How to CC chain as a Holy Priest in 5.2

I would consider discipline and holy priests to be the worst classes to help out in cc chains by themselves. All we have is our Psychic Scream, and a choice between a root, another fear and dominate mind. Normally in patch 5.1, I would run comps in 2s with a hunter, wait for his scatter trap, spectral guise in and fear the opponent, and try to get a good position for Dominate Mind. But there were many flaws to this approach: warriors, druids and even rogues would eat the traps if we were trying to cc their healer, or even a shaman would use grounding totem on the freezing trap. Dominate mind could easily be lined using the pillars or interrupted, due to its long 2.5 seconds casting time. We could counter by stunning or snaring the DPS and then scatter trapping, but this was still hard to accomplish.

So what is the scenario for 5.2?

Apparently, casting a CC chain as a disc priest may be much easier since the casting time for dominate mind is lower. Just cast fear into a Dominate Mind, but be sure to keep your partner healed up before casting dominate mind. Another fact is, that glyph of Pain Suppression and Inner Focus are all base line. So this would free up some glyph space to allow for other glyphs. I have my sights set on Glyph of Psychic Scream, which plants your feared opponents in place. This would assist us for some easy positioning. Simply fear, line the opponent DPS behind a pillar and cast fear. The uncertainty of where your feared target will run will be eliminated, allowing us to pre-plan our Dominate Mind with much more precision.

So that was Discipline Priest. What about Holy Priest?

Apparently it seems Holy priests can be even better at locking someone down than Disc. The rotation involves a spell called Holy Word: Chastise, which is a 3 second disorient. The 3 second disorient would allow for enough time to land in another Dominate Mind locking out your opponent for another 4 seconds (diminishing returns with the first Dominate mind).

So the chain for Holy Priests would go something like this:

Fear > Dominate Mind > Holy Word: Chastise > Dominate Mind

8 seconds + 8 seconds + 3 seconds + 4 seconds = 23 seconds

Off course you cannot possibly get a full 23 seconds chain, and the chances are that you will be interrupted by another opponent while casting or channelling Dominate mind. But this falls to our advantage as well. If interrupted, we are locked out of our shadow spells, leaving us one form of interrupt, less to worry about. Positioning will be very important as we would want to Dominate Mind just behind a pillar. A full rotation along with your partners cc will be frustrating for your opponents.

The best part about 5.2 is that Chakra stances for Holy priests have a 5 second cool down now, thanks to the pvp set bonuses. So it is possible to switch to Chastise and change back to Serenity within 5 seconds, allowing for this chain in CC. Just make sure you make full use of macros as changing stances does not trigger GCD.

Therefore, this may actually put us on par with other healers of locking an opponent out. However, when we use Dominate Mind, we are in a way, locked out as well. So that’s the only drawback of using this strategy.

So come next patch give this a shot. It is even possible to try it out in 5.1. However, you will probably not survive as a Holy priest since you will have mana issues, no survivability, 30 seconds Chakra CD and 2.5 seconds casting time for Dominate Mind.

Hope this article has given some helpful insight into improving your gameplay in the next patch.