Priest


 * The Light calls, but shadows whisper. Heroes of righteousness, Priests have unmatched healing potential and can bestow powerful holy enchantments on their minions. However, there is no light without dark. Priests can also tap into the shadows to manipulate the minds of their enemies and deal mortifying psychic damage.

 is one of classes in Hearthstone.

Heroes
is represented by the following heroes.

Background
''Priests are devoted to the spiritual, and express their unwavering faith by serving the people. For millennia they have left behind the confines of their temples and the comfort of their shrines so they can support their allies in war-torn lands. In the midst of terrible conflict, no hero questions the value of the priestly orders. These masters of the healing arts keep their companions fighting far beyond their normal capacities with an array of restorative powers and blessings. The divine forces at the priest’s command can also be turned against foes, smiting them with holy fury.''

As light cannot exist without darkness, and darkness without light, some priests tap into shadow to better understand their own abilities, as well as the abilities of those who threaten them.

Hero Power

 * Restore your allies with a divine touch.

The default priest Hero Power is Lesser Heal, a powerful healing option which can be used on heroes or minions to restore Health. It can help restore damaged minions to full Health, keeping them alive and allowing them to trade against multiple enemies, leading to good card advantage. It can also be used to heal the hero itself, recovering Health lost to the opponent's attacks. A powerful defensive tool, Lesser Heal can allow the priest and its minions to survive long after they should have been defeated, and fits best with a slower strategy, outlasting and outmaneuvering opponents.

Replacement Hero Powers

 * Heal is the upgraded Hero Power.
 * Playing Shadowform will replace the current Hero Power with Mind Spike. In Classic format, playing Shadowform for a second time will replace Mind Spike with Mind Shatter. Both of these are powerful damage-dealing alternatives to Lesser Heal, but deprive the priest of their healing utility.
 * Shadowreaper Anduin will replace the current Hero Power with Voidform, as well as replacing the hero.
 * Activate the Obelisk will replace the current Hero Power with Obelisk's Eye once the Quest is completed.
 * Galakrond, the Unspeakable will replace the current Hero Power with Galakrond's Wit, as well as replacing the hero.

Healing

 * Staying alive is one of the best ways to make it to victory. Priests have powerful cards for keeping their minions in tiptop shape to deal damage.

Priests are masters of healing, and can heal themselves and their minions through their Hero Power and a range of healing spells, as well as boosting minions' health. Priests' healing theme is reinforced by synergies with spells such as Inner Fire, and minions such as Lightspawn. Priests are capable of strong defensive play, keeping a handful of minions alive against all odds, and quickly regenerating defenders between rounds.
 * Featured cards

Silence

 * Priests can use their psychic abilities to control minions, manipulating even their very card text. Silence can erase the power of a Priest’s enemies, and by the same token eliminate weaknesses from friendly minions.


 * Featured cards

Cloning

 * A truly sage Priest knows how to use the enemy’s mind tricks against them.

Known for their ability to peer into the minds of their opponents, priests can use spells such as Mind Vision and Thoughtsteal to steal from their opponent's deck. Priests also feature a theme of mind control, seizing control of enemy minions through cards such as Cabal Shadow Priest, Shadow Madness and the infamous Mind Control.
 * Featured cards

Core cards
Raising up to level 10 awards 16 Core  cards (31 copies), while winning up to 500 games in Ranked, Arena and Duels awards golden copies of existing cards. All Core cards are uncraftable and cannot be crafted or disenchanted. starts with the following cards:
 * Starting cards

Up to level 10, reaching each level will award the player two copies (one at level 10) of a new Core card.
 * Levels 2-10

Expansion cards


's expansion cards can be obtained mostly by obtaining corresponding card packs or class packs. The player can buy them in Shop with gold or real money, or get them through various sources. Some cards may be available through various promotions, like logging in to get them.

Mini-set cards, while can be obtained like expansion cards, can also be obtained by buying its bundle available in Shop for a limited-time. The player can buy the bundle with gold or real money.

Expansions cards are also craftable and can be obtained by crafting them with Arcane Dust.

Adventure cards
Adventure cards can be obtained by completing their Adventure's encounters. They are uncraftable until the player completes the Adventure or their set rotates to Wild format. The player can buy the Adventure with gold for each individual part, or real money for the whole of it.

Cards
Breakdown of cards in both Standard and Wild formats can be seen in the following table.

Strategy and gameplay
The Priest is one of the most defense-oriented class in the game. Their ability to keep their own minions alive and destroy even the biggest army of minions is one of the best in the game, their ability to buff allies is only second to Paladins, and their copious sources of card generation allows them to keep up their momentum over the long run. This is countered by the Priest's low damage output, lacking strong high-Attack minions and methods of dealing burst damage. The Priest must win the game by gradually whittling away at the opponent's health through their very resilient minions. Priests heavily lean on the control playstyle as a result, although they can play the tempo game by making their early-game minions very stubborn to remove.

The Priest Hero Power, Lesser Heal, allows them to heal any target for 2 Health each turn. It can be very useful for not only keeping themselves alive, but also for regenerating defenders or for preventing a valuable minion from being worn down. Due to this, Priests may favour minions with higher health pools since they can survive attacks to get healed. To complement this, Priests have access to multiple cards that give a minion a sizable Health buff, such as Power Infusion, Kabal Talonpriest, and High Priest Amet. As a result, most opponents will struggle to remove the Priest's minions, which can trade and win against more fragile minions effortlessly and tank a removal spell, while increasing their capacity for healing.

