Before you can start kitting out your character you’ll need to know what your stat priority is so you can select the appropriate gear, gems, enchants, and consumables. Discipline Priests don’t have any significant stat caps to aim for and instead must choose whether to focus on Haste or Mastery for their throughput.
Stat Priority
- Intellect
- Spirit
- Haste
- Mastery
- Critical Strike
Intellect is your primary stat and will always be the most important stat for a Discipline Priest as the main source of your Spell Power and mana pool. Intellect also increases your Critical Strike.
Spirit is the primary mana regeneration stat for all healers in Cataclysm, with MP5 being removed. The amount of Spirit you need comes down to how comfortable you feel with your mana pool. Once you get to the point where you are not burning through your mana on a typical fight, you may want to consider dropping some Spirit in favor of throughput stats.
Haste is the most valuable throughput stat for Discipline Priests since they are so reliant on cast-time heals. Haste will also increase the number of ticks you get out of Renew, Divine Hymn, and Hymn of Hope over their duration. 12.52% Haste will get you the first extra tick and 37.52% will get you a second. Those breakpoints are just a bonus though, and most Discipline Priests will want to stack Haste regardless of those caps. The downside of prioritizing Haste is that it only increases your throughput by speeding up the timeline of your spells and not by adding anything to them, so you’ll be healing more but also spending your mana faster.
Mastery is almost as valuable as Haste and can even pull ahead when you’re healing steady incoming damage, including tank healing. Each point of Mastery improves your Shield Discipline, allowing all of your absorption effects to soak up more damage. Compared to Haste, Mastery offers a direct increase to your output without requiring you to spend more mana, so it can be a better stat to stack at low gear levels or if you’re otherwise concerned about your mana pool. A balance of the two stats is ideal and will cover all your bases.
Critical Strike is not a bad stat, but it’s just not as useful as the others. You’ll generally want to replace it or Reforge it to something better. If there are no better options it’s still an increase to your healing output and also causes your single-target heals to proc Divine Aegis more often.
Reforging
Reforging is a new feature in Cataclysm that allows you to trade out part of one secondary stat for another on any piece of gear. You won’t be able to get Intellect this way (or get rid of another stat like Agility or Stamina), but you can fine-tune your secondary stats to your heart’s content.
Discipline Priests will want to Reforge any Critical Strike on their gear to a more useful stat. Once you are comfortable with your mana, you can even start to Reforge some of your Spirit to Haste or Mastery.
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