Priest -|- Metalbunny.net

Priests are powerful allies that are always a welcome addition to most groups. Although they are generally expected to act as healers when in a group, shadow-spec priests can cause quite a bit of damage as well, and can thus act as caster too. Priests are the only healer class with the ability to heal entire groups of players at once, and carry powerful buffs that are helpful to most other classes.

At the higher levels, priests gain abilities such as walking on water, mind controlling enemies, and others, which makes a high-level priest a lot of fun to play. But at the lower levels, the cloth wearing priest with a limited choice of damaging spells can be very hard to play solo, and will often have to team up with other players to be able to survive many of the more challenging quests that come along in the game. On the other hand, most will love to have a healer along, and thus it's usually not that difficult for a priest to find someone to help.

The priest class is however designed to keep the classes with over 10,000 HP alive in the midst of battle, and as such the healing spells far outway the amount of damage a priest can do. Though a priest can still hurt you, they're more efficient at healing than killing. If you're more into doing tons of damage, and not so much standing back and healing everyone, then the mage class is probably better suited for you.

Available races:
Human, Dwarf, Night Elf, Troll, Undead, Blood Elf, Draenei

Armour: Cloth
Weaponry: One-handed Maces, Daggers, Staves, Wands
Magic types: Shadow, Holy Light

Main strengths:

Large selection of healing spells.
Ability to resurrect fallen players.
Ability to force enemies to fight for the player.
Can use shadow magic to cause large amounts of damage.

Main weaknesses:

Restricted to cloth armour = very low armour class.
Poor melee abilities and very low HP.
Always expected to act as healer, even when not holy spec.

Typical role: Caster, Healer

Starting stats (level 1):


Race	Strength	Agility	Stamina	Intellect	Spirit	Armor	Health	Mana

Human	20	20	20	22	24	45	52	160
Dwarf	22	16	23	21	22	37	82	145
Night Elf	17	25	19	22	23	55	51	160
Draenei	21	17	19	23	25	39	51	175
Troll	21	22	21	18	24	49	62	128
Undead	19	18	21	20	28	41	62	130
Blood Elf	17	22	18	26	22	49	50	220

Race Specific Spells
There are some priest spells that are available only to certain races:


Spell	Level	Human	Dwarf	Night Elf	Draenei	Troll	Undead	Blood Elf

Desperate Prayer	10	x	x	-	-	-	-	-
Starshards	10	-	-	x	-	-	-	-
Touch of Weakness	10	-	-	-	-	-	x	x
Hex of Weakness	10	-	-	-	-	x	-	-
Symbol of Hope	10	-	-	-	x	-	-	-
Chastise	20	-	x	-	x	-	-	-
Feedback	20	x	-	-	-	-	-	-
Elune's Grace	20	-	-	x	-	-	-	-
Devouring Plague	20	-	-	-	-	-	x	-
Shadowguard	20	-	-	-	-	x	-	-
Consume Magic	20	-	-	-	-	-	-	x

NOTE: As of patch 2.3, Fear Ward, which used to be a racial spell for Draenei and Dwarf priests, was made available to all priests. As a replacement, Draenei and Dwarf priests now get Chastise instead, a spell that does holy damage and incapacitates the target for 2 seconds.

Priest milestones:
Level 10: Resurrection spell
Level 30: Mind Control (ability to control enemies)
Level 38: Levitate spell (ability to walk on water)