The Priest's array of removal spells are potent. A Holy Smite, Penance, or Holy Nova can take care of weaker foes easily. Even high-health minions are at risk, with cards like Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death being capable of outright destroying them. Even when the Priest is completely overwhelmed, they can wipe the board clean with cards like Shadow Word: Ruin, Mass Hysteria, and Plague of Death, even if it can cost them their own minions. These cards lets the Priest protect their minions while ahead or turn the game around when falling behind effectively. Priests are potent spellcasters as a result, and cards like Priest of the Feast and Lyra the Sunshard complements that.

The Priest's ability to read their opponent's mind translates to card generation. They can use cards like Psychic Conjurer, Thoughtsteal, and Archbishop Benedictus to copy cards from their opponent's deck to use their cards against them, and cards like Mind Vision, Chameleos, and Madame Lazul even lets them take a peek at their opponent's hand, giving them a strategic upper hand. Copying your opponent's cards can be great fun, and can provide you with some very unusual possibilities. They can find themselves suddenly hacking away at enemies with a Gorehowl, chucking Fireballs with Archmage Antonidas, or even turn into their opponent's class if they copied a Hero card.

Priest can also bend lesser minds to their will, mind controlling them to join their side. With Mind Control, they can take a valuable minion from their opponent of their choosing, able to single-handedly turn the game in their favor if the opponent was relying on them to win. On the less costly side of things, they have methods of temporary mind control too, such as Shadow Madness and Potion of Madness, using them to turn against their kin and destroy each other; even better if the controlled minion had a Deathrattle effect, which the Priest forcibly takes away from their opponent.

With multiple Priest cards having quirks that require a minion to be at a certain Attack level, they also have cards to manipulate a minion's Attack temporarily, such as Scarlet Subjugator and Lazul's Scheme, which combo well with cards like Cabal Shadow Priest, or at the very least help make more efficient trades.

Priests have the largest and most flexible silencing options of any class. The basic Silence spell costs 0 mana, and Mass Dispel is the only card that can silence multiple enemies. They can even use cards like Purify and Unsleeping Soul to Silence their own minions, turning normally useless minions with huge stats like an Ancient Watcher into powerful attackers.

When healing is not enough, Priests can also resurrect their fallen allies with cards like Mass Resurrection and Eternal Servitude. These cards can potentially summon minions that have a higher Mana cost than the spell that was used to resurrect them. Decks have been made to exploit this effect to their fullest by utilizing only expensive minions.

Complementing their ability to resurrect allies are Deathrattle effect. They control powerful Deathrattle minions like Obsidian Statue to their will, combined with cards like Shadowy Figure, Mirage Caller, and Awaken the Makers make their impact more significant.

Priests also have an affinity for dragons. Their strength and cost complement well with the Priest's playstyle, which are made even better with dragon synergy cards like Duskbreaker and Drakonid Operative.

Burst damage & combos
A playstyle that used to be associated with Priest was their ability to unleash combos that can one-shot the opponent. Mind Blast was once part of the Priest's arsenal, dealing direct damage to the hero for a small cost. Combined with Prophet Velen, who doubled healing and spell damage, this became even more potent, but by creating multiple copies of Prophet Velen in a variety of different ways, a simple 5-damage Mind Blast multiplied into loads of unavoidable damage. Even without Mind Blast, Priests were able to use other unconventional methods to one-turn-kill their opponent.

Priest could also tap into their shadow powers with Shadowform to turn their Hero Power into a damage dealer, sacrificing their healing power for offense. What's more, Shadowreaper Anduin did more of the same but refreshed on playing a card, and with the help from the Kabal he could unleash loads of damage in a single turn. A more temporary solution was using Auchenai Soulpriest or Auchenai Phantasm to turn their healing into damage, which combined with burst healing like Circle of Healing was a potent removal or damage.

Divine Spirit is a Priest spell that doubles a minion's Health, making them twice as hard to kill. While it can be used to simply protect a minion from dying, it can also be used with Inner Fire to convert their health into big damage, and doubling an already double health minion was often enough to outright kill an opponent.

In the Year of the Phoenix, some of the Priest's core cards were replaced to distance the class's identity from burst damage combos, moving these tools to the Hall of Fame.

Trivia

 * The priest class is infamous for its slow plays and a bias toward control decks. In April 2016, the official Twitter account described priest as "Arguably the most time consuming golden hero" to obtain.


 * "Priest turn" is a phrase used to describe turns when the optimal play is simply to do nothing. The term is usually applied to late game turns where total inaction is far less common, and typically refers to priests, but can also be used for other classes. The term first arose due to the play-style of many control priest decks, which frequently saw late game turns with full mana, several cards in hand, and yet the priest taking no action, except perhaps to use Lesser Heal on themselves.


 * Some priests, when unable to take any action on turn 2, will use their mana to cast a Lesser Heal on their opponent. Since no other action can be taken, and assuming that no damage has yet been dealt, there is neither any advantage nor disadvantage to this act (unless the player's deck includes Frost Giants). Thanks may be offered, or when a pair of priests is involved, the gesture may be reciprocated. The Hero Power is sometimes accompanied by Anduin's threaten emote - "The Light shall burn you!" - suggesting the healing is in fact a somewhat ineffective attempt to destroy the opponent.


 * At one point during the game's alpha, the priest's Hero Power did not heal targets, but rather gave +1 Health to the next minion the priest played. The effect stacked if it was not consumed, meaning that if the priest used the ability several times (over several turns) without summoning a minion, the next minion summoned would gain several points of bonus Health. This design was eventually removed, primarily due to concerns over UI and mechanic complexity, and because the developers felt that it strayed too far from the priest's healing-based nature.


 * appears to have been an earlier prototype for the priest class during the game's alpha, prior to the arrival of Anduin.

Gallery

 * Card frames