Chapter 2 Advanced Routing for FortiOS 5.0 : Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) : Troubleshooting OSPF : DR and BDR election issues
  
DR and BDR election issues
You can force a particular router to become the DR and BDR by setting their priorities higher than any other OSPF routers in the area. This is a good idea when those routers have more resources to handle the traffic and extra work of the DR and BDR roles, since not all routers may be able to handle all that traffic.
However, if you set all the other routers to not have a chance at being elected, a priority of zero, you can run into problems if the DR and BDR go offline. The good part is that you will have some warning generally as the DR goes offline and the BDR is promoted to the DR position. But if the network segment with both the DR and BDR goes down, your network will have no way to send hello packets, send updates, or the other tasks the DR performs.
The solution to this is to always allow routers to have a chance at being promoted, even if you set their priority to one. In that case they would be the last choice, but if there are no other candidates you want that router to become the DR. Most networks would have already alerted you to the equipment problems, so this would be a temporary measure to keep the network traffic moving until you can find and fix the problem to get the real DR back online.