Ana wrote:Without the matter of poor gear scaling and generally being unfit for raids, Smite does decent dps (I assume the priest would keep SWP up while shooting). The problem with the spell is that it costs INSANE amounts of mana if you spam it. You can kill things reasonably quick but you often have to waste time drinking... it gets tedious after a while.
Holy priest dps is excellent for massively undergeared Strat though. AoE dps with superb survival capability for the undead, MC dps for the living part. Great fun.
This is true, I've done both living and undead (and Scholomance) as "DPS" as a holy priest, Shackle, Mind Soothe, Mind Control are great utilities that a priest can bring to the table.
Smite is okay, but with a decent wand + shadow word pain you can get 100-150 DPS easily even with low spellpower as a healer priest, while still being able to heal.
For general 5 mans:
You can probably get away as DPS in most instances that have a lot of humanoid mobs as you can mind control them, but that requires 0 talent points spent and you'd do pretty good DPS if you mind control the right mobs as well as CC:ing them, so you might as well have gone shadow or healing.
More on topic:
I dont think Spiritual Guidance would do much, even when gearing for spirit, let's say 400 spirit fully raid buffed, that would only net you 100 spell power and it would be hard to find gear with both good spirit and good spell-damage on it, so you'd be better off just gearing for spelldamage. I'd go with option B.