Warrior Priest - how do you make this character work?

[C O R P S E Y]

Usually play on Champion mode. It feels very underpowered but I've heard people on the forums saying its a good class. Any recommendations on weapons / perks or general tactics? It seems just so under-whelming.

[48 YEARS OLD VIRGIN]

Been trying every weapon and nothing feels good. His skill charges too slowly and does too little once activated. Feels like everyone does what he does better.

[These stairs go up!]

WP inherently does better in higher difficulties due to better uptime for Righteous Fury and more need for someone to support the team and stop them from taking damage or healing them with his ult/fury.

There are several builds that are very solid regardless of difficulty.
Heres a guide.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1833338040

Hope that helps.

[The Fountaineer 🖋]

Don't play him like a damage dealer. While he CAN do decent damage with Smite active, he excels at pushing and tanking for teammates. Double bubble talent clutches on any map.

[Dame Arstor]

He's a class that scales better in high density situations

[RNG_Wizard]

He's a pretty true support, so in lower difficulties where players don't really need support he's not particularly useful. On higher difficulities though, starting at Legend and especially in Cataclysm and beyond, he begins to become extremely powerful.

He has excellent crowd control with an arsenal that specializes in high cleave, massive stagger and some strong armor penetration, can heal allies for permanent hp while killing, can grant invincibility to ignore or undo large bursts of damage from elites or monsters, secure revives even at a distance, and his 20/20 damage resist & mitigation alongside a large health pool and 100% base curse resist make him a near unkillable tank that uniquely gets stronger instead of weaker while carrying books.

On Champion, he has limited effectiveness. Enemies aren't abundant enough to maintain Righteous Fury, plus they don't hit hard enough for his barrier, healing and high hp to matter much. The best thing I can tell you about Warrior Priest if you play Champion is that he makes Legend feel like Champion.

[Chromatic]

On champion difficulty or lower where people need less tanks, I like to throw on some dual hammers with attack speed and just go to town. I also like tome and hammer to snipe specials at close range. The more serious builds apply to higher difficulties and are all about bullying armor for your team while they annihilate everything for you.

[Frostbeast]

Priest is kinda underwhelming. But Zealot with the new Greathammer is fun.

[BigJ]

Don't play a tank in champion, don't need it xd, outside of champ his damage heal can be massive in cata.

[Khal'cynee]

he is a frontline tanky healer support, and can deal with chaos and swarm easily with his gearset
but when are thing go well, when your team melt enemy without difficulty and when you dont have big density of mixed wave, fury doesnt trigger so much and you look useless a bit, but you are the perfect last standing career, can heal by himself and secure from special and your only weak is against monster

[Archdeacon Monseigneur]

if you want to play him like a damage dealer despite what these guys are telling you i got a few tips for you.

swiftslayer on both weapons is mandatory.
add attack speed and crit chance or power vs. enemy on them as well.

for combos;

Greathammer:
Elite enemy: light, light, heavy (rinse repeat)
Trash enemy (hordes): heavy, heavy, light (rinse repeat)

Dual Hammers:
Elite enemy: heavy only
Trash enemy (hordes): light spam, or mix in a heavy here and there as long as its not the overhead. in which case the combo is light, heavy, light, light, light, heavy (rinse repeat)

use +20% health and 30% block cost reduction on your necklace, 5% crit on trinket and (until they fix it) 33% curse resistance (converts to extra 33% extra hp currently but will be fixed soon)
personally for my dps set i am running 10% power vs. infantry + 10% power vs. skaven on charm. however, you can switch out either of these for 10% power vs. chaos or 10% power vs. armoured depending on your preference.
i'm running 5% crit chance on both weapons combined with 10% power vs. chaos on my greathammer and 10% power vs. skaven on my dual hammers.

considering WP already has +30% power vs. chaos warriors, gor standard bearers and certain armored bosses you don't need that much power vs. chaos in order to do good damage against them, but using greathammer to kill them is a must as something like dual hammers do pathetic damage against armored.

my total power vs. setup:
10% vs. skaven (20% with Dual hammers)
10% vs. infantry
10% vs. chaos (Greathammer) + perk = 40% (vs. chaos warr, standard bearer, bosses only)

Use Greathammer vs. elites/armored/monsters/bosses (yes even stormvermin)

Use Dual hammers against hordes and other roaming trash enemies, can also be used against stormvermin in a pinch with heavy attacks, but even with the 20% power vs. skaven the greathammer is still better at dealing with stormvermin of both variants (standard and shielded).

for talents, there's some pretty mandatory ones depending if you're playing in a selfish way or a supportive way, but since this build is purely for dps;

lvl 5 row: Slayer Of The Wicked - you will cleave a lot with either weapon, so this talent makes for the best THP gain. Eternal Vigilance is not too bad either since WP is a stagger god, but i prefer the former.

