Priests excel at healing and buffing their party members, and are quite capable of dealing shadow damage to their foes. They are incredibly valuable for group questing.

Gnomes, Orcs, and Tauren may not be priests.

Customizing your priest

While the priest class grants you a fair amount of flexibility with respect to specification, priests really are limited to spell-based healing and damage-dealing roles. They have friendly heals, buffs, and cures (similar to paladins), but their damage-based spells differ from those of a mage because priests don't have much by way of area-of-effect (AOE) or crowd control.

• Discipline is somewhat of a hybrid tree. It strengthens your priest's ability to conserve mana, deal spell damage, and heal. Most importantly, it unlocks the full potential of many of the priest's buffs. This is a good skill tree to mix with either of the other two.
• Holy skills are essential for healing priests. If your priest's role is to heal, most of your skill points should go into this tree.
• Shadow skills optimize your priest's ability to deal damage, and are essential if this is the role your priest is to play.

Obviously, priests are not melee characters, so choose armor and equipment that benefits spell critical hit rating, healing potential, resiliance, and intellect. Be careful to monitor your threat when in battle, regardless of your priest's specialty: both damage dealing and healing can catch an enemy mob's attention.

Be careful and strategic

You may need to re-spec your priest more frequently than not because of how dependent the priest's abilities are on the skill points they spend. In other words, priests are versatile spell-casters, but necessarily in functional role. Also, unlike the mage, some of the castable buffs that priests may used shouldn't be left active at all times because they constantly drain mana, which requires careful monitoring of available and active buffs.

Character pairing

If you frequently play Warcraft with someone who has a melee-centric character (warrior/hunter/rogue/etc) then a priest would be an excellent accompanying power, who can heal the melee character without necessarily worrying about taking too much damage at once.

More priest resources

To learn more about various aspects of priest characters, check out the following links.

• WoW Wiki Priest Guide
• Spiritual Guidance (a priest blog)