Hi all,
I’m a bit confused with what I’ve been reading on places like WoWHead and Icy Veins.
Stat priority for 10.1 resto druid healing in raiding is apparently:
- ILevel
- Haste
- Mastery
- Vers & Crit
The disconnect I see is that most gear from Aberrus (and the ones in the BiS list on WoWHead) tend to offer more critical strike & versatility than mastery. I have a decent amount of the BiS list for resto druid and my current stat percentage is:
Critical Strike 20%
Haste 26%
Mastery 10%
Versatility 16%
Would love to hear thoughts. Thanks friends!
The best stat list is disconnected from the stats on items that are available to drop/come from vault. The stat priority is basically a statement that, if all else is equal, these are the stats that will allow you to perform best. But in practice while you may prefer haste and mastery, there will be a lot of situations where two items you’re considering will only have one or neither stat. Everyone will wind up with a variety of stats as a result, but when you can choose to follow the ideal resto druid stats, you should.
With how the stats are, you’re pretty much going to do well with any mix.
Haste should be your top priority in all cases if you can manage it.
Verse/Mastery are pretty equal
Haste is our best stat until you have “enough”, after which it becomes our worst stat. Unfortunately the only person who can determine how much is “enough”, is you. If you are running out of mana, you probably have too much haste (or poor spell selection).
You can think of Vers and Crit to be mostly interchangeable. Crit is typically a bad stat for healers due to it’s unpredictable nature, but it’s not as bad for Resto Druids because each individual HoT tick has it’s own chance to crit, which tends to even out the odds and turn it into more of a flat power boost. Of course, there is still the initial burst heal from Regrowth, the burst heal from Swiftmend, the burst at the end of Lifebloom, etc, that still suffer from Crit’s unpredictable nature, but it is what it is. Vers also benefits us in that it prevents incoming damage, and helps buff our damage output (if you care about that). So if you absolutely have to choose between the two, I’d lean toward Vers.
Mastery has the most potential due to the fact that it stacks. You can really cheese it, if you have a lot of mastery, and you are able to maintain a fairly high number of HoTs per person. Great for smaller groups, less great for larger groups. It’s always great for tank healing, since you should always be able to maintain multiple HoTs on the tank regardless of group size.
In general, Mastery is always better than Vers/Crit, unless you find yourself rarely if ever able to get more than one HoT per person out on the raid. If your healing style is to literally just put one Rejuv on each person, then you might as well just go with Vers/Crit…
Thank you for the replies, everybody!
this is all very helpful. I appreciate it 