Im very happy about playing a priest in a 5vs5 team, we got 1800 rating atm, its not sky high, but its above average. I see countless whine threads that claims that paladins are a upgraded version of priests, and has no downsides, and that priests have thousands.
You guys need to relax and think twice. Priests are just as good in PvP as paladins. Feel like your too squishy? That your too weak to PvP? Dont lose faith my friend, you just need to know how to prioritize your gear stats, have a decent spec, and a little bit skill helps ofc.


Heres how you can improve in the Arena.


1) Basic Equipment
Go to your auction house, Search: "Physician" in Cloth above level 65, and replace any green/crap-blues u have with those items (im not kidding, do it!). If there are none in there, come back another time. They might be green items, but these stats is exactly what you need in PvP. Items from honorpoints and arena points are also what you are looking for. Do _not_ go out and grab all the spirit/int/+healing equipment you can, cous what good does those stats if your dead and cant heal anyway?

I suggest you go arena when you have more than 9k hp with selfbuff, +550 healing or more, and around 8k mana.


2) Talents
Go to your Priest Trainer, and spec this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=dxMGzhrzZfVthc0RVhN
There are ofc other builds that also are good. This is a spec that your PvE guild would accept (atleast i hope so) so you dont have to re-spec everytime you wanna do Arena.
If your in a PvP guild and dont give a crap about PvE, i think you should go with this spec instead: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=dxMGzbTxMZfVthcMoV0h
Be aware that this spec sacrifices some healing power and in return you get more survivability. Survivability is good but you dont wanna gimp urself too much, so i suggest you only spec this if you have around 800 healing, otherwise your heals will be quite weak.


3) What to do inside Arena
I assume you already have friends you can team up with in the arena (5vs5 - where the real arena points are at). Some teams have 3 healers and 2 dps'ers, others have 2 healers and 3 dps'ers.
Heres what you should do:

If 3 healers:
Let the other healers do main healing, your task is back-up heals (only if somebody is close to duying), keeping PoM up, but mainly Mana Burn their Paladin/Druid/Shaman (who ever is healing). Note that i dont mention priests, thats because these classes have lower mana than Priests so you get them oom allot faster. If the Druid suddenly begin regenerating mana very fast, its cous he used Innervate on himself. Innervate can be dispelled, so do that. Mana Burn is infact one of the most powerful spells a Priest have. Use it or reroll!
In Blades Edge Arena (not the circular one) its a good idea to use Mind Control if the opponents are not going for you at one point, maybe they are focusing on the "real" healers or whatever. At this point you Mind Control their Rogue/Warrior/Hunter/Paladin/Shamans off the ramp, so he have to run back up again. Do not Mind Control weaker classes such as Warlock/Mages/Priests, especially not Undead ones. Why dont you wanna MC these targets off? Because with those on the ramp, and their healers below, they will recieve zero heals and your rogues/warriors/hunters will basicly tear them apart.

If 2 healers:
You will have to heal now, use Greater Heal (talents reduce its casting time to 2.5 seconds). Do _not_ use Flash Heal because you will go oom in the blink of an eye. Ussualy you will end up as a punchbag for the opponent dps. Thats not gonna be a surprise to you, you are a cloth wearer and theres only 2 guys healing, so ofc they will grab whoever looks weakest!
When you get attacked (and you will!) keep Renew up on yourself at all times, and be aware on your healers whereabouts, being in his Line of Sight ussualy means life or death. Dont think you can just stand there healing urself while ur being beated, cous if theres a rogue and something else, instants are your only friend. When you have cast PW:shield, PoM and Renew, and there are no more instants to help yourself out, begin dispelling your party members if they have DoTs on them. Dont just stand there and take the beating, thats the worst thing u can do. Always do something!
The great thing is, the longer you are alive, the longer time does your teams dps have to kill the opponent healers, and even if you end up dead. It doesnt mean that much if the opponent team has lost 2 players in the meantime.

AND REMEMBER TO HEAL WHEN YOU DIE. Cous with my spec, you have Spirit of Redemption. Dont waste a second of it! Finish it off with PoM just before the timer ends.
Also, use Shadowfiend when your on 40% mana, not 0%.

Note: It is possible to ressurect your teammates inside the arena, even though its rare that you can pull it off since it requires you to be out of combat AND not touched for 10 seconds.


4) Trinkets
If your engineer, create the Gnomish Poultryzer Trinket (or the goblin one with same stats) that gives +45 stamina. Equip it even though you cannot active its use-effect inside the Arena. As other trinket, use Gnomish Net-o-Matic. This will help you get Warriors off you and keep urself up just a little bit longer.
If your not an engineer, use Insignia of the Alliance/horde, and the Arena Grand Master Trinket (you get that by winning the chest in Gurubashi Arena 10 times i believe).


