Mists of Pandaria Classic Balance Druid Stat Priority

The stat priority for Balance Druid is as follows:

1. Intellect
2. Hit, Spirit, or Expertise (15% Hit Cap)
3. Haste to 1-second GCD softcap (10296 Rating)
4. Critical Strike
5. Haste past 10296 Rating
6. Mastery

Intellect is the primary stat for all casters and increases the magnitude of your spells and also grants a small amount of Critical Strike, making it the best stat for scaling your damage.

Your Intellect will also get further increased by raid buffs such as Blessing of Kings, making it the stat to stack above all others. You will get more of it on higher item level gear naturally, making it an easy stat to stack.

Your second priority will be to reach the Spell Hit cap of 15%, which can be obtained through the Hit Rating stat, with Expertise in Mists of Pandaria, or with Spirit thanks to the Balance of Power passive. Reaching the Spell Hit cap ensures that your spells can no longer miss your target, giving you the highest possible DPS increase out of any secondary stat.

Haste is a great stat for Balance as it allows you to hit Eclipse states more quickly and also adds additional damage ticks to all of your damage over time (DoT) effects, increasing their value substantially. The main goal with Haste rating is to hit the 1-second global cooldown soft cap of 10296 Haste Rating (or 3101 Haste Rating at level 85 in the pre-patch) as that is a major damage increase, but further Haste increases are less effective as they no longer affect most of your spells.

Critical Strike has synergy with the Shooting Stars passive and allows your spells to critically strike for 200% damage. The main problem with Critical Strike Rating is that you need a lot of Rating to get 1% more chance to land critical strikes, which lowers its value.

Balance Mastery is Mastery: Total Eclipse, which increases the bonus damage awarded by being inside an Eclipse. It is the worst secondary stat due to the lack of synergy with the rest of the kit and thus relatively poor scaling.