Gearing your Discipline Priest (or any class) properly is essential to a better PvP experience. If you hope into the BGs (or, ack, arenas) in your item level 400ish greens, well, it’ll be tough. It’s not like dungeons or raids or heroics, where you need a certain minimum item level. Nope, you get to hope in with whatever you got.
If you’re not yet 90: You need to have accumulated 7,500 honor to get the PvP weapons, yet the weapon is the biggest possible upgrade. So as much Battleground PvP as you can before you hit 90. You will want to burn about 4k (maybe on mounts) and save 3,500. Then, when you hit 90, you immediately buy a Tyrannical Gladiator’s Energy Staff (or equivalent pair of weapons.)
If you’re already 90 you’ll have to work a bit harder.
At 90: You can either buy the Crafted Malevolent gear set, if you have lots of gold, or poke around the Timeless Isle for a couple hours, opening chests, and collecting your 496 PvE gear. Since everyone, regardless of gear, has 72% Resilience (as of patch 5.4) the PvE gear will be fine for honor grinding in the BGs. If you get both PvP trinkets you get an additional 10% Resilience.
Getting better PvP gear: PvE gear is downrated in the PvP settings (BGs, arenas, etc.) so the PvP gear is better. Yes, your ilevel 560 PvE gear is downrated to 496 or so. Grind up the points for the Tyrannical Honor gear.
The best Discipline Priest PvP gear for season 14 (Patch 5.4) is the Grievous set. If you’re going to do rated BGs and/or arena you will want to get this asap and the Tyrannical gear will be better for starting that than the PvE gear, though not by a lot. (Healers only get 50% of the value of the PvP Power on gear.)
Your stats:
- Spirit before anything else, until you’re “Ok” with your mana use.
- Mastery for the absorb shields on top of the heals.
- Int for more powerful everything.
- Haste is pretty nice, especially when you hit the breakpoints to get an extra tick on your “over time” spells. (Go here, scroll down to the Priest card.)
- Crit is arguable. Some pan it, some love it (Divine Aegis effect.) Of course, you have to be able to get enough crit rating to make that worthwhile….
- Hit is unnecessary
- Reforge to Spirit, if you need the mana, Mastery before Haste for the rest.
Discipline Priest Gems and Enchants
Your PvP gear socket bonuses are all Int or PvP Power. Since, as a healer, you only get 50% of the value of PvP Power anyway, it might be worth your while to ignore socket matching on any pieces of gear with a PvP Power bonus and just gem for Int/Mastery: Artful Vermilion Onyx
- Meta: Ember Primal Diamond for the Int bonus and more mana
- Red & Yellow: Artful Vermilion Onyx
- Zen Wild Jade if you’re matching socket colors, Artful Vermilion Onyx if you’re not.
- Belt buckle and Blacksmithing sockets: Artful Vermilion Onyx
Enchanting
Go for Spirit, if you still need more, otherwise Int and Mastery. There are no head enchants, so ignore that part.
Everything in one pic
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