"May the stars guide you."
Disclaimers:
This is not intended to be a bleeding edge DPS optimized raiding Priest spec that will put everything else to shame (so buy now while supplies last!). If anything, this is intended to be a viable Damage Per Mana (DPM) efficient Priest spec to be played for FUN as a soloist and in 5 man groups in PvE content. That means that I'm looking at a build for leveling more than I am for raiding.
The primary purpose of this build is to explore the possibility of a potential off-meta spec which I have not seen anyone (else) show (enough) interest in (yet) to post an actual build for. This post is basically an answer to a question of mine ... which is that IF you were going to design a build to support use of Starshards as your primary damaging attack spell, then HOW would you go about selecting Talents to support that objective? Since Starshards is a Night Elf Priest only racial spell, this question is only relevant to Players interested in playing Night Elf Priests (who seem to be a decided minority of Alliance Priests, for somewhat obvious reasons of hardened Conventional Wisdom). I have to wonder if Night Elf Discipline/Holy Priests are even rarer than Moonkin Druids ... and if so, that notion only increases my desire to follow through on this experiment so as to share my conclusions and experiences with this community.
I also know that the prevailing opinion for Mages is "lol arcane" and that what I'm presenting here is in many ways a functional "Arcane Missiles by Priest" sort of build strategy by alternative means, which no doubt plenty of people will look askance at. However, the discoveries that I made HERE synergizing long Cast+Channel spell rotations is the cornerstone foundation for making this build one of (in not the most) mana efficient damage producing builds I've ever encountered.
Level 60 Night Elf Priest ( 21 / 25 / 5 )
https://classicdb.ch/?talent#bxgMsM0oZbxtMcbVZx
- Discipline (21 points)
- Unbreakable Will - Rank 5/5
Increases your chance to resist Stun, Fear, and Silence effects by an additional 15%. - Silent Resolve - Rank 5/5
Reduces the threat generated by your spells by 20%. - Improved Power Word: Fortitude - Rank 2/2
Increases the effect of your Power Word: Fortitude and Prayer of Fortitude spells by 30%. - Martyrdom - Rank 2/2
Gives you a 100% chance to gain the Focused Casting effect that lasts for 6 sec after being the victim of a melee or ranged critical strike. The Focused Casting effect prevents you from losing casting time when taking damage and increases resistance to Interrupt effects by 20%. - Inner Focus - Rank 1/1
When activated, reduces the Mana cost of your next spell by 100% and increases its critical effect chance by 25% if it is capable of a critical effect. - Meditation - Rank 3/3
Allows 15% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting. - Mental Agility - Rank 2/5
Reduces the mana cost of your instant cast spells by 4%. - Divine Spirit - Rank 1/1
Holy power infuses the target, increasing their Spirit by 17 for 30 min.
- Unbreakable Will - Rank 5/5
- Holy (25 points)
- Healing Focus - Rank 2/2
Gives you a 70% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting any healing spell. - Holy Specialization - Rank 5/5
Increases the critical effect chance of your Holy spells by 5%. - Divine Fury - Rank 5/5
Reduces the casting time of your Smite, Holy Fire, Heal and Greater Heal spells by 0.5 sec. - Holy Nova - Rank 1/1
Causes an explosion of holy light around the caster, causing 28 to 33 Holy damage to all enemy targets within 10 yards and healing all party members within 10 yards for 52 to 61. These effects cause no threat. - Inspiration - Rank 2/3
Increases your target's armor by 16% for 15 sec after getting a critical effect from your Flash Heal, Heal, Greater Heal, or Prayer of Healing spell. - Improved Healing - Rank 3/3
Reduces the Mana cost of your Lesser Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal spells by 15%. - Searing Light - Rank 2/2
Increases the damage of your Smite and Holy Fire spells by 10%. - Spiritual Guidance - Rank 5/5
Increases spell damage and healing by up to 25% of your total Spirit.
- Healing Focus - Rank 2/2
- Shadow (5 points)
- Spirit Tap - Rank 5/5
Gives you a 100% chance to gain a 100% bonus to your Spirit after killing a target that yields experience. For the duration, your Mana will regenerate at a 50% rate while casting. Lasts 15 sec.
