# Priest

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Priest

This article is about the role. For the monster, see aligned priest.
Priest (priestess if female) is one of the roles in NetHack, capable of playing any alignment as a human, or restricted to chaotic as an elf. A priest's religion is chosen randomly from the pantheons of the other roles. A human priest is therefore capable of representing any of the other roles' gods in the game.
The guidebook has this to say about Priests.

    Priests and Priestesses are clerics militant, crusaders advancing the cause of  righteousness with arms, armor, and arts thaumaturgic. Their ability to commune with deities via prayer occasionally extricates them from peril, but can also put them in it.

Contents

1 Starting equipment
2 Intrinsics
3 Skills
4 Special rules
5 Strategy

5.1 Character creation
5.2 Early game

5.2.1 Weapons
5.2.2 Armor
5.2.3 Spellcasting
5.2.4 General

5.2.4.1 Atheist conduct

5.3 Mid game

5.3.1 Objectives
5.3.2 Spellcasting

5.4 Late game

5.4.1 Spellcasting

6 Rank titles
7 Quest
8 Variants

8.1 SLASH'EM

8.1.1 Starting equipment
8.1.2 Skills
8.1.3 Techniques
8.1.4 Strategy

8.2 FIQHack

9 Encyclopedia entry
10 References

Starting equipment
Priests start with the following items:

a blessed +1 mace
a +0 robe
a +0 small shield (like those of aligned priests)
1–2 cloves of garlic
1–2 sprigs of wolfsbane
2 random spellbooks of level 3 or lower (suitable for priests: clerical, divination, or healing spells)
4 potions of holy water
a chance at one of the following:
an oil lamp (9% chance)
a magic marker (10% chance)
If an elf, a random non-magical instrument.
Intrinsics
Priests gain the following intrinsics at these experience levels:[1]

Level 15: Warning
Level 20: Fire resistance
Skills

Priest skills

Max
Skills

Basic

Weapons: lance, bow, sling, crossbow, dart, shuriken, boomerang
Combat: bare hands

Skilled

Weapons: polearms, spear, trident, unicorn horn

Expert

Weapons: club, mace, morning star, flail, hammer, quarterstaff
Spells: healing, divination, clerical

Priests start with Basic skill in Mace and Clerical spells. The spellcasting skill is always Clerical, no matter what spellbooks a character starts with, because the initial spellcasting skills are hardcoded in the function skill_init in weapon.c and are independent of the starting inventory. Their special spell is remove curse.

Special rules
Priests automatically know the beatitude of all items. This doesn't require sight or touch -- any item you're aware of, for any reason, will show its beatitude. If no BUC is shown, that means the item is uncursed. (You can force the game to include the "uncursed" descriptor by setting !implicit_uncursed in your options.)
Priests don't receive the multishot bonus for their race or being Skilled at their weapon; thus, they can never fire more than one missile per move.
As the guidebook (somewhat obtusely) alludes to, Priests can also #turn undead.

Strategy
Character creation
Priests are restricted in most edged weapons, including many desirable weapon skills, and players may elect to work around this by means of a sacrifice gift. For such players, lawful priests have the best chance of receiving a viable artifact weapon in the form of an artifact long sword such as Sunsword or even Grayswandir, with the unrestricted skill making Excalibur an option as well. Neutral priests have somewhat less reliable options for a first gift, though they may receive Mjollnir, which is a quite powerful artifact in its own right and can be advanced to Expert skill. While most chaotic options for first sacrifice gift options are somewhat useless, elven Priests can force Stormbringer by naming Sting and Orcrist beforehand.
For those not planning to use an artifact weapon, priests in general can be quite fragile in the early game unless they elect to wear armor. Lawful priests have the least perilous trip through the Mines early on, while chaotic priests gain more "immediate" benefits from sacrifice due to prayer timeout reduction, which can aid in farming spellbooks; chaotic priests will also have an easier time dealing with the mysterious force.
Elven Priests tend to be the most fragile of all available choices, and need assistance from equipment to reach the maximum strength damage bonus or even maximum carrying capacity. Their higher maximum attributes for casting stats may not make as much difference in spellcasting success by the time you can actually reach those limits, although the energy growth bonus is somewhat helpful.