lvl 10 row: Rising Judgement - mandatory for getting killing blows on elites.
Sigmar's Executioner looks good on paper, but without Rising Judgement you will find it hard to get killing blows on elites before your teammates nicks them, which means you will not benefit a whole lot from the talent, wheres rising judgement always works, it also always applies +8% power to all your heavy attacks even with no stacks. it is critical that you take this talent in order to kill chaos warriors effectively. combined with WP's other perks (and the setup i suggest) you're effectively able to 3-4 shot chaos warriors with the greathammer definite 3 shot if you already have 5 stacks of rising judgement before engaging him, and if the 5 stack heavy attack and the followup attack both crits then you might just be able to 2-shot him. crazy i know. - by far the most important talent to have.

lvl 15 row: Smiter. no two ways about it, go with Smiter. since first target always counts as staggered it synchronizes really well with both righteous fury and rising judgement. again, this just helps dealing with elites as you essentially always do +20% damage on your first swing on them, and in case you got righteous fury up it goes up to 40% in one swing since righteous fury applies stagger to the target. forget that mainstay and enhanced power even exists.

lvl 20 row: Empowered Smite for dps, From Fury, Fortitude for healing. depending on which you favor the most. i recommend Empowered Smite for the pure dps increase though, but if you want to be less selfish the latter is a good choice too.

lvl 25 row: Prayer of Hardiness is the superior talent in this row since it gives the whole party 15% increased HP, but again, this is a pure dps build, so Prayer of Vengeance will help you that extra little bit with dps output, although the difference it makes is really miniscule, i can't recommend using it.

lvl 30 row: this is literally up to you, there is no mandatory pick for this. i personally run United In Prayer because theres almost no situations where its ever wasted and it has twice the explodeys. its a proactive skill whereas Comet's Gift is a very reactive skill.
Unyielding Blessing is not bad either, since it allows you to walk through hordes, and prevents knockback from fire rats and gun rats, and lasts a few extra seconds.
whatever you are most comfortable using - use that.

hope that helps.

EDIT: this is my build for legend difficulty btw. but it also works fine on champion.

[s0laris]

You wont really see the effect of the WP until you hit legend/cata/cata+, but mostly cata/cata+.

I use this build:
https://www.ranalds.gift/heroes/19/121332/80-4-3-6/81-3-4-6/3-2-1/1-4-4/2-7-3

It should work from cata and up.

[Slayer Slayerson]

Pray.
Pray harder.

[Tunnfisk]

Originally posted by CorpseEater:

Usually play on Champion mode. It feels very underpowered but I've heard people on the forums saying its a good class. Any recommendations on weapons / perks or general tactics? It seems just so under-whelming.

I think it comes with practice. I've noticed that flail and shield is pretty much easy mode on WP. However I do enjoy using 2h hammer more. It's a good kit in my opinion, good team buffs and class ability.

I mean, what else are you going to play? Elf? *scoffs*

[Emilia Tempest]

Warrior Priest gets stronger on higher difficulties (legend/cata) as tanks and supports matter more on those difficulties then on anything below that, as stuff dies faster then you can blink.

You can make people (or yourself) invincible for 6 seconds, which is huge for saving a teammate if they make a silly mistake or just get jumped.
You can even heal others with the ult (talent required) if they get hit by a big attack, just use the ult and boom all that HP back up! (which ofc gets a stronger heal in higher difficulties because durr enemy do more damage).

His fury is currently strange and maybe will get changed to proc more. Made a bug report about it as it only counts enemy type, not the specific enemy, so you currently get the same amount of fury for a stormvermin then you get for a chaos warrior. A Chaos warrior should give way more fury cuz he is more tanky and rarer.
Unless your team stands together and you throw yourself into the horde blocking, hitting things, killing stuff you wont get it charged. Its pretty hard and demanding to get it charged in a horde right now but it is possible.

One thing, never spam the AoE explosion of the Hammer&Tome. It isnt worth charging your hammer for 4 seconds and then hitting llike 6 rats. Just use your other melee to take care of the horde. Use it when there is an huge blob (like in a chokepoint).

Warrior Priest is an amazing tank and a support, he is very well balanced and depends on the player's skill to be effective. In my opinion this is the most well made career in the entire game. The balance is right, most talents are viable and after they adjust fury to proc a bit more then this career is pretty much perfect.

[Aedwynn]

Originally posted by JaggSauce:

lvl 15 row: Smiter. no two ways about it, go with Smiter. since first target always counts as staggered it synchronizes really well with both righteous fury and rising judgement. again, this just helps dealing with elites as you essentially always do +20% damage on your first swing on them, and in case you got righteous fury up it goes up to 40% in one swing since righteous fury applies stagger to the target. forget that mainstay and enhanced power even exists.

Mainstay is generally better.
Smiter gives no benefit against horde as it counts as staggered only first enemy hit, so if you are cleaving through 5 enemies, only 1st will count as staggered, others won't. Another thing to note, it provides no benefit at all if enemy is already staggered (through Ult, headshot/crit or other effects). Even against elites Mainstay instantly catches up as you won't oneshot enemies with Smiter anyway. Smiter looks better on weapons that hit precisely 1 target vs targtes you kill in 1-2 strikes. Also looks better when facing bosses. In all other cases Mainstay is better.