Spooncraft

Priests are the masters of healing and preservation, restoring their wounded allies, shielding them in battle, and even resurrecting their fallen comrades. While they have a variety of protective and enhancement spells to bolster their allies, priests can also wreak terrible vengeance on their enemies, using the powers of shadow or holy light to destroy them. They are a diverse and powerful class, highly desirable in any group, capable of fulfilling multiple roles.

Discipline: Disc. priests are very strong healers but their main specialty is in shields and damage prevention. They don’t have the versatility that holy priests do but make very strong single target healers. Disc. priests can also provide some minor holy damage through Penance. They have more shield type spells and effect such as grace, divine aegis, and pain supression. A disc. priest makes a great PVP healer and a very fast and mobile healer with the many talents that lend to spell haste.

Holy: Holy priests are very versatile healers. They have a bevy of talents that enhance their healing power and grant tons of healing efficiency through mana preservation and mana returns for over healing a target. Though not the greatest at DPS they can hold their own with very minor holy damage spells such as holy fire and smite. Holy priests also excel at group healing through circle of healing, lightwell (although still viewed negatively by many) is a very powerful tool for players to heal themselves if the priest is out of range or worse. The 51pt talent for holy priests is a get out of jail free card where for 10 seconds the target of Guardian Spirit cannot be killed and recieve 40% more healing.

Shadow: Shadow priests can provide excellent single target DPS. They can replenish a raid’s mana and health as they deal shadow damage to the target and they have access to shadowform which boosts shadow damage dealt and grants some protection from attackers. Shadow priests have the most damage output of all the three priest talent specializations and still maintain the class’ robust defensive traits.

Wowhead has a really great talent calculator where you can experiment with new builds for your Priest.