Holy Priest Healing Stat Priority — The War Within (11.1.5)

When raiding, you want to use your Mana pool flexibly to counteract deadly damage throughout a long fight. Thus, efficient Mana usage is of paramount importance.

1. Intellect
2. Critical Strike = Mastery
3. Versatility >= Haste

When healing dungeons, you want to maximize your throughput in short fights. Since you can drink quite often, raw throughput stats are important. Damage-reducing stats also gain in importance as they allow you to survive things you usually cannot in the highest Mythic keystone dungeons.

1. Intellect
2. Critical Strike = Haste
3. Versatility
4. Mastery

While we provide stat preference lists, swapping gear to higher item level items — and their higher Intellect/total stats — should usually provide a larger upgrade than using lower item level items with better stats. The exception to this rule are items with important tertiary stats, Leech, and Avoidance, all of which should still be used ahead of other items without them unless the difference in item level is around 6 or above.

Leech allows you to passively self-heal for a percentage of the healing/damage of each spell you cast. Due to its great scaling and the prevalence of enemy mechanics that hurt everyone in the group, it ends up doing a lot of free healing that would, otherwise, need to be covered by Mana from yourself or the other healers in your group.

Avoidance's exact power depends on the encounter mechanics, but is often the decider on living/dying against extreme damage abilities in very high keystones. The damage it prevents is also very helpful in a raid setting.

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.

Mastery ( Mastery: Echo of Light) causes each one of your direct heals to place a HoT on the target, healing for a percentage of the initial heal over 4 seconds. Successive applications of this HoT stack.

Critical Strike doubles the effects of your heals, which also benefits your Mastery.

Haste lowers the cast time of your heals, as well as your global cooldown. It also reduces the cooldown of Prayer of Mending, as well as increasing the healing of Renew (by granting additional ticks).

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

Speed slightly increases the speed at which your character moves. This can be useful when trying to dodge encounter mechanics or when repositioning with your group, but is not as noticeable as other stats.

In order to get 1% benefit from each stat, you need different amounts of stat rating. This means some stats naturally scale better than others, even before diminishing returns kick in from having too much of a certain stat relative to others.

1. Critical Strike - 700 rating per 1%
2. Versatility - 780 rating per 1% damage/healing increase / 0.5% damage taken reduction
3. Mastery - 732 rating per 1%
4. Haste - 660 rating per 1%
5. Leech - 1020 rating per 1%
6. Avoidance - 544 rating per 1%
7. Speed - 162.5 rating per 1%