5) Collect Resilience!
At this point it will take some time before you can improve. Next step is to improve your gear by getting lots of the Resilience stat. Resilience reduces your chance to get Critted, but also reduce the damage you take WHEN your opponents crit you. Resilience items are not common in instances though, you have to grind Battlegrounds to get them, and/or do Arena for Arena Points.

So how do u get started on getting this equipment? Where to begin?
Get 2 parts of the Honor Items set, i suggest the Robe and Shoulders. There are 3 sockets in the robe, fill those out with Solid Star of Elune (+12 stamina) in each socket. And drop 2 Solid Star of Elune in the Shoulders too. This 2-set-bonus rewards 35 Resiliece, and the items themselves gives 17 and 15. (the socket bonus from these items reward resilience, but dont drop crap gems in them just to get this resilience bonus, cous as i said above: Stamina > Resilience).

Sooner or later, you will get enough arena points to get the Gladiator Helm. Drop a Solid Star of Elune in it together with the Meta-gem: "Powerful Earthstorm Diamond". This metagem gives 18 stamina and a 5% chance to resist Stun. This is the best PvP meta-gem for an Arena Priest. The helm awards 26 resilience.
The next Arena Item you should buy is the gloves. These award 25 resilience.
The set-bonus of 2 gladiator items is 35 resilience.

To sum it up: With these 4 items, you will get 163 resilience and 240 stamina, not bad huh?
In order to get these items you need: 3.000 arena points, 39.150 honorpoints and 50 Arathi Basin marks.

Note: When Blessed Resilience procs, it renders you immunity to Crits for 6 seconds, it has 60% chance to proc everytime you get crittet. But there a nice thing about it: An attack that WOULD have critted, but didnt do it due to your high Resilience stat, will still be able to proc Blessed Resilience! So you get immune to crits without ever had recieved a real crit, wonderful! (this is _not: a bug, blizzard have made it this way to increase the usefullness of the Resilience stat for Holy Priests who wouldnt take it if it werent for this.)

Note: A high amount of Resilience can even result in attacks with a 100% chance to critical strike (for example a rogue using Cold Blood) to turn into a non-crit.


6) Stat Calculator **still in testing**
To figure out what item is the best choice, we use a stat calculator. Simply take the individual stats from the item, multiply that stat number with the number given below. Do that with all the different types of stats the item might have, and then add the numbers together for the final item value. If the result is higher than what you already were using, replace it with the new item.

-------------------------------------------
Resilience x 1,2
Stamina x 1,0
Intellect x 0,8
Dmg/Healing x 0,7
Healing x 0,6
Mana/5sec x 2,0
Spirit x 0.2

-------------------------------------------
Maybe this sound a bit strange, let me explain with an example:


Hierophant's Sash, +28 stamina, +19 intellect, +19 Resilience, +22 dmg/healing
Voidweave Cilice of the Physician, +34 Stamina, +23 Intellect, +50 Healing

What item should you use? Lets try the calculator:

Hierophant's Sash: 28 Stamina + 15,2 Intellect + 22,8 Resilience + 15,4 dmg/healing = 81,4 points
Voidweave Cilice of the Physician: 34 Stamina + 18,4 Intellect + 30 Healing = 82,4 points


The winner became the Voidweave Cilice of the Physician

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Note: Mana Burn, which will basicly be the only offensive spell you will use does NOT get ANY bonus to its Mana Drain Amount based on your +spell dmg. You can have +1210 Spell dmg, or +34, and it will still only drain 1021-1079 which is what the tooltip says for a Rank 7 Mana Burn spell.
This is the reason why +Spelldmg is not prioritized higher than it is, simply because we rarely use it. However +43 Spell dmg/healing is still better than +47 Healing.
Situations can happen where a Shadow Word: Death is that last burst needed to finish off a player before he gets his heal. Even though ur not designed to do damage, you are more useful when doing so in some situations, dont forget that!

Spirit Stat is for me an almost useless stat in Arena PvP. You only get full effect of Spirit when your out of combat, and its VERY rare that you get out of combat for a longer duration inside the Arena, instead go for Mana/5sec

great guide thx should be sticied

I lost my faith and went to the dark side, seems to work pretty well.

