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Priests are the classic healing class on World of Warcraft. They specialize in techniques to keep their allies alive. They are the lifeline in a group and if the healer falls, the rest of the group will quickly die as well. Priests must be protected at all costs to ensure everyone's survival. If the priest remains alive after a battle, they can quickly resurrect everyone else. If only the priest dies, it will be a long run back to the group and everyone has to wait. Priests can only wear cloth armor, so they will usually go down in one or two good hits. It is ultimately the warrior's job to keep them from taking damage, but it often falls to other classes to trap or distract enemies attacking the healer. Priests can do some damage but are usually considered the weakest in damage. Really any class can do excellent damage if done correctly. Shadow priests are specialized in doing DPS and can actually rank at the tops of the damage meters. They usually sacrifice most of their healing ability for this power, so it's hard for them to find a group.

With the changes to Wrath, the developers have been very transparent as to what they intended for each of the trees.

 Disc priests are to be, of course, the most durable of the priests (and they have several tools within the tree such as pain suppression and divine aegis on crit heals to ensure this). Many of their talents focus on increasing the survivability of this cloth-wearing healer. On the other hand, they also intend for disc priests to be amazing single-target healers. Considering their divine aegis talent, I am thinking crit shall play more of a role into how disc priests gear. It is also said that disc priests have been the best healers for tanking Death Knights as of the current Wrath beta build.

Holy priests have been geared more to be area of effect healers. Granted, they are strong all-around healers with potent single target heals in addition to some pretty crazy area of effect heals (circle of healing, which is now a "smart" heal and heals those with the lowest HP out of the targets it can heal). Some mana issues have been addressed, but overall I think you're going to see holy priests mostly sticking to spellpower (the combined spell dmg and healing stat) and spirit.

Shadow priests are still your damage dealers, but I think it shall grow easier for them to find groups though maybe not quite so easy to find raids. In BC, shadow priests were used to "recharge" mana users with Vampiric Touch. Shadow damage they dealt to a target returned a proportion of mana back to the party and the shadow priest. Now, Vampiric Touch has been changed to only return mana back in proportion to damage dealt by a specific spell: Mindblast. Granted, mindblast is a substantial source of damage for shadow priests and is in the damage rotation but eek. It does drop raid utility. On the other hand, hybrid DPS'ers (ret paladins, feral druids, shadow priests, etc) are not being punished for being a hybridized class as opposed to a "pure" DPS class (rogue, hunter, mage, etc). So maybe while shadow priests won't be sought over because they can return such high amounts of mana, Blizzard hopes they'll be brought because of player skill as they should be just as useful as any other DPS class in getting through content.

 Another interesting change to shadow is the ability for mind flay to crit. This, in addition to deep shadow talents that increase crit for their spells, means that shadow priests shall be looking to gear for crit as well - a stat that they previously ignored.

 We'll see how Wrath treats us!

Wow, a durable priest. I never thought I'd see the day. I though priests were supposed to fall over dead when they got hit. I'm glad to see they're making priests more specialized now. Too bad they messed with the mana-battery function of shadow priests. We used to love having the constant mana restoration in raids from our powerful shadow priests.

I'm also really glad to hear they aren't penalizing DPS hybrids for still being hybrids. My pride and joy of WoW was showing the damage meters and proving that a DPS druid could not only do ok, but continually top the charts. What changes do they have in store for druids? 

 

This smells like another thread! I'll make a post in the parent, general discussion about classes with useful links to Wrath information :D In general, balance druids see some love with some AoE capabilities, bears can still tank but have had trouble hitting the armor cap now whereas feral overall has been a little TOO good (according to Blizzard) on the DPS, resto druids were deemed pretty overpowered by Blizzard earlier but I haven't heard such tales yet. Out of all the healers, they are reportedly the ones who struggle with mana the least.

 Blizzard made it explicitly clear that they want mana conservation and management of your mana to play a part in the next expansion. They want casters to have to actually balance their stats and seek gear that will also increase/aid their mana pool and not just the damage or sheer healing they can produce. Hence the change to shadow priests' Vampiric Touch.

Disc priests have been extremely popular in arenas and can be extremely difficult to kill in PvP. In PvE they typically survive longer thanks to talents that increase their survivability, passively increase their health pool, etc.

Well, at least I quit WoW while I was ahead. The reason I liked my Druid so much was because I was so overpowered. This whole attempt to make things fair looks like it will really put a damper on the fun. I used to love being told Druids couldn't DPS, then posting the damage meters to show I had FAR surpassed anyone else in the group. I'd hate to see the day when druids go back to being the forsaken class no one wanted like they were when I first started playing. I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens.

I rather like the idea of them trying to make everything a bit more balanced. That is to say no one class is superior. It does homogenize classes a bit and admittedly takes out some of that unique factor. However, the goal now is that feral cat druids will do as much DPS as a combat rogue or a fire-spec'd mage. Granted, some classes have more burst damage capabilities, others have more AoE abilities, while others are better for sustained damage (think: hunters). But in general they want it to come down to peoples' skill and not their gear nor their class to be what holds them back. They want hybrids to do as much damage as pure damage classes, hybrid tanks to tank just as well as warrior prot tanks, etc so on and so forth :)

That's good to hear. I hated the days when I couldn't even get a group as a feral druid due to their stigma of being completely worthless in DPS. If they are working to balance them with other DPS classes, it might help us all to better get along in the competitive world... of Warcraft. I'm glad they finally made some steps to equalize tanking in the hybrid classes too. It just wasn't right when you couldn't get a group unless you had a warrior.