Priest sov & DD counter

i may be all wet on this, but is there anything special about the priest that inherently slows the DD counter? Played every sov mostly on hard/fast,  all playd about the same wrt the DD count except the priest.  With the priest it has always been very slow to rise even when i go out of my way to piss the SK off.  I assume there is some degree of luck/randomness involved but i have played enough to put that aside.  Something strange seems to be going on.  Just finished 2 games on the same map never had to use reduce DD once with priest and finished with like 100DD, other sov i i had to cast it 6-10 times and finished with DD around 250