Spiritual Guidance: Pre-raid gear guide for holy and discipline priests

By Dawn Moore

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for disc and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast.

So you've gotten your priest to level 85 and now you want to get geared up to heal raids, huh? Not sure what dungeons to run or what tabards to wear? Not sure where to start or too lazy to go to Wowhead and find out the information yourself? Spiritual Guidance is here for you! This week I'll be listing off all the gear you can get your mitts on before you can get into raids.

Before we get started, you should know that when you first hit 85, you'll only want to run a handful of normal dungeons to get your average item level high enough to queue for heroic dungeons. Those normal dungeons are Grim Batol, Halls of Origination, and Lost City of Tol'vir. The other normal 5-man dungeons only drop 308 and 316 item level gear. Once you can queue for heroic dungeons, you'll see level 346 gear in all the dungeons. Normal mode raid gear is 359, but you can get a handful of 359 gear without raiding, either through crafting, reputation, or drops. Got that? Okay, let's get to the priest-specific stuff now.

Some disclaimers before we start. First, I won't be including any valor point gear in this list, because though you can get valor points from doing the heroic daily, you won't really find yourself with a significant amount of points to spend just getting ready to raid. I'll include those items in my raiding gear list later.

I also don't recommend any resilience gear. This is because you can't reforge resilience into usable stats for PvE. We'll tackle PvP and resilience gear at a later date, but feel free to spend any extra honor you have laying around to get yourself raid-ready. Just remember that the honor grind is horrific nowadays, so if you want to PvP later, you may want to save your honor for something you'll actually use in PvP.

Check out the Cataclysm professions for priests guide for information on profession exclusive gear.

Helm

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

iLvl 359

  • Je'Tze's Sparkling Tiara BoE world drop; the second Je'Tze item, without the cute word play. This drops randomly in the world, so keep your eyes on the auction house if you have deep pockets.

Neck

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

iLvl 359

Shoulders

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

Back

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

Chest

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

iLvl 359


Wrists

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

Hands

iLvl 346

iLvl 359

Waist

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

iLvl 359

Legs

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

iLvl 359

Fingers

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

Trinket

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

iLvl 359

Feet

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

Main hand

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

Off hand

iLvl 346

Staff

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

iLvl 359

Wand

iLvl 333

iLvl 346

Faction reputations

The new factions all have tabards, just like in Wrath; with most factions, you can do a few quests to get friendly reputation, then grind out a good chunk of your reputation in dungeons using a faction tabard. (If you need help getting the tabards, Shy at WoW wrote up a nice guide for finding each faction vendor.)

If you do all of the available quests for each faction, you should typically get to honored, so it's not a bad idea to go back and do any quest zones you skipped. With Therazane, it's very easy to get to revered just doing the introductory quests and one to two days' worth of dailies. The Tol Barad factions are the only factions you can't get a tabard for, so you'll need to do dailies within the zone to get your reputation up. You can get to exalted much quicker depending on how often your faction wins the battleground, since extra dailies unlock when your faction controls the peninsula. The commendations you need to buy gear, you'll get plenty of while grinding up your rep.

If you didn't figure it out just by examining the list, the first Cataclysm reputations you'll want to grind out are with Guardians of Hyjal, Therazane, and the Earthen Ring. Hyjal and Therazane in particular have helm (Arcanum of Hyjal) and shoulder (Greater Inscription of Charged Lodestone) enchants that you're going to want if you're planning to raid.

Archaeology

If you're into archaeology, there are also a handful of 359 items you can assemble. The trinket in particular is amazing, but there is a lot of luck involved in the entire profession, so you could try for ages and never get what you want. You could also get what you want the first time you assemble the lot of fragments required to make whatever it is you're after though, so if you intend to go after any of the following items, good luck!

Selecting gear

As for what gear you should take, some of this stuff has spirit, some of it doesn't. My advice is to get as much spirit gear as you can, until you no longer feel like mana is a huge issue. This should happen with some new trinkets and mostly 346 gear. If you want to be extra precautious for raiding, stick to the spirit gear — but remember that if the item level is higher, it's generally an upgrade, so don't keep a spirit item for a higher-iLevel intellect item. Intellect is the stronger stat once mana is no longer an issue.

For secondary stats, disc priests want a balance of all three secondary stats (you can consult the 101 guide if you haven't already). Holy priests should avoid taking too much crit and work at getting 12.5% haste. (I'll explain why later this week in holy 101.)

This wraps up the priest pre-raid gear guide. I'm still tidying up holy 101, but you can expect it toward the end of this week before we close out the year. Take care, and as always, hit the comments if you have any suggestions or questions.

Want more tips for carrying out your priestly duties? Spiritual Guidance has you covered. Check out our profession guide for priests in Cataclysm, Discipline 101 for playing your first discipline priest at level 85, and then review our article on working through levels 80 to 85 as a priest.

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