase their effectiveness. Using archangel this way, makes your smite healing almost costless. (you can also opt to use archangel asap at 5 stacks just to get the mana back asap).
An idea about atonement, is really to ignore it if u can help it, and macro to other spells, because you will still be healing as per normal, but the proc helps. (Macro it to big spells for buff to healing, or macro it to holy fire to use it on cooldown during atonement spam for mana returns)
Atonement actually does very little HPS, so its not viable to use atonement when heavier healing is required. Hence for normal healing mode, as our good article writer has mentioned before, macroed "Inner Focus" to each Greater Heal, Binding Heal, Prayer of Healing, or Flash Heal. By talenting "Train of Thought", Greater Heal is my prefered heal when penance is on cooldown, due to the talent actually indirectly reducing the cost of greater heal by 11% by making "Inner Focus" come off cooldown sooner.
As for AOE healing, I would spam heavily Prayer of Healing alternating on groups, this makes good use of Divine Aegis proc and also "Prayer of Healing Glyph". Its good to remember to use PW:S to proc rapture when spamming PoH.
I do not take Strength of Soul, due to the fact that:
1) If the raid is taking damage, i will be raid healing
2) If noone is dying, i may as well use atonement healing (helps dps and saves mana by pumping Archangel at 5 stacks asap)
3) I do not spam PW:S, as I use it to save others when they are low and in need of healing immediately, and only to proc rapture.
As for stats, it seems that crit will outweigh mastery (at least for me), as most of our healing % with this strategy are affected by crit, and less % of stats are effected by mastery (this is based on my recount breakdown on most fights with manual crafting, and also rawr model).
A non related to this post but I think worth mentioning, i guess is the use of "Focused Will" for disc priests, as there is a lot of damage being taken by a player in Firelands, by reducing the amount of damage taken on successive attacks, it will really save your life, allowing you to focus on others that need healing immediately too (I find it more effective to reduce damage then a 2 minute cooldown medium heal, which is only slightly more then PW:S yourself).
My toon is Shadowyvaine-Blackrock (US) in case anyone wants to check my spec. It is a little strange that I skip some talents that others will find atrocious but really..
1) I do not have mana issues due to maximizing rapture procs so no need for faster shadowfiends, Instead I use it very early in the fight (80% mana, rapture on CD) to get it a 2nd time.
2) I do not take "Borrowed Time" because I find that other talents are more required over an occasional quicker heal, which may help, but again, other talents matter more.
Happy healing.
Donhorn Aug 2nd 2011 2:08AM
I'm actually trying out your setup right now while playing around with target dummies with the macro Minstrel posted below and I'm just wondering about the macros you use. I'm a macro noob and I'm having issues getting the Archangel macros I tried to make to work at all.
MusedMoose Aug 1st 2011 9:26PM
I just wanted to say that, thanks to the column last week about leveling a Discipline priest, I've started one of my own and will now be reading this column regularly. I'm not high-level enough to deal with Atonement, but it sounds really interesting; I already know I can DPS and heal with my priest much more easily than with my shaman, so I'm looking forward to putting the advice in this column to use. Also, the Discipline 101 column from a while back was *incredibly* useful, thank you for that.
And part of the joy of playing the class? Referring to my character as a disco priest. ^_^
Andrew Aug 2nd 2011 12:06AM
THANK YOU! No one on my server knows what I mean when I talk lovingly about my disco.
Philster043 Aug 2nd 2011 7:47AM
Haha! I'll have to remember that. I do enjoy dancing with my priest with all the light shows activated.
Nikuna Aug 1st 2011 9:33PM
What about the dps side? Would you want an atonement priest filling a dps slot? I found leveling my priest through Wrath content in atonement spec pretty fun. The dungeon groups I joined didn't seem to mind when I was dps-ing as atonement (I guess it helps that I saved a group when the healer DC'ed).
GerardthePriest Aug 1st 2011 9:54PM
My dps (except on gimmick encounters) while healing using Atonement maxes out at about 6k. I guess if I spec'd and threw in DoTs to maximize dps output instead of healing I might manage something a little higher? For raiding there's no way anyone would fill a dps slot with an Atonement priest, though. The dps simply isn't high enough. On a healing-intense encounter, maybe an atonement priest could be a nice tradeoff if you have a ton of dps from your other dps players. Maybe.
Artemisian Aug 1st 2011 10:24PM
Heeeeeeeeeeell no. That is all.
Jeremy George Aug 1st 2011 10:57PM
atonement priests should never queue as dps... in the same gear I do 12K+ as shadow but only 4 to 6k as the atonement healer. I would not hesitate to kick a "dps" in a healing spec. That said, a bored over geared healer will have a much better time cranking out dps during the easy bits of a 5 man, instead of standing around waiting for someone to need a heal. It makes 5 mans faster and more fun to have an extra half a dps.
aldalton Aug 1st 2011 11:27PM
Gerard: The last part of your post is what I had in mind. I like to play a support/utilitarian role, so I found being able to dps while also healing to be very appealing (I don't really have the attention span for main healer or dps... too much time playing resto druid pre-cata).
Jeremy: That was pretty much what I was doing; just queuing for Wrath 5-mans to lvl the priest and no one seemed to care that I was atonement dps. I did queue as healer and do the same thing, but sometimes that didn't go so well, as you can imagine...
leper1983 Aug 2nd 2011 4:12AM
I've been queing up as heals and just smite/holyfire spaming since it has no issues keeping the groups up.. Though i can't count all the times i've had people bitching at me to heal instead of dps lol.. So funny and so sad at the same time.
Verine Aug 2nd 2011 10:27AM
I had a lot of fun smite healing from 80-85. Most of the time I was doing half of the damage of the dpser's. It was a nice bonus and kept me from getting tunnel vision and from feeling like whack-a-mole.
I might just roll a lowbie priest to try leveling that way.
BB Crisp Aug 2nd 2011 1:38PM
You'll never get close to matching a true dps, but you can still atonement heal your way through a lot of fights. Queuing as heals and dpsing as disc in Heroics makes them a little more interesting for me. On single target encounters, you can match or even beat the tank in dps and typically keep him topped off.
On Alysrazor, I keep one of my tanks up primarily with HF/smite on the hatchling he's kiting. I shield him when I can and penance on cd. And when the boss lands, you can add an extra touch of dps and top off your raid automatically at the same time (since atonement healing is "smart"). On our last kill, I did 6.3 million in healing and about 3 million dps over the encounter. Nothing to write home about, but it does add up. This is perfect for any boss fight with moments of light incoming damage, damage focused on the tank, or when the raid is stacked. And having archangel ready to pop for moments of large incoming damage is great, though I tend to use it on cd for the mana return. This leaves it active almost half of the time anyway. I also take Train of Thought, since it typically lowers the cd of Penance by 1.5 seconds or so.
The one warning for anyone trying out this playstyle is don't get tunnel vision. HF/smite to your heart's content, but nobody should die while you're at it. Go to your stronger, less efficient heals when you need them.