- Spirit Tap - Rank 5/5
One of the peculiar points about a Starshards oriented Priest build is that neither Starshards itself, nor Shadow Word: Pain for that matter, can critically hit … since they're both DoT spells (one channeled, the other instant). Your other Holy and Shadow damage and healing spells can critically hit though, so it makes sense to invest in raising critical hit chances for your Holy spells at least. But in a Starshards build, you're rarely going to be using Smite, except perhaps as a "filler" spell or those times when you combine it with Mind Blast for a particularly fast damage spike or an opening alpha strike while stuff is bumrushing towards you.
Instead, the primary spell rotation involves using Holy Fire, Starshards, melee hit … repeat. This is then a 10.0-10.5s spell rotation (when including melee hit) that makes optimal use of the DoT burn of Holy Fire while simultaneously leveraging mana recovery from Spirit in an extremely efficient way (MINIMUM 60% mana recovery from Spirit while continuously casting, up to 80-90%(!) depending on situational factors, talents and gear).
Now with the benefit of experience, I can say that investing in Divine Fury and Searing Light does help with the Holy Fire+Starshards+melee hit spell rotation more than I was expecting it to. Even though Searing Light only adds an extra +10% to one of the two main spells you're casting (Holy Fire), it also boosts Smite, and on more than one occasion that extra +10% damage on those Holy spells has meant the difference between needing to cast an extra spell or not. Reducing the number of spells cast to kill by -1 is helpful not only in saving time, but also in saving mana.
A side benefit of that investment into Divine Fury however is that you make a decent "off main" or solo healer, when the circumstances call for it. Indeed, relative to "main" healers, you aren't going to be that short on healing power from Holy, by comparison in talents. The main difference is that you won't have Holy Reach (for extra range), Spiritual Healing (for +10% more healing), or Spirit of Redemption, following the build strategy I've laid out. However the big thing you'd be short on is that as a Damage Per Mana (DPM) caster, if you gear for spellpower that's good for All Schools (and healing), you'll have less spellpower than if you were specializing in just healing cloth gear. So not a "main" healer, but you can certainly pick up the slack as an "off main" healer if need be ... which is just fine with me, since I would rather blast away as a damage dealer than get stuck "flying the gauges" as a healer anyway. But the swing role versatility is there, inside the build.
The thing that turns this build into an orbital artillery cannon is the sheer amount of Spirit that it can stack up AND MAKE USE OF while continuously casting. Spirit Tap DOUBLES your Spirit for 15s ... and yes, that includes +Spirit mods from equipped items. Divine Spirit increases your Spirit and can be cast on yourself. Spiritual Guidance gives you +1 Spellpower (all schools) for every 4 Spirit you have (drop fractions) when talented up to 5/5. If you have 400 Spirit, you've added +100 Spellpower to everything you can cast. All of which means that for this build Spirit is NOT your dump stat ...! On the contrary, given how much mana you can recover from Spirit while continuously casting, piling on more and more Spirit onto this build not only "deepens" your mana pool (in effect) it also increases how powerful your spells are at the same time ... win-Win-WIN!
Having played this build on both Darrowshire (Elysium) and Symmetry, I can categorically say that stacking as much Spirit as possible onto this build strategy can be rather ... eye watering ... is the most expressive way to put it. I was walking into Scarlet Monastery and Razorfen Downs with more than +100 total Spellpower @ Level 39 thanks to all the Spirit itemization I had equipped on top of the usual +Spellpower cloth pieces I'd tailored for myself, and I was taking full advantage of it (100% spellpower coefficients). It was glorious.
The sum total of all of these disparate parts would appear to create a most unusual combination ... of an Arcane Night Elf Priest who is extremely mana efficient at producing sustained damage pressure on a single target, and with some ability to apply damage to multiple targets simultaneously (via Holy Nova). The irony of course being that this is a Priest build instead of a Mage build, and Night Elves are hardly renowned for their ... aptitude ... for the Arcane, having turned away from their arcane studies after the Sundering in a bid for survival. And yet, here is a build that combines Arcane, Holy and Shadow together (21/25/5) in what feels (to me) like a rather viable balance in, of all things, a Priest … and more specifically, in a Priest dedicated to the Goddess Elune.
This is a talent build that (probably) only someone who allowed themselves to bathe in the light of Elune could love and follow in our world. Fortunately, that's where still I am, standing for the Goddess in the place between the Shadow and the Light.
/pray
/cast Starshards