Great guide and I agree with you. Though I have some changed that I would personally do on the specc.
Why would you take empowered healing if your purpose is arena healing? tbh you really rely on instant casts like PRoM, renew, shield etc. I dno but everytime I try to cast a Greater Heal I get itnerrupted and silenced in the matter of seconds. So I would skip the 5 points in Empowered Healing and put them in 10% mana since 10% mana will do you more good imo. And since you barely will use spirit I'd say skip the Spiritual Guidance talent!

I came up with: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxMRuogxZfyt0cMoV0h

But if you want to combine your pvp healing with instance healing you might wanna get Divine spirit etc.

+32 healing with 4 points Spiritual Guidance even with ZERO items that gives +spirit.
when u smack spirit buff that increase to +42, for 4 talent points.

If you wanna go further down, u need 2 points Spiritual Guidance, so reducing spiritual guidance to 2 points would result in +21 healing.

Then use those 2 points in Holy Concentration if you want the required 35 points to unlock Empowered Healing. Imo you need that talent to shoot out Greater Heals that can outheal a mortal strike or wound poison. Remember that you dont heal as great as a PvE healing priest (some pve peeps have +1600 healing, but you probably only have around 700 with the minimum gear i suggest).

So the question is 2 points in Spiritual Guidance for +21 healing, or 2 points in Holy Concentration for 4% chance to proc clearcasting on a flashheal/greater heal when you cast a flash or greater heal. Personally im not a fan of things that have to proc, reduce ur reliability on "luck" factors as much as possible is ussaly a good idea, 4% is not much.


Tjobo if you are getting too much interrupted/silenced, try be a sneaky bast@rd, you should never be located in the center of the circular arena for example where everyone can see you. Try to stand next to a pillar (ofc u should still have line of sight to the peeps ur healing), so opponents have more trouble location you on first sight. If you get ranged attacked from there, run behind the pillar for like 3 seconds, sometimes thats enough to lose the attention of a mage for example, and he will take another target.

Btw if you have the gear/friends for it, the last boss of Blood Furnace heroic drops a neck that reduces chance to be affected by silence and interruption effects by 15%!

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=dxMGdcxbZfexI00oVhh

This is what I'm using and I'm loving it =)

Nice guide.

I have used this build on 3vs3 arena and I have found it usefull. I know it lacks survivability but the Black out procs sometimes so it gives me time to get away. Also the silence have been very usefull in many situations.

Also Mind flaying someone just before they try to jump to you at Blades edge makes me happy in pants
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxMGd0MZbyxhc0oZVMgzMu

really nice guide tbh

but i would go with http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=dxMGucgZrEzI00qV0h for spec

plz paste best gear with no raiding/karazhan raiding b4 u get gladiators set eg the top3 for each slot

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Q u o t e:
plz paste best gear with no raiding/karazhan raiding b4 u get gladiators set eg the top3 for each slot

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I could work out a list later when I get, but it'll be primarily spell damage gear since those are the parts with most hp on them. To get gear I evaluate the stats according to this:

Stamina > Spell crit > Healing > Resilience > Intellect > Mana per 5 > Spirit... I'll even go that far to say Agility is better than Spirit in arena, since the fights are short and intense.

Also if you got some gear with sockets don't care about the socket bonus and fill every socket with +12 Stamina, trust me you won't regret it.

I'd go for http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=dxMGzIMZfEzI00qVzI

Moved the mental agility and spirit talent points to improving inner fire, since your purpose is to make the priest a good healer and at the same time be able to take some beating.
The spirit talent is imo a laugh, the little healing it gives isnt really worth it imo and it wont save anyone. And mental agility seems to me more like a filler to get to spirit buff when improving inner fire is far superior when it comes to survival.

Improving greater heal is a handy talent to heal with but I'd only use it for conserving mana and without decreasing its mana cost it's not very effecient and when taking a beating the chance of actually finishing a greater heal is close to 0 unless the other team lack some serious interrupting effects.
So I moved the talents to decrease casting time to Inspiration and getting some extra crit.
Removed a couple of points at spiritual healing as well mainly because pvp gear often comes without decent spirit.
The talent points in Insiration is there just to improve the survival further, usually helps a lot when getting slapped by a ms warrior (if you crit). It's also handy when it comes to healing others.

I actually even went far enough to get the lolwell talent, mainly because I believe it can be useful with the correct timing, however, It's just a matter of taste.

I would also change the priority in stats to:
Stamina 4:3 >Intellect > Healing > Crit = Mp5 > Resilience

Since most stamina gear indeed have resilience I wouldn't bother with decreasing any other stat to get it,

There have been specs thrown about here, non have imp Inner Fire. This is a must for a PVP build.

Thank you for taking the time to write the guide! Constructive posts are always welcome, well done.

