Holy Priest Karazhan Guide and Beyond!

*EDIT*

While this is a good generic healing guide it seemed many people wanted a full step by step guide to healing in karazhan. I have written a healing guide fro trash mobs and bosses in kara here - http://wowraidguide.blogspot.com/2008/02/complete-and-concise-guide-to-priest.html

Holy priests are invaluable in Karazhan. From Shackle Undead to Circle of Healing their utility is amazing. While a Paladin healer is also a preferable addition, two holy priests can heal Kara with ease.

Of course it is down to the raid leader to make sure they are utilised correctly. There are two types of Healing Priest you should bring into a raid

Circle of Healing Priests have a perfect ranged AoE heal for many bosses, as well as instant and spamable. You really should have at least one priest with this in your raid group. To make this truely effective make sure your tanks and melee DPS are in one group, with your casters and ranged in another. This allows circle of healing to be fully effective in all fights.

Ofcourse if your priest does not have CoH he will most likely have Improved Divine Spirit, another fantastically useful buff, improving mana regen and overall effectiveness on all magical areas.

Basics

Priests have to remember a lot of different tactics for each and every boss in WoW. It is a lot to handle, but after you have downed a boss a few times the tactics will come naturally. In each boss section I will be specifying the healers role if something special is required.

When raiding Karazhan Priests have to remember to gear up for it. I have seen many priests in +1k healing gear saying they are more then well geared, not to mention priests with poor mana regen because they simply tried to stack +healing to get into the raiding sector.

Let me lay the myths to rest, you may have been boosted through Karazhan with better healers before. But to main heal in kara 1.4k+ healing is what you need to be an effective, wipe free priest healer. 1.25-1.3k is doable, but isn't easy as your heals cannot keep up with boss damage. Healers with less than this really should gear up first.

After you have got to a level where you can heal kara without too much trouble (Usually around 1600, if you get upto 1800 it means you can survive most bad pulls) You will find heroics are beckoning, if for nothing more than Badges of Justice. Again, do not go into herois with less than this, some trash hit for 3-5k every 1.5 seconds, you rely on your DPS getting the mobs down before the mob grinds your tank down at a faster rate then you heal him.

Of course not all trash mobs are like this, but you really have to be careful in many Heroic instances. Some are much milder than others, Slave Pans for instance is not too hard and by using the right tactics Mechannar can be downed quite easily. In either case though 1600 +healing should be the minimum.

If you are having trouble in heroics take a look at what is going wrong. If you are running out of mana chances are the DPS are simply not good enough rather than your mana regen being poor. On the same note if the tank is going down before you get your heals off the problem is more likely his armour. However if he survives a few hits but your heals are not healing him to full health the problem is most likely your own.

Rotation

Priest rotation is mainly used in high end raids. Although rotating your prisets has not been as much of an issue as it was back in the days of Pre Burning Crusade it still does help, and can be required for weaker groups.

Priest rotation is a fairly simply process. Sometimes it involves rotation of jobs, sometimes it involves a priest going out of combat while another heals to gain the passive spirit regen.

For jobs it may be switching between main tank healing and raid healing. One will always be more mana intensive. If you are trying to clear a raid quickly it may help mana downtime by switching the roles after every pull.

On some bosses you may see your Mana going down faster than the other priests, if this occurs tell the priest before hand you are going to stop healing, only start again once you have either significantly more mana than him or the raid needs urgent heals.

It is imperative you both warn the other healers and gain a decent amount of mana. Since you stopped healing the other healers will be burning their mana a hellova lot faster to compensate for your pause. They too will soon need to stop healing to recoup mana.

Downranking

An important part of your spell cast bar will be downranked spells. If you dont have this get them in ASAP. Despite blizzard nerfing this you can cast a lower mana spell which heals for a significant amount. You should have lower ranks of greater heals and normal heals ready in your task bar, wether it is for keeping the tank topped up or for throwing that one last ditch heal on the tank before your mana hits absolute zero.

I think that just about covers the basics of priests, I have purposely not gone into much deal but this guide provides a great introduction to priest raiding in world of warcraft the burning crusade end game. As the site progresses I will invest some time in writing indepth articles on all areas of priests in raiding, not to mention their gear!