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The guidebook has this to say about Priests.

              Priests and Priestesses are clerics militant, crusaders  ad-
         vancing  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

Starting equipment

Priests start with the following items:




Priest skills
Max Skills


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.


Early game


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. Like any character, a Priest will want to sacrifice for an artifact weapon as soon as possible.


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.


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.


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.


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.


Using #turn will break atheist conduct, as will using #chat on a priest (monster).

Mid game


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 aren't level 14 yet but you have a means of creating monsters, 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.



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


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


  • 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


Main article: Priest quest



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.




Starting equipment


Priest spell skills are different than in vanilla. Also of note, they can become skilled in long sword.

Priest skills
Max Skills


Level Technique
1 Turn undead
1 Blessing



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 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

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;
worthy to look at them. But no more innocently clerical
conversation could have been heard in any white Italian cloister
really meant in the Middle Ages by the heavens being
incorruptible." The taller priest nodded his bowed head and
there may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is
utterly unreasonable?"

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