How does +spell power work?

I’m having some confusion with Classic gear- I got a few pieces of gear that have stats like “+31 healing spells” or “Increases damage and healing done by spells and effects by up to 21” and can’t find any resources online as to how these work.

Would “+31 healing spells” be considered +31 to INT for healing spells or is it +31 HP on a single heal?

Same for “Increases damage and healing done by spells and effects by up to 21”. If I have a staff that is +10 and “Increases damage and healing done by spells and effects by up to 21” Is it better than a staff that has +32 INT for instance. Are these bonuses better or raw INT better? so confusing…

It increases the healing/damage value of the spell. For longer cast and damage/healing over time spells, it provides the full bonus, and for shorter cast and instant cast spells it only provides a partial bonus.

Whether you want more int for more mana or more damage/healing for more mana efficient spells is one of the decisions you’ll have to make for your gear.

Spell power just increases the damage or healing of the spell.

However, it’s not quite that simple. Each spell has a coefficient. Short spells benefit less while spells with long cast times (or dots/hots with long durations) gain more benefit per cast. Otherwise spells with shorter cast times would become more and more desirable compared with spells that have longer cast times.

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You are confused because to my understanding retail has really changed how WoW stats work compared to how they used to. In modern retail wow my understanding is you have “main stats” like int that you stack for many purposes, but in classic int solely increases your maximum mana, and only very minutely increases your spell critical strike chance. Spellpower/ +healing/+specific spell damage items apply in the case of spellpower to every spell school, in the case of healing only to healing spells, in the case of shadow damage only to shadow spells. Shadow damage spells don’t uniformly get empowered at a 1 to 1 ratio for spell damage/shadow damage. For example shadow bolt has like a .8 or so ratio, so for every one spell or shadow damage you get the shadow bolts damage goes up by .8. Long story short: if you are playing a warlock in classic int isn’t that useful to you since it does not increase your damage very much at all (it’s a really really small crit chance for each int), and you don’t really need max mana very much due to having life tap. Phone posting so excuse my spacing.

IF I am not mistaken.

You spells says X damage, then you add your modifiers, etc.

(plus) adds to you base, as in, to your X

again…IF lol

You don’t get 100% SP for every spell. It depends on cast time, and whether it’s direct, or duration. Direct only receives full if the cast time is 3.5 or longer. Anything below this, and you’re getting less. 3s is 85%. The bottom is 20%, which is for instants and 1.5 or faster. You can find a chart to show every value.

Duration effects like pain or renew are 100%. This is because they are spread out over the duration and cannot crit.

I’ll give an example of how Spellpower works. These arent the actual numbers, they’re just examples.

Lets say you have 100 spellpower. You have two spells, Fireball and Renew. Fireball has a 150% spellpower ratio, and Renew has a 50% ratio.

Fireball’s base damage is 100, and Renew’s base healing is 100. With a 150% SP ratio, and with 100 spellpower, Fireball will do 100 base damage + 150 bonus damage from spellpower for a total of 250 damage. Renew heals for 100 health + 50 additional health from the 50% spellpower ratio for a total of 150 healing.

Intellect does not increase spell damage in Classic. Intellect only increases your maximum mana pool and gives a small increase to spell critical hit chance for non-DoT and non-HoT spells. So if you have a base crit chance of 5%, stacking Intellect might get your spell crit chance up to 7%. Spellpower has no effect on critical hit chance, only on the actual damage of the spell.

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Spell power is very good on dot classes like shadow priest and warlock (shadow weave being a nice mid tier upgrade while leveling because of this). Other classes also benefit for instance I play mage and since I spend 99.9% of the time casting frost bolt the added damage helps greatly. The ratio I believe from study is 1 intellect is 2 spell power in terms of damage/utility weights since intellect provides theoretical damage which is ok on mage specifically because of shatter crit procs being very frequent. So when judging an item as mage I try to take minimal intellect lose (crits and mana) in exchange for spell power… I figure their usefulness is pretty much equal in a questing situation, while intellect is more valuable for AoE Grinding since blizzard benefits from mana rather than spell power

It is my understanding, from a reddit post, that the value of Intellect to Spell Power is roughly equal at 2.2 INT for +1 Spell Power.

Can anyone confirm this? Does it vary per class?

That’s not a thing in Canilla/Classic.

The only thing Int gives besides mana is spell crit, which does vary from class to class.

For raiding warlocks, most people value 1 SP equivalent to 4-5 int for dps purposes. This is why green shadow wrath gear is pre-raid bis in several slots.

That seems to value Int too highly. Remember, you need ~60 Int to even get 1% additional crit. It’s very underpowered relative to spellpower.