Early game
Weapons
One disadvantage of the Priest is their weapon skill set. Priests can't gain skill in any edged weapons, and can't multishot any ranged weapons. Combined with no skill in the attack spells, this makes it hard for priests to find a good way to kill monsters.
Instead, a Priest's best ranged option early game is the aklys, which they can pick up in the mines and can advance to up to Expert. Skill and enchantment investments on the aklys can be useful for the entire game.
The starting +1 mace is slightly better than a +0 long sword at Basic skill against small monsters. It is much less effective against large monsters, but these typically appear later. Priests can use a unicorn horn to do more damage to large monsters.  Like any character, a Priest will want to sacrifice for an artifact weapon as soon as possible.  Lawful priests should generally dip for Excalibur as soon as they can survive any fountain spawns.  Even unskilled, Excalibur is better than other available options.

Armor
Metallic armor and shields are worth wearing to get your AC down; your starting spells don't generally need to be cast quickly, so when you do need to cast them you can find a quiet spot and disrobe. You will want to switch to non-metallic armor with a good AC as it becomes available.

Spellcasting
A priest starts with a robe which aids spellcasting, and can use their potions of holy water to bless spellbooks they find, thus gaining more spells. However, they may have better uses for holy water.
A priest should focus on melee combat because most of their starting spells aren't useful in a fight. However, they are very capable of casting low-level spells such as sleep and force bolt.
The most useful combat spells that a priest can start with are protection and healing. Utility spells, especially identify, can also give a priest a significant advantage once they are able to cast them.

General
Priests' ability to tell the beatitude of items and their starting holy water gives them advantages in the early game:

They can identify which weapons, armor, and rings are safe to equip even if they have lost their pet. Another character who cannot pet-test must drag everything to an altar.
They can more easily get the more useful blessed effects of scrolls such as identify, genocide, enchant armor, and enchant weapon.
They can remove curses with holy water or by blessing scrolls of remove curse.
They can get an early wish if they find a magic lamp; they may wish to go to Mine Town early to see if there is one to buy.
Priests can easily uncurse items they find in bones files.
Consider stashing at least one of your starting potions of holy water as early as possible, to keep from losing it to cold/fire/lightning attacks.  As long as you have one potion, you can make more at will.
If you manage to get an early wish, dragon scale mail is generally more useful than a weapon, because AC and non-metallic body armor are useful things for a priest to have.
You should #turn undead only if you are certain that there are no non-undead monsters nearby.

Atheist conduct
Priests are well suited to the atheist conduct, because they need not use altars to ascertain beatitude.
Lycanthropy can be dealt with using your starting wolfsbane. Removing curses is easy with the starting holy water.
Using #turn will break atheist conduct, as will using #chat on a priest (monster).

Mid game
Objectives
The quest has mostly weaker zombies and only a few strong monsters, and the large number of graveyards contain many boxes full of items. There is more treasure on this quest than any other. Drain resistance or at least magic cancellation of 3 is useful to prevent level drain from wraiths and vampires. If you are not at a high enough level for the Quest but have access to create monster in some form, you can gain levels by creating wraiths on the home level and luring them back through the portal.
The unaligned altar can be converted and used for sacrificing, but monster generation is low and most generated monsters are undead and cannot be sacrificed.  In version 3.6.0 and later, you can get corpses by kicking the trees on the home level to summon killer bees.  
Some priests that get to the Castle will be strong enough to face the monsters in direct combat, or use the passtune to crush more difficult monsters with the drawbridge.

Spellcasting
Except for attack spells, Priests are decent spell-casters. They can advance to expert in clerical, divination and healing, but are restricted in other classes. Note that their spellcasting prowess is based on Wisdom, not Intelligence (but the odds of learning a new spell still depend on Intelligence). Even with attack spells restricted, the simpler ones (i.e., level 3 and below) may still be of use.
Skill slots are not in short supply; a Priest has few weapon skills, and may gain many levels from wraith corpses in the quest. Advancing divinations to Skilled enhances the effects of spells like  detect monsters, detect treasure, and identify, but advancing the school to Expert only improves spell failure rates.

Late game
Spellcasting
A high level priest may be able to make use of a spellbook of polymorph, despite having no skill in matter spells, by using the Mitre of Holiness and a robe.
At skilled divination, Priests should be able to cast magic mapping, which should make Gehennom mapping a trivial task.
You can learn simple attack spells (like force bolt or drain life) and cast them with 0% failure rate.  Magic missile is especially useful at high levels, as its damage scales up with your level - which can easily be increased due to the wraiths in the quest.