Priest is good to get u to 1800,but it sucks if u plan on going for top.Check armory and compare how many top teams have priests and how many have paladins,shamans.Personally i got 2 pesimistic after the pom nerf and i stoped playing my 124 days down the drain priest.Solid guide though u just forgot the shadow reflector which is rly usefull for shadow priests/locks.Tbh u optimistic guys should try having a rogue feral druid and MS warrior with windfury on u.Takes less than 5 sec to die(with my 11.5k hp buffed).I lost faith 2 weeks ago and since i like to spam button i choose to spam icelance...RIP PVP PRIEST

And i aint talking bull@%@*

Well written idd , I suppose with that build u trying to avoid the visiting of the trainer between raids and pvp time. Those constant retrains are getting really annoying I gotta admit. If that's the case and if it works fine with u its cool I believe, but you really need to reconsider this build otherwise ;D

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Q u o t e:
Priest is good to get u to 1800,but it sucks if u plan on going for top.Check armory and compare how many top teams have priests and how many have paladins,shamans.Personally i got 2 pesimistic after the pom nerf and i stoped playing my 124 days down the drain priest.Solid guide though u just forgot the shadow reflector which is rly usefull for shadow priests/locks.Tbh u optimistic guys should try having a rogue feral druid and MS warrior with windfury on u.Takes less than 5 sec to die(with my 11.5k hp buffed).I lost faith 2 weeks ago and since i like to spam button i choose to spam icelance...RIP PVP PRIEST

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Paladin/shaman or paladin/priest as healers is pretty much equal. Playstyle of the teams vary alot though.
Saying that priests are useless beyond 1800 rating in arena pvp is bull!*%* though, most of the top teams are running with a priest, the rest have a shaman.

Guess I'll add my thoughts on the guide.
Greater Heal is the best heal for you to use if you aren't being focus fired, yes, but in reality if your team is good you actually won't be healing much so by far the majority of the heals you're doing will be shields, renews and prayer of mending with an added flash heal every now and then. Only bad opponents will allow you to stand in the back chain casting greater heal aswell, further reducing the effectiveness of empowered healing.
If you're running a team with 2 healers only (paladin really is the only combination that works well with a priest) you will be tanking alot just like the OP is saying, but it is also essential to note that when tanking you should never be standing still. The paladin should be keeping freedom up on you and you should be kiting those warriors and rogues around untill the very end of the match if needed. If you ever just stand still and let a warrior or two beat on you, you WILL die - even with 13k HP and 250 resilience.
If you're running a team with only 2 healers (you and pally) you should allways have either a mage or hunter on your team, or even both. With the hunter keeping frost trap up, or the mage focusing polymorphs on the targets who are damaging you, you will be able to survive immense assist trains. Without any of that type of CC around you, you will die, and you will die fast.

Regarding gear. Sure "of the physician" greens are great and all, and the best offhand for pvp healing I've seen is one of those, but really. Grind some honor and get the Grand Marshal's/High Warlord's mooncloth items. You will have a very hard time finding better gear off AH or in 5 mans.

Regarding spec.
The spec posted by the OP is in no way the best spec for 5v5 arena. Empowered healing is very good, if the opponents are stupid enough to let you stand in the back and cast gheal.
But like I said, in general the healing from a holy paladin with the added shields, renews and prayer of mendings from you will be enough to keep the entire group up.
This is what I believe to be the best 5v5 spec, and from what I can see on armory it seems that most priests in "top" teams are running with very similar talent specs.
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxgMucgZfVthcMoV0h

