Holy Priest's kit is spread across more buttons than most healers - Renew, Prayer of Mending, two Holy Words, and a throughput cooldown that reshapes all of them for 20 seconds. Parse percentile doesn't tell you which of those you're actually using well. Here's what Healper checks in a Holy Priest log, and why.
What top Holy Priests actually did
Measured from 400 logs of top-performing Holy Priests at keystone level 11 in Midnight Season 2 (Curse of Ula'tek), across 8 dungeons. These are measurements of what that cohort did, not targets anyone set - and the middle-half column matters more than the median, because it shows how much honest variation there is between good runs.
| What | Median | Middle half | Logs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Renew uptime | 95.0% | 92.5-97.0% | 400 |
| Average mana through the run | 94.2% | 89.7-96.5% | 400 |
| Overhealing | 43.2% | 38.8-47.4% | 400 |
1 of those 400 runs had the healer bottom out on mana at some point (0.2%). Running dry is not rare at this level, and the spread in the mana column is why: the middle half of this cohort is a wide band, not a target.
The same corpus broken down per dungeon, with the cooldowns this spec actually pressed, is on the Holy Priest benchmarks page. Mythic+ only: the raid brackets carry no per-log data in any season, so nothing here describes raid.
Renew uptime: your baseline, not your ceiling
Renew is tracked the same way HoT uptime is tracked for every healer spec: the percentage of active combat time it's active on at least one target, with pandemic refreshing preserving part of the remaining duration on a timely reapplication instead of resetting it. Renew is cheap and low-commitment, so a low uptime usually just means it's being forgotten during Holy Word and Prayer of Mending weaving rather than a deliberate tradeoff.
Prayer of Mending: keep it bouncing
Prayer of Mending should rarely be sitting on cooldown - Healper tracks its cast-per-minute rate and grades it against the cohort in the table above rather than a fixed target. It's cheap relative to the healing it returns, so a low rate is one of the more common gaps between an average Holy Priest log and a strong one.
Holy Word: Serenity and Sanctify: use them, don't save them
Both Holy Words are tracked by cast frequency rather than uptime, since they're on-demand throughput rather than maintenance. Serenity's base cooldown is 60 seconds with one charge - a second charge is a talent, not baseline - and Sanctify is tracked the same way where a build has it. Most do not: Ultimate Serenity replaces Sanctify, and 2,468 of the 2,500 committed top Holy Priest logs show Ultimate Serenity healing while only 24 show any Sanctify at all, so for most readers this section is about Serenity. Casting Heal or Flash Heal reduces both Holy Words' cooldowns, so keeping them on cooldown is largely about not holding them for a "better" moment that costs you casts elsewhere.
Apotheosis: your core throughput cooldown
Apotheosis reduces your Holy Word cooldowns and mana costs for 20 seconds. Its base cooldown is 120 seconds, and Healper compares your casts against what top logs of the same fight and bracket actually did rather than against a chain-casting ideal. Going a full pull without using it is treated as a bigger miss than using it a little late, since it's meant to be lined up with the next predictable damage window rather than saved. Archon additionally wants frequent Halo casts - Halo's base cooldown is 60 seconds - since Halo's healing feeds back into Apotheosis windows.
Mana and overhealing
Mana is checked two ways - your average % across the fight, and whether you went fully OOM. Overheal % is compared against benchmark logs from top Holy Priests at your bracket rather than a fixed ceiling; Piety redistributes some overheal for Oracle, but a high rate still signals reactive casting into already-topped targets.
Want the exact scoring breakdown and percentile math behind all of this? See how we calculate your score.