- Author: Kurathis
- Date: June 10, 2021
- Updated: June 10, 2021
- Expansion: TBC Classic
One of the most important things to remember for healers of any class, is to always consider the length of each fight when you are prioritizing your stats. The reason behind this is if, for example, we look at a fight that doesn’t last more than 2-3 minutes, MP5 will not be as important as it would be on fight that exceeds that time. There are various factors that play a role in each fight’s duration such as gearing, group composition, along with overall knowledge of the encounter, and because of this, below you will find a standardized priority list, while below that, you will find descriptions for each stat outlining why they are important so that you can adjust your own list if necessary.
- Plus Healing
- Mana-Per-5-Seconds (MP5)
- Intellect
- Spell Haste
- Spell Critical Strike
- Stamina
- Spirit
As you can imagine, Plus Healing increases the amount your healing spells actually heal for. With Purification increasing the effectiveness of our healing spells by 10%, and Improved Chain Heal increasing its respective healing by 20%, it only increases the importance of Plus Healing. With these combined, it’s reported that your Chain Heal will heal for an additional 1.65 per 1 point of plus healing.
Each point of MP5 you have, increases your mana regeneration by 1. So, if you had 10 MP5, you’d be restoring 10 mana every 5 seconds. Unlike Spirit and its respective mana regeneration, MP5 regeneration occurs during combat. MP5 also regenerates every 2 seconds, rather than 5. So, if you had 10 MP5, you would be regenerating 4 mana every 2 seconds.
With Nature’s Blessing, our intellect provides increased spell damage and healing by an amount 30% of our intellect. Intellect also provides players the opportunity to use their spells and thus the more you have, the more spells, in this case heals, you can cast before running out of mana.
Spell Haste increases the rate of which we can cast our spells and it also decreases the Global Cooldown (GCD) – it should be noted that the GCD cannot be reduced lower than 1 second. While Spell Haste does become more common on gear in later phases, there are still some such as Scarab of the Infinite Cycle available in Phase 1.
Spell Critical Strike increases the amount healed by 150%. So, if you normally heal for 1,000, and landed a critical heal, it would heal for 1,500. This does create opportunity for you to experience overhealing, especially using a bigger heal, such as Healing Wave. Overhealing can be considered wasted heals.
Stamina is always a stat to keep in mind, regardless of class or role, since there are plenty of encounters in the game that will damage the entire party, and you want to live through that so that you can continue healing. Of course, unfortunately, there’s also the reality of tanks losing aggro if you decide to heal AND DPS, and this allows you a better chance of survival.
Realistically, Spirit isn’t one of the more important stats for Shamans, since it either requires you to be out of combat to active regeneration rates, or to stop casting for five seconds to then start regenerating mana. Because of our need to constantly be casting heals (more specifically, down-ranked spells) we won’t be benefiting from Spirit solely because of the five-second rule.
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