Restoration Shaman Healing Stat Priority — The War Within (11.0.5)

This stat priority will serve you well for general healing:

1. Item Level
2. Versatility = Critical Strike
3. Haste = Mastery

Take note that Mastery gains a lot of value when doing difficult content where players are more likely to drop to low health, such as progression raiding and rated PvP. It can be considered to be almost on par with Versatility and Critical Strike in these types of content.

Also, Haste has more value if you are focused on damage dealing and being a Battle Shaman, for soloing and in Mythic+ keys, and also if you are using non- Chain Heal builds.

The first priority for your gearing should be to use your highest Item Level gear pieces. These come with a lot of Intellect, which scales your spells, and while Intellect is not generally your best stat when comparing 1 point of it to 1 point of the other stats, these gear pieces will also have an overall larger amount of secondary stats than gear with lower item level, more than making up for the presence of a weaker stat, such as Mastery.

Having said that, there will be a few situations where item-level upgrades will not be actual upgrades. Sockets are usually worth a bit more than 5 item levels, Leech on the first 2-3 pieces is worth about 5 item levels, Avoidance is also worth around 5 but only in encounters where you take dangerous area of effect damage.

When healing, you want to use your Mana pool flexibly to counteract deadly damage throughout a long fight. Thus, efficient Mana usage is paramount, and Haste loses a bit of value.

When healing high Mythic+ dungeons, the damage reduction of Versatility is very important, as it allows you to survive things you usually cannot in the highest Mythic keystone dungeons and generally reduces the stress to self-heal during high damage periods.

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 after you hit 30% of a non-Mastery stat.

Mastery starts at 24% effect for Restoration Shamans since our Mastery point to Mastery % conversion value is 3 ( Skyfury grants 6% more Mastery effect to Restoration, for example), bringing the start of diminishing returns to 114% (24% starter + 90% stat soft cap) on the character sheet.

1. Versatility — 780 rating per 1% damage/healing increase / 0.5% damage taken reduction
2. Critical Strike — 700 rating per 1%
3. Haste — 660 rating per 1%
4. Mastery — 233 rating per 1%, starts at 24% with 0 Mastery
5. Leech — 1020 rating per 1%
6. Avoidance — 545 rating per 1%
7. Speed — 250 rating per 1%

Thus, having multiple rings and necklaces in your inventory is an excellent way to reduce the impact of diminishing returns as you get new gear, since you can use them to balance yourself out whenever necessary. These are the rating thresholds for the first tier of diminishing returns on each stat:

• Critical Strike — 21000
• Haste — 19800
• Mastery — 21000
• Versatility — 23400

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.

Versatility is a direct throughput increase that also reduces damage taken. It improves nearly all of your abilities but does not scale as well as Critical Strike for pure throughput. This is balanced by its damage reduction component and better DPS scaling than Critical Strike, making them roughly equal in practice. In PvP, due to its defensive properties, it is generally the best stat in all situations.

Critical Strike increases your throughput and gives a very minor Mana regeneration boost through Resurgence. It is the strongest stat for pure healing throughput, as it scales well and improves nearly all of your healing spells, with the notable exception of going over 100% Critical Strike with a Tidal Waves powered Healing Surge.

Mastery, represented by Mastery: Deep Healing, allows you to heal for more when targeting low-health allies. It starts off at a high value and does not scale well, which tends to make it perform worse as item level rises. Still, it does have good value on difficult content where your allies are likely to be at low health when you heal them, and we recommend valuing it on par with the top stats for progression raiding, high Mythic+, and rated PvP.

Haste lowers the cast time of your spells and the duration of your global cooldown. Haste also causes your healing over time and damage over time effects to tick faster, as well as increasing the tick rate of your healing totems. When Mana is not an issue, Haste is the best throughput stat and is always a great stat for dealing damage due to its great scaling. However, in prolonged fights where you need to stop casting healing spells to conserve Mana, you gain more from having more powerful spells, as you cannot make full use of your Haste as is.

Leech allows you to passively self-heal for a percentage of the healing or damage of each spell you cast. Due to 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 or dying against extreme damage abilities in very high keystones. The damage it prevents is also very helpful in a raid setting.

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.