Rank titles
The status line shows you to be one of the following ranks when you reach the specified experience level:

XL 1–2: Aspirant
XL 3–5: Acolyte
XL 6–9: Adept
XL 10–13: Priest/Priestess
XL 14–17: Curate
XL 18–21: Canon/Canoness
XL 22–25: Lama
XL 26–29: Patriarch/Matriarch
XL 30: High Priest/High Priestess
Quest
Main article: Priest quest
Nalzok, the Priest quest nemesis, is quite tough, but he respects Elbereth and the scroll of scare monster. The quest is rather boring, but extremely profitable. All the levels contain several graveyards with wraiths and chests full of goodies. The locate level may also contain several sleeping foocubi, which you should not disturb until you are able to utilize them without the risk of negative effects. Given all the graveyards and sleeping monsters, some source of stealth is advisable before attempting this quest.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (NetHack 3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.

The scroll of scare monster on the ground no longer scares any unique monster.
The quest artifact is The Mitre of Holiness, which has a great base item in the helm of brilliance; the Mitre additionally allows you to #invoke it to regain your power, gives fire resistance and halves damage from the undead and most demons. However, unlike many quest artifacts, it doesn't confer magic resistance, so you have to get that from a different source.

Variants
SLASH'EM
In SLASH'EM, Priests can be doppelgangers, drow, elves, hobbits, or humans.

Starting equipment
blessed +0 mace
blessed +0 robe (note that in SLASH'EM, an ordinary robe does not enhance spellcasting; that requires a robe of power)
blessed +2 small shield
1–2 blessed cloves of garlic
1–2 blessed sprigs of wolfsbane
spellbook of healing
spellbook of force bolt, sleep, resist poison, resist sleep,  detect food, detect monsters, light, knock, or wizard lock
random blessed scroll
4 potions of holy water
10% chance of magic marker, otherwise 10% chance of light source (50% chance of oil lamp, 50% chance of torches)
Skills
Priest spell skills are different than in vanilla. Also of note, they can become skilled in long sword.

Priest skills

Max
Skills

Basic

Weapons: lance, bow, sling, crossbow, dart, shuriken, boomerang
Combat: bare hands
Spells: attack, enchantment, body, matter

Skilled

Weapons: long sword, polearms, spear, javelin, trident, unicorn horn
Spells: protection

Expert

Weapons: club, paddle, mace, morning star, flail, hammer, quarterstaff
Spells: healing, divination

Techniques

Level

Technique

1

Turn undead

1

Blessing

Strategy
In SLASH'EM, Priests get Disrupter as their first sacrifice gift, which is very useful in their quest as it grants +5 to hit and +30 to damage against the undead. It is not terribly useful as a main weapon, but makes a good secondary weapon to use against liches and vampire mages. Make sure to enchant it to be able to hit undead with enchantment resistance!
Lawful Priests can try to use Skullcrusher, which can be gotten by sacrifice. If you are good at unmounted polearm tactics, then Reaper can be another option. The previously-good wish, the Sceptre of Might, is a much weaker weapon in SLASH'EM; it now does a flat +3 to hit and +5 to damage against cross-aligned, instead of double damage.
Neutral Priests do not get any new options and should go for Mjollnir (now a heavy hammer) or the Staff of Aesculapius.
Chaotic Priests can use the Bat from Hell, which can by gotten by sacrifice. They can also use Plague or Hellfire for ranged combat; both may be obtained through sacrifice. Arrows shot from Plague are automatically poisoned, and bolts shot from  Hellfire explode and deal fire damage.

FIQHack
FIQHack priests can be Orcs.
Priests get a +20 bonus to effective XL when writing scrolls.  Thus at XL30 they can always write unknown scrolls.
Turning undead has been buffed compared to vanilla.

Encyclopedia entry

For the two priests were talking exactly like priests, piously, with learning and leisure, about the most aerial enigmas of theology.  The little Essex priest spoke the more simply, with his round face turned to the strengthening stars; the other talked with his head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to look at them.  But no more innocently clerical conversation could have been heard in any white Italian cloister or black Spanish cathedral.  The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown's sentences, which ended:  "... what they really meant in the Middle Ages by the heavens being incorruptible."  The taller priest nodded his bowed head and said:  "Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?"

[ The Innocence of Father Brown, by G.K. Chesterton ] 

References

↑ attrib.c in NetHack 3.4.3, line 62