Dreadwail's Priest PVE Healing Guide for Classic WoW

Spirit Tap (Shadow)

Makes it so when you kill a target you get incredible mana regen following the kill which lets you immediately move on to the next target. In most situations it provides similar regen to having drank a prior level mana drink while moving towards your next pull.

Wand Specialization (Disc)

With 5/5 points here you can simply use SW: Pain and then start wanding for plenty of DPS without needing to cast many (if any) spells to conserve mana.

like thisShadowformLeveling Rotation

Power Word: Shield (to avoid spell pushback)

Smite (but do not go OOM)

Shadow Word: Pain

Wand

SmiteShadow Word: PainSpirit TapPower Word: ShieldRenewShadowformMind BlastMind FlaySmite

Power Word: Shield (to avoid spell pushback)

Mind Blast or Mind Flay (but do not go OOM)

Shadow Word: Pain

Wand

Mind Blast

You must must must keep Inner Fire up for the armor bonus. Your survivability is dramatically improved if you learn to prevent it from dropping off.

You should always keep Power Word: Fortitude up for the additional health.

Use Renew to keep your HP up. You shouldn't need to use normal healing spells beyond Renew if you're following this guide, unless you pull too many or otherwise hit snags. You may even elect to pre-Renew if you're about to pull an elite and you know it will eat through your Power Word: Shield.

You should downrank Psychic Scream so that you don't incur the full mana hit from it. The increased spell ranks just increase the number of targets it fears and 99% of the time you're just going to be in the 1-3 targets range. So Rank 2 (3 targets) is really all you should ever need while leveling.

If you're fighting multiple mobs you should first get Shadow Word: Pain ticking on all of them and then immediately cast Psychic Scream so that the Weakened Soul debuff drops sooner. While the mobs are running around you can proceed to wand down the targets one by one. This is obviously highly dependent on how tightly packed the mobs you're fighting are because you need to be careful not to fear into them and get adds.

PVE Healing Stats

+Healing
This one should be fairly self-explanatory. It makes you better at your primary job for the same mana cost spent.

Spirit

Mana efficiency is critical in Classic WoW and spirit helps your regen rate. In addition if you spec into the Spiritual Guidance talent (you definitely should!) it will directly increase your damage and healing up to 25% of your Spirit.

MP5

Again mana efficiency is critical in Classic WoW. The reason Spirit is rated higher than MP5 despite both increasing regen is because Spirit also affects your +healing via Spiritual Guidance.

Intellect

Increases your mana pool and healing crits.

Stamina / HP5

You don't want to die do you?

PVE Healing Talents

Divine Spirit - A 30 minute spirit buff. This synergizes with Spiritual Guidance. Since spirit is you bread-and-butter, this is a no-brainer.

Spiritual Guidance - Straight increase to healing capability based on your spirit. Again this one should be a no-brainer.

21/30/0 - Holy
This is the go-to spec for holy priests. Some of the talent choices are flexible enough to move a single point around here and there (improved renew vs holy specialization, etc) but the general idea here is to benefit from both Spiritual Guidance and Spiritual Healing.

26/25/0 - Holy for the beginner/undergeared

This is basically the same spec as above except that it sacrifices Spiritual Healing in favor of a larger mana pool via Mental Strength. This is really only necessary for very undergeared priests or beginners who are still growing accustom to classic wow mana conservation.

31/20/0 - Power Infusion

Power infusion is a great dps boost, especially if synergized with other cooldowns. You probably don't need more than 1 priest in your raid with a PI build, and you should weigh the gear levels in your raid to determine whether its appropriate.