A Holy Priest heals by casting, and the limit is your mana bar, not your cast bar. Forever rebuilt the tree around that budget: Meditation now keeps half your Spirit regeneration running while you cast, and Mental Strength adds 15 % to your Intellect.

This build heals one target, yourself, for the whole fight. You keep Renew (Rank 10) ticking, cast Greater Heal (Rank 5) while you have mana to spare, and drop to Heal (Rank 2) when you don't. On a one-minute single-boss fight it heals 1,310.8 HPS, the 3rd best of 5 single-target healers. For group healing, use the Party switch above.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• Regeneration while casting. Meditation keeps 50 % of your Spirit regeneration going inside the five-second rule, where Classic's kept 15 %. Over a three-minute single-boss fight it adds 12.2 % to your healing, more than any talent that heals.
• A mana cooldown of your own. Shadowfiend hits about ten times in its 15 seconds, and each hit hands you 5 % of your maximum mana. You get it once every five minutes.

• Steady on every fight. The single-target build places 3rd on one minute and 3rd on three, so its place among the healers doesn't move with fight length.

Weaknesses

• Behind the Restoration Shaman and Druid. You place 3rd of 5 on every fight. On a three-minute single-boss fight you heal 85.4 % of the top healer's number.

• Mana-bound from two minutes on. There a point of Intellect or MP5 weighs more than a point of healing power, and the cheap filler takes over whenever your mana falls behind the clock.
• The filler is a low rank. Blizzard's 1 October notes cut the spell healing of ranks "vastly below" your level, without a formula. Heal rank 2 is a level-22 spell, and our simulator gives it no such cut. If the cut reaches it at 60, the long-fight numbers here drop and the filler moves up a rank.

On every fight

Length is what moves a healer, not the number of bosses. On one minute your mana lasts about as long as the fight, so you cast the big heal throughout. On two and three minutes it doesn't, so the cheap filler comes in and the mana talents lead. Three bosses change nothing for a healer: nobody takes damage, and the party is the same. Choose a fight from the table and every page of this guide follows it.

Races

For the Horde, Undead lead every two- and three-minute fight with Dark Sacrifice, a free racial that turns 1,600 health into 1,600 mana plus your Spirit on a 10-minute cooldown. One-minute fights go to Trolls, whose Berserking speeds your casts by 10 % for 10 seconds while you still have mana for every one. Undead fall to last there, probably because Dark Sacrifice spends a global cooldown on mana that a one-minute fight never uses.

On the Alliance side the Gnome wins every fight. Its Expansive Mind is 5 % more mana, and every two minutes Eureka! takes 10 % off three direct heals and adds 10 % to them.

What a Priest brings to the raid

Prayer of Fortitude and Prayer of Spirit reach the whole raid. Spirit helps the casters who run short of mana. Stamina helps the Undead melee, whose Touch of the Grave drains an amount set by their own maximum health. Prayer of Shadow Protection adds nothing in a fight without Shadow damage.

Changes

Each row is this build's result on this fight after an update to the simulator or to Forever's data. Updates has the details of each.