Every Sunday Spiritual Guidance offers Holy and Discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music.

I decided to take a break from gems this week to discuss a style of priest healing that is becoming popular among raiders: discipline raid healing. Though the concepts behind it are extremely simple to understand and execute, this style of play seems to have slipped under the radar of many players despite its amazing potential. Tag along with me after the jump and I'll fill you in on the basics and benefits of disc raid healing. Holy priests, I'm talking to you, too.

Unfortunately for the average discipline priest, there were quick and inappropriate assessments made early in Wrath of the Lich King which tagged discipline as a "tank healing" spec. While I do agree that discipline's burst response and damage mitigation lend themselves extremely well to healing a tank, there is a great deal of potential that will go untapped if a discipline priest never ventures outside of a little bit of cross healing. Take note – discipline priest are single target healers, not tank healers!

Disclaimer: In the hardest of progression content, I do not encourage cross healing! Remember: "Honor and shame from no condition rise; act well your part, there all the honor lies." Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man. Do your job, and trust your fellow healers to do theirs. Staying on your target will make it easier to identify where a healing problem is, and that's the first step to correcting it. If you're in farm content, however, go nuts – actually, go shadow.

So, what is discipline raid healing? Chances are, if you're a discipline priest, you've already found yourself doing it now and again. Remember when you prepared for XT-002 Deconstructor's Tantrums in Ulduar by casting Power Word: Shield on as many people as you could? Or perhaps on the Twin Val'kyr in Trial of the Crusader you bubbled everyone in sight because the raid damage was so high? That's the basics of it, except you do it full time instead of just occasionally.

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