Discipline Priest Healing Stat Priority — Shadowlands 9.1.5

All of our secondary stats are very close in value. Due to the scaling of Intellect on gear as well as the closeness of the secondary stat values, targeting the highest item level possible is almost always the correct play in terms of gearing outside of edge cases. For more in depth discussion about gearing, check out our gearing guide.

For more information on how the information on this page is determined as well as what Enchants and Consumables to use based on the results, take a look at the following two pages.

The stat priority is as follows when deciding between equal item level gear:

1. Intellect;
2. Haste;
3. Critical Strike;
4. Versatility;
5. Mastery.

Intellect is your primary stat. You should look for this stat in all of your upgrades. It provides you with Spell Power, which increases the power of your heals.

Haste reduces the cast time of your spells, reduces the cooldown of Power Word: Solace, reduces your global cooldown and more. Moreover, it increases the amount of attacks your Shadowfiend can make, and the number of ticks from Shadow Word: Pain/ Purge the Wicked.

Critical Strike grants your damaging spells and heals a chance to double their value. That said, it is worth noting that it does not double-dip with regards to Atonement healing (Atonement heals cannot be critical hits; they only heal for the amount of damage that was done, which is the only portion that can be a critical strike).

Mastery ( Mastery: Grace) increases your healing on Atonement targets. Please note that this DOES work with your Atonement healing and not just your direct healing.

Versatility increases all your damage and healing done, and decreases all damage taken.

Leech grants you self-healing based on your outgoing damage and healing events. This free self-sustain can reduce the amount of Mana and global cooldowns you and the other healers have to spend healing you during major damage events, allowing you to focus more on the people that need it. Due to this stat being a tertiary stat instead of a secondary stat, it is not going to be found very often but will remain powerful when it is.

Diminishing returns on secondary stats have been added to the game moving into Shadowlands. This means that once you break a specific threshold for each stat, the amount of rating of that stat required to equal one percent will increase the more you have, meaning you will no longer have reason to stack a single stat to extremes.

In regards to gearing, it is unlikely to have any impact for the first tier of the expansion, due to the overall low stat levels your character will possess. More information will be provided later in the expansion if this becomes more relevant, but for now it can be mostly ignored.