WORLD of Warcraft has nine character classes. At least, that’s what it says on the box. In fact, the World of Warcraft, like every MMO ever made, has just two character classes: one which makes your green bar go down and one which makes your green bar go up. It doesn’t matter whether the bastard pummelling you to death is a muscle bound titan wielding an axe the size of your house, an emaciated waif setting fire to your head ten times a second, a bovine Legolas-wannabe with a pet wolverine called Tiddles or a hyperactive halfwit popping out of thin air and stunlocking your stomach until you keel over in a heap; these many shades of git are one class and one class only. The one that makes your green bar go down.

At some stage in RPG history, one bright spark took a step back from his day job of nurturing his beard, feeding his beer gut and typing endless lines of robot language into a BBC Micro and came up with an astounding new idea. Turning the green-bar-down concept completely on its head, this class would have the core ability of being able to replenish the green and prevent people from dying. Thus the Preist was born.

With the development of the MMO, the Preist would become an instant hit with everyone who didn’t play a Preist, its presence in their party enabling them to hit things to their hearts content with a substantially reduced risk of death. This, in turn, endowed the player behind the Preist with a warm glow of usefulness, popularity and self worth, a fundamentally mistaken feeling generated solely by the Preist’s role as a mobile version of the life-up chicken from Streets of Rage.

World of Warcraft Preists come in three flavours, defined by the trio of talent trees, Vanilla, Concrete and Emo.

Vanilla

The Vanilla Preist is the Preist as originally envisaged by God, or more accurately, as originally envisaged by the tubby programmer whose eureka moment gave birth to the class. Structured primarily around skills which improve green bar replenishment, most Vanilla talents simply boost the conversion rates of the blue bar to the green bar. But the Vanilla tree also holds some special abilities, including: Happy Fire - an area of effect spell which heals friends for virtually nothing while simultaneously damaging foes for virtually nothing; Not Dead Yet - which allows the Preist to shapeshift into an angel simply by wandering into a hail of enemy attacks, granting an enjoyable 15 second period of interruption-free casting; and Bandage Fridge - a handy stockpile of heals over time which is invisible to all other players.

Concrete

The Concrete Preist is designed around the concept of not dying. Through a combination of anti-death talents, high resilience and sheer bloody mindedness, the Concrete Preist can not only survive attacks but actually defeat opponents. A fight usually turns into a steady war of attrition in which the enemy gradually diminishes your blue bar by hacking away at your green bar, all the time being gradually killed themselves at a rate equivalent to a small dog chewing their ankle. Key skills in the Concrete armoury include: Dispel Me 1 - a helpful talent which boosts spell effects for two seconds until dispelled; Dispel Me 2 - a helpful talent which reduces incoming damage for two seconds until dispelled; and Dispel Me 3 - a helpful talent which reflects incoming damage back at the attacker for one second until it disappears of its own accord.

Emo

The Emo Preist was developed as a way of giving the Preist player, whose existence to date had involved doing rarely acknowledged favours for everyone else or collapsing after being kicked in the head by a bigger character, a way of fighting back: Emo Form. Like pumping a Baywatch cameraman full of horse tranquilisers and handing him a shotgun, the Emo Form engages at the flick of a switch and directly converts years of pent up penis envy into a violent explosion of purple-based damage which leaves nothing behind on the battlefield but guts and weeping. Crucial to the power of the Emo Preist are: the Proton Pack, a scary beam which makes ghosts writhe around in readiness for being trapped in a special shoe box; Cheating, which replenishes the green bar in accordance with the amount of enemy green bar reduced and is therefore against the rules; and the Emo Form itself, which boosts damage output and turns the Preist the same colour as the outer layer of a teenager.

Tricks of the trade - the tactics that will help you become the greatest WoW player.

(1) The accepted greeting upon meeting a Preist is “heal”. If this fails to elicit a response, the Preist is Swedish. The accepted greeting upon meeting a Swedish Preist is “hael”.

(2) Emo Preists enjoy being told to change their talent build to enable you to complete an instance. Ask them to do it, and if they refuse, tell them they are a noob. This will make the Preist happy.

(3) In PvP, remember to always target the Preist last. This will ensure it has plenty of time to use up its blue bar on helping its friends, making it much easier to kill when the moment comes.

(4) If you are cornered by an aggressive Preist,

(5) Reroll Preist.

Thank you for reading my Elite Guide to Preists. Hopefully one day I will see you on the battlefield and you will kill me with what you have learned.