I'll try and explain the choices as best possible.
For discipline we have 5/5 unbreakable will, which is mandatory.
Next up is 5/5 Silent Resolve - now most will say that 20% dispel resist is too low for 5 talent points, and I did agree on that before I actually took it, but in reality, keeping that renew, shield, prayer of mending and blessed resilience on you for just another purge will save your life in alot more situations than you may think.
In general a blessed resilience build relies heavily on having the passive buffs from talents up all the time - if you're being chain dispelled the surviveability goes down alot, and silent resolve avoids just that. There's also the added functionality due to the way dispels seem to be working. Say a shaman or priest tries to dispel you (which should remove 2 buffs), and the dispel fails on the first buff it was trying to remove - then it won't even attempt to dispel the 2nd buff, meaning that Silent Resolve works as a 20% chance not to be dispelled at all, with the added bonus of it also being able to "proc" on the 2nd buff.
Imp pw:f and martyrdom are no brainers really, the lack of improved power word shield kinda hurts, especially with the improved scaling since last patch - but seeing as you won't be running around with much more than 800 +healing in your pvp gear due to having to stack defensive stats I don't believe it's good enough to warant putting points in it in general.
Next up is absolution and inner focus - both are kinda self explanatory, absolution really owns considering that in alot of matches you will be functioning as an offensive dispeller. For priests who allways have shamans in their group getting 3/3 imp pw:s over 3/3 absolution is obviously the better choice, for everyone else it's a no brainer imo considering how often dispel magic is used.
Improved inner fire is a rather small increase on level 70 in pure damage reduction percentage, but it is still a major armor improvement and it really helps vs. physical dps heavy groups - which in general are the ones who pose the biggest threats to priests (due to spell warding vs. casters).
Mental agility is a no brainer since you're using instants as much as possible - enhancing them is exactly what you're after.
Improved mana burn is an essential arena talent since it is the single spell that makes us as good as we are in arena play.
Some people decide to take 5/5 mental strength and 1/3 imp. pw:s over absolution and imp. inner fire.
Allthough I do in no way agree with that being the better choice, they are not gimping themselves significantly, and that extra bit of mana is very usefull in the smaller brackets (2v2 and 3v3).

Moving on to the holy tree.
First up is Healing Focus and Improved Renew. I'm assuming that this is the base of just about any pvp build, so no explanation needed.
I don't think Holy Specialization is worth it considering just how few heal casts you actually will be doing. I really am not kidding when I say that a paladin can keep the entire group up for a major part of a match.
Spell Warding and Divine Fury. Some players take Holy Specialization over Divine Fury since they pretty much only use flash heal. Being able to cast a greater heal every now and then is incredibly nice though, and I really think Divine Fury is far superior in general. Spell Warding is self explanatory - PvP is about damage reduction, and that is exactly what Spell Warding does.
The 1 point in Holy Nova is a personal preferrence. The reason why I have it is primarily for the use on hunters snake traps. Being able to take all of the snakes out with the use of one global cooldown is something I value quite highly.
Blessed Recovery is nice since it's "free" healing and it adds a bit of extra incoming heals whilst kiting. Some only take 1 point in blessed recovery since the extra healing is fairly low, and as such they use the 1 point in it as an extra buff for the purgebots to remove.
In general tier 3 holy is where most builds vary due to personal preferrence. Some go 1/3 Blessed Recovery and 3/3 Inspiration, others go 3/3 Blessed Recovery and 1/3 Inspiration etc. In the end the difference is very small though. In the build I'm currently using I'm 1/1 Holy Nova, 3/3 Blessed Recovery and 1/3 Inspiration at the cost of 1 point in Improved Healing.
Next up is 3/3 Improved Healing. Reduced mana cost on greater heal is just nice in general and will allow you to spam it more on the rare occasion the opponents are ignoring you.
Then we have 2/2 Healing Prayer and the 1 point in improved death (Spirit of Redemption..). The 2 points in Healing Prayer obviously got worse with the patch, but I still think that I'm using prayer of mending often enough to warrant having the talent. Some will probably want to go for something else - maybe inspiration over that talent.
Alot seem to like the Spiritual Guidance talent, but you really need to keep in mind that wearing the gladiator set along with various PvP pieces you will have incredibly low spirit, and as such the boost from that talent is minor.
Spritual healing and Blessed Resilience explain themself.

i played vs u raph and i can say that some times even your paladin cant keep u alive.Thats exactly the reason i say priest sux.U have among the top gear in the batlegroup and ur fragile when dispelled. imagine my team have only 1 meller,while others(like hamme)comes with rogue feral druid(5% crit) and ofc on top of that windfury.As a counter u got what?No escape mechanism.I have to admit that our batle group has the most top team coming with a priest.If u got time check the armory though ull see that this is a rare occasion.Pom nerf killed pvp priest imo...

Anyone tried a build something similar to: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/priest/talents.html?500232013332000000000230500300000000000000500232210051120000000
I loved it when I was level 60, I can't say I have played a lot of arena but back then it was really nice to use all the powers that priests have. The fact that only doing healing, only doing damage is a limit, doing both is good. When I used it a level 60 it was like they can't kill you because then you heal yourself, or use the imp. psychic scream and still you do dmg, can use silence and heal with VE. The problem I see with that build in arena is that mana should be gone very fast since you always have something to cast and you will do it.

So I don't know if it works in arena, but I know it worked back in level 60 in the other pvp instances. So has anyone tried a full tri-specc in the arena?

PS. don't look a my level or rank, it's way outdated, level 70 marshal should it be.

EDIT: chaged the talent build link