Holy Priest Healing Stat Priority — Dragonflight 10.0.7

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. Mastery = Critical Strike
3. Versatility
4. 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, which should still be used ahead of other items without them unless the difference in item level is around 15 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 6 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 Circle of Healing and 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 - 180 rating per 1%
2. Versatility - 205 rating per 1% damage/healing increase / 0.5% damage taken reduction
3. Mastery - 160 rating per 1%
4. Haste - 170 rating per 1%
5. Leech - 110 rating per 1%
6. Avoidance - 72 rating per 1%
7. Speed - 50 rating per 1%

From Patch 9.1 onward, we are starting to obtain enough gear that Diminishing Returns (DR) on secondary stats will start to kick in for most people. What this means is that when you obtain a large amount of one secondary stat, through gear and trinket procs, you no longer gain full value for all of it.

Keeping a variety of rings and necklaces is a really good way to try and reduce the impact that diminishing returns will have on you as you obtain gear upgrades. You can swap your rings around to easily change a large amount of secondary stat (and the gem/enchant as well) to help avoid losing too many secondary stats to DR.

Below is when DR begins to kick in for each stat:

• Critical Strike — 5400
• Haste — 5100
• Mastery — 5400
• Versatility — 6150

You can read more detail about how secondary stat diminishing returns for Holy Priest works here.