MP5 and HP5: the Most Useless or Underrated Stats in WoW Classic?

MP5 and HP5 are the Worst

This is definitely a bit of a divisive topic. People (casters especially) scoff at the thought of MP5. As long as you have enough mana to burn max rank of your spell for the whole fight, MP5 is useless! And they aren’t wrong. If you have the mana to not have to downrank spells for a given fight, then mana regeneration stats are indeed useless. Or at least for that snapshot it is true. HP5 is literally treated like the red headed stepchild of everyone’s stat allocations.

Itemization Rarity Purposeful?

It doesn’t help that these stats were almost unheard of on gear before the Dire Maul patch and even still you are hard pressed to find anything with HP5. They are stats that aren’t suited to stacking – and that was very possibly purposeful. These stats are odd and break the cardinal rules of resource management: you don’t gain back health in combat and you don’t gain back mana when casting.

Imagine if you geared your character with hypothetical gear that was purely MP5 or HP5. And imagine that it was itemized in a way where you don’t get a measly 5 or 8 per that you normally find. Imagine this or this in every slot. Useless? Hardly. You are potentially unkillable or have infinite mana.

This is Peak Performance, You Just Don’t Want to Admit It

This was actually the theory I had as an aspiring Priest back in Vanilla before we had the optimization figured out. Screw +healing. What if I could get so much MP5 that I could just heal max rank whatever constantly instead. If you look at the options it is quite easy to see that you could get 100 or more MP5. At that point it really starts to add up. Over the course of a minute that is 1,200 mana! The problem of course is to get that itemization requires removing a lot of comparable +healing. Bummer. I think Blizzard knew how it could be used like this and so I think this is why these stats are hard to stack in bulk.

Not Stackable, so Actually Useless, Right?

The problem with these stats is they are very time dependent. You take the graph to infinity and the stat gives you infinite mana or health. Intellect gives 15 mana. Stamina gives you 10. Deal with it cause that’s all you will ever get. But MP5 and HP5 just keep ticking and ticking and ticking. In the short term? Yeah they are pretty garbage. 1 MP5 in one minute gives you 12 mana. It takes 75 seconds for 1 MP5 to equal 1 int for just the mana component, not to mention crit. And that doesn’t even factor in Blessing of Kings or Spirit of Zandalar. Worst case scenario it takes just under 95 seconds for 1 MP5 to be the same mana as 1 int. There’s only a handful of fights throughout Classic where the fight lasts longer than that.

I can tell you are lining up right now to focus on int instead of MP5. And for most of you it’s probably the right plan. Tanks already completely ignore HP5 so there’s not much to say. For 99% of the time I would generally agree. MP5 and definitely HP5 in how it’s itemized is done so in a way that only roughly benefits the class. In the same way that crit for healers (except Paladins) don’t really matter that much because it’s not dependable, MP5 is a nice stat to have but not the bread and butter that you focus on. So why even continue to talk about it? Well the thing that is interesting about it is that infinite scalability like I mentioned.

MP5 and HP5 for the Extremely Hardcore?

I’m not saying that this is the way people need to gear if they are trying to push the envelope but it might be interesting to investigate. The guilds that are speed running content do it in such a way that they don’t stop to drink, eat, or do anything. It is a chain pull from start to finish. Casters rely on using mana pots to keep outputting maximum DPS and heals. If you truly don’t have time to drink except for maybe one tick here or another there, then it begs the question: what is the fight length? I would think it very well might be the entire raid, not just each encounter as other guilds would see it.

So if you are now looking at, not 30 one minute fights but one 30 minute fight, the value of MP5 and HP5 just skyrocketed. These are the slow tick batteries that are the lifeblood of the situation these guilds face. The issue is the same as before with my early Priest days – the itemization of these items is junk and hard to stack the way you want. But is it possible? Can you make it worth it? I’m not sure but I’m curious to see if some guilds might want to look into this.

The analysis of this would be to look at the complete picture of resources per player. How much mana do you have, how much can you gain from sipping the water here or there, how much do you get from MP5, and most importantly how much can you get from your dark-rune and major-mana-potion. Start to think of consumables as buffs that take a consumable slot and the picture is more clear. On average a dark-rune gives you 1200 mana while a major-mana-potion gives you 1800 mana. Both have a 2 minute cooldown. Translate those to MP5 and they are the equivalent of 50 MP5 and 75 MP5 respectively. Not as high as maybe you would have thought? That sure puts the Paladin Blessing of Wisdom with 33 untalented MP5 into perspective doesn’t it?

Maybe Not so Horrible

In fact there is a lot of gear that maybe is getting sneered at a little more than it should. Take robe-of-the-archmage for example. Sure it’s BIS but people are so eager to upgrade from it and ignore the mana on use.

The mana gained from that you can translate to being the equivalent of 8.3 MP5! I know Mages don’t usually care about MP5 but that’s not a small amount of MP5 when analyzing what the value of the gear actually is.

The bottom line as with everything is look at your raid situation, gear, and guild style and see what fits you best. On paper MP5 and HP5 are pretty underwhelming but they have their upsides when it comes to looking at longer fights. While you may be normally where you still don’t run out of mana, if you do face that issue, look at these stats with a bit of a fresh perspective and hopefully it will help your optimization in your raid.