The Light Has Betrayed Me: What Does Priest Need to Get Back to the Top?

The current state of Hearthstone’s premiere healing class is a far cry from its era of dominance at the tail end of Knights of The Frozen Throne with the Razakus archetype: they are clearly lagging behind in power level and representation right now. On paper, it’s easy to identify what’s missing from the current mixture – however, as history has shown, it’s perhaps the most difficult class to get right. The real challenge is not about pushing it to the top of the charts – it’s about doing so without creating a frustrating and oppressive gameplay experience.

Total Darkness

It’s perhaps a testament to the weakness of the class’ evergreen set that the core of most good Priest decks of the past had very little to do with its basic toolkit – for instance, it regularly relies upon newly introduced AoE cards like Lightbomb and Psychic Scream to have a chance to keep up on the board. While a control archetype was semi-playable in the Classic days, it wasn’t even the strongest of its kind at the time, auto-losing to Paladin.

It took a multitude of sets and some quite powerful class cards to make Dragon Priest a reality for a brief period during The Grand Tournament, a short period in the limelight before the Standard rotation kicked the class back to oblivion. So bad was the state of Priest at the time that One Night in Karazhan’s Purify sparked a meltdown in the community, wondering why Team 5 would introduce such a meme card to a class that was already struggling for a very long time. Things did improve a lot thanks to Mean Streets of Gadgetzan as Anduin also got a bunch of overpowered cards alongside so many other contenders: Potion of Madness, Kabal Talonpriest, Drakonid Operative and Dragonfire Potion all became core in Priest builds for the next two years, and even Kabal Songstealer, Greater Healing Potion and Pint-Size Potion saw play, meaning all but one class card introduced here turned out to be Constructed-worthy. This is the kind of support Priest needs to get to the top – certainly an ominous sign.

Good but not too Good

Reno Priest had an interesting little niche to occupy during the MSoG days thanks to an excellent matchup against Reno Mage and pretty decent anti-aggro capabilities while the new rotation and some of the Un’Goro cards enabled both a Silence Priest deck and laid the foundations for a dedicated combo archetype solely relying on Divine Spirit and Inner Fire that would eventually flourish in KnC. Of course, Knights of the Frozen Throne is the real deal here, enabling the infinite burn of Razakus Priest, an archetype that heavily leaned upon the tools introduced in Gadgetzan.

It was around the same time that the class also dominated in Arena, causing quite the consternation: usually, the effective playstyle revolved around sticking a large minion on the board and then leveraging your hero power for value-trades, but the amount of reactive tools available has reached a tipping point around this time where it was completely impossible to play around everything – from Potion of Madness to Kabal Talonpriest and Dragonfire Potion, a game-ending punish was waiting around every corner –, highlighting the other issue with the class: it’s incredibly difficult to make it strong while also keeping it fair. In the end, the Raza-based archetype had to be nerfed with Wild in mind, which is a testament to its incredible power levels.

Later on, Spiteful Priest would make use of the same neutral package that found a home in almost every single class and Big Priest would once again enable a fairly robust resource-generation plan, similarly to the current Resurrect-based archetype. It’s certainly a viable deck but it’s hardly a regular fixture – so what’s the common factor in the decks listed above that propelled them above and beyond what the class can currently offer? Based on our understanding of the class so far, Priest can only succeed if they can either generate an obscene amount of resources – and we’ve clearly seen recently that a class that relies heavily on premium removal will struggle in an environment chock-full of resource generation – or some sort of dedicated finisher. Since the former isn’t really a viable option right now with all the Death Knights and other goodies, we’ve got to look at the latter – it’s no wonder the only semi-viable option for the class right now relies on an oddball combination of the two.

A Bright Future?

While Priest feels tantalizingly close to establishing a truly powerful deck, time is working against the class. The next Standard rotation at the release of 2019’s first set will remove Journey to Un’goro (with cards like Radiant Elemental, Shadow Visions and Lyra the Sunshard), Knights of the Frozen Throne (Spirit Lash, Shadowreaper Anduin and Obsidian Statue) plus Kobolds and Catacombs (Duskbreaker, Lesser Diamond Spellstone and Psychic Scream), meaning it will once again have to be built from the ground up – again, highlighting the issues with an evergreen Classic set baking in a pre-established power level hierarchy between the classes.

With the value plan mostly out of the question, perhaps the best hope for the near future is in the resurgent Divine Spirit-Inner Fire archetype, a new build of which has been recently popularized by Zalae. In general, some good anti-aggro tools in the upcoming set could make the current builds fairly serviceable until the rotation, and while Priest will take heavy hits at the end of the Year of the Raven, a decent chuck of the infinite value-generation tools will also rotate out of the game. Will that mark the resurgence of a pure control-based Priest archetype? Only time will tell…