Priest Group PVE Technique

Group PVE Technique

Well, this is kind of a no-brainer. Your goal here is to keep your party members alive with your healing abilities, but you will have to be careful here, as mobs are attracted towards healers, and may choose to attack you if you use your healing abilities too often or too quickly. In other words, you shouldn’t heal people until they get down to around half their life bar (unless you’re fighting enemies with the potential to rapidly deal damage). You’ll also probably want to stick to Flash Heal for the most part, as it’s low-cast, quick-casting, and does a decent amount of healing. This will help manage your aggro and prevent threat from transferring away from your tanks, and still let you resort back to your bigger heals as necessary.

Beyond pure healing, though, you’re going to want to manage your buffs as appropriate. Power Word: Shield is, of course, an excellent way to protect a party member that’s about to die, but again, aggro can be difficult to keep under control. In addition to heals, you can also use debuffs, such as Hex of Weakness and Touch of Weakness, to reduce the effectiveness of an enemy’s attacks. You’ll have access to direct damage spells, such as Mind Blast, Smite, and Shadow Word: Pain, but in general, you won’t want to be casting these unless you’re engaging easy enemies or your party really needs the extra damage; against most mobs, the extra damage gained won’t be worth the risk of drawing in aggro.

If you do gain aggro in a group fight, then you’ll quickly want to hit the Fade switch and take a breather on the healing. It can be easy to get the attention of mobs, especially during fights with multiple enemies, so feel free to use Fade as soon as you gain aggro, and continually cast it as soon as the cooldown’s up, or whenever another foe comes along to attack you. This will usually cause your threat to drop down far enough to cause the mob to switch back over to a tank; so long as you don’t go absolutely crazy with heals (which is usually either an indication of you being a poor priest or your group being poorly coordinated), you can manage aggro fairly well with Fade.