Have I been wrong all this time?

[Verzerrung]

     I started a priest a Priest when Lich King came out and began raid healing after talking to some people about what stats to focus on. So I was told to Focus on Spirit Spell power and Haste, so i stacked those 3. My Spirit is 805, Haste is 454, ans SP is 2085. Then today I asked in trade chat if anyone knew the haste cap and trade blew up with "WTF are you stacking haste?"

     So obviously a little taken aback as to why it was so hated I check a few Ulduar lvl priests out in Dal and even more off armory. Low and Behold none of them were above 250 haste and most of them had more mp5 than spirit with a lot more crit gear.

     Up untill now I was under the impression that Holy priests usually in the raid heal role were to focus on haste so you could react to the situation at the time a bit faster and to focus on spirit since a lot of priest talents build off it. So my question to you guys is...

What am i missing?

[Oneoldfogie]

Personally I don't think that much of haste.

With the change from Naxx to Ulduar I felt that I was lacking a lot of Mp5, and mana. So what I go for is Spirit/Mp5, Intellect and Spellpower over Spirit Spellpower Haste.
I think you would benefit more in almost any situation with more Mana, Mp5 and Spell Power rather than haste.

If that makes any sense.

[Kelesti]

Pick up a bit of haste to not screw yourself when dropping Divine Fury, that's the only reason why it's on my gear really.

[Bob002]

It's a personal preference as far as I'm concerned. I'm personally going spirit in blues, spell power in red, and intellect in yellow. When I feel I'm to an adequate spell power level, I'll start changing things out.

I do not like stacking haste if I can help it; I feel that it costs too much of the iLvl. I just get it from gear. I have almost 300 with 1775 SP.

[Kelesti]

Spell power isn't really something a Holy Priest goes out of their way for, they get alot of it just from Spiritual Guidance and Improved Inner Fire.

Personally, int/spirit in yellow, spirit in blue, and SP/Spirit in red (red's if the socket bonus is worth it). That's usually what makes me last through some of the extensive encounters.

[Mipsy]

unfortunately this is what you get when you allow others to tell you how to gear up. take the initiative and find those answers for yourself next time.

[Danner]

I started a priest a Priest when Lich King came out and began raid healing after talking to some people about what stats to focus on. So I was told to Focus on Spirit Spell power and Haste, so i stacked those 3. My Spirit is 805, Haste is 454, ans SP is 2085. Then today I asked in trade chat if anyone knew the haste cap and trade blew up with "WTF are you stacking haste?"

So obviously a little taken aback as to why it was so hated I check a few Ulduar lvl priests out in Dal and even more off armory. Low and Behold none of them were above 250 haste and most of them had more mp5 than spirit with a lot more crit gear.

Up untill now I was under the impression that Holy priests usually in the raid heal role were to focus on haste so you could react to the situation at the time a bit faster and to focus on spirit since a lot of priest talents build off it. So my question to you guys is...

What am i missing?

Holy is built to be the clinical precision healer, capable of landing the perfect heal for a situation, able to turn it around. Since all our heals are stupidly powerful but also stupidly expensive, this is the way we are supposed to heal.

Unfortunately, reality does not work like that. In a raid, people will simply be taking large amounts of periodic damage all the time. The most important part of a healer is to be able to counter this damage consistently. As such, longevity beats precision. And thus, the most effective way for a holypriest to heal, is pretty much to stack a silly amount of manaregen and hit the health deficiencies in a club-like fashion with our overpowered heals. In short - we need regen more than anything else.

And this is where we have a problem, because the holy specc is very unhelpful in that department. All it offers us is a very large assortment of very large clubs, and all which are too expensive to use, regardless of which gear you select.

So - Welcome to the wonderful world of holypriesting, where no stat is actually useful

--

As Kelesti says, spellpower is probably the least important stat for a holypriest. All your spells will be awesomely strong no matter what you do, and this is mostly due to Spiritual Healing, Spiritual Guidance and the spellpower boost from Inner Fire. You don't really need spellpower beyond what you then naturally get as you upgrade gear.

Crit is a semi-useful stat for the holypriest for two reasons. it procs Surge of Light, which saves you mana. And it procs Holy Concentration, which gives you mana. But apart from saving mana through procs, crit is not a good stat for healers in general - you cannot rely on critical heals to happen, and as such need to heal as if they never happen. There was a big argument between GC and the rest of the priest community over this matter a few months back, let's just say neither party convinced the other.

Haste is a very skewed dual-edged sword. While it obviously makes your casts faster, and getting that heal off 0.02 seconds faster will make all the difference in the world, and there isn't really any top limit to how much of it you can use, haste is a very expensive stat. Because it comes at expense of stats granting you manaregen, and that is pretty much alpha and omega for a holypriest. Some haste is always useful, but you will have to look hard to find many holypriests deliberately stacking haste heavily. We have issues sustaining heavy healing without haste, and with haste it just gets a lot worse since we get less regen. (And also use more mana, but that can be countered by holding back accordingly). Usually holypriests end up between 7-10% haste at current gear levels. Most of this come naturally from gear without much thought.

Leaving stats granting you manaregen. This is the only thing that really matter for a holypriest in my opinion. Others disagree, i'm a bit militaristic in my approach to regen stats

Holypriests are a bit burned by intellect, because our specc offers no stat boosters to the most important regenstat for healers in general. Still, it is the strongest stat for manaregen available if you raid. But we get 15% less out of it than our disc brethren, and that is a notable amount. I use a thumb of rule that 1 int = 0.5 MP5 for holypriests. When raiding. While not raiding, intellect is pretty crappy overall.

MP5 is actually pretty decent these days. What you need to keep in mind is that 1 MP5 costs twice the itemization of 1 int. As such, 1 MP5 is actually worth 0.5 MP5, which is pretty much on par with intellect, but effective everywhere. It is as such hard to claim that MP5 is a bad stat for regen. But it's also boring. Also, keep in mind that intellect will scale better than MP5 due to how the spirit formula works. It's low scaling, but it's there and around T10 level, intellect will be superior.

Spirit is supposed to be the best stat of a holypriest. Until any devs says otherwise, I'll stick to this claim. But the reality is that it isn't. At 1293 intellect, 1 spirit is worth 0.3 MP5, 0.37 MP5 in a raidsetting if you have all buffs and all talents boosting it, and assuming you have holy concentration up 40% of the time (a very generous estimate, mine is around 25% due to having too much haste and too little crit) spirit is worth just below 0.5 MP5. While casting. It is only if you get significant OOFSR time, (which I claim is not likely) that spirit is actually turning into the best regen stat for a priest. Otherwise, it is marginally the worst.

That said, it does scale better than all other regen stats as holy. Which is a very important point if you ever get clad in T10 gear. Until then, I would argue that the order is like this for a hoolypriest. But you can also probably rest assured that blizzard will nerf spirit again before it turns into the best regenstat in the game:

T7 and below: MP5 > int > spirit
T8: MP5 = int > spirit
T9: MP5 = int = spirit
T10 spirit > int > MP5

What ultimately saves spirit is the talent Spiritual Guidance. Most holypriests end up accepting that spirit isn't the best regenstat in the game (despite that being its primary use and despite spending multiple talents improving spirit). But the secondary bonuses - like spellpower - make up for the shortcomings in the primary role. If you stack spirit as a holypriest, you aren't really min/max-ing regen to the limit, but you aren't doing very wrong either as you do get a lot of nifty spellpower.

[Worshaka]

Depends what priests you've been looking at... you will find very few Disc priests interested in Haste due to the ability to abuse Borrowed Time.

If you are definitely talking about holy priests than 250 haste rating isn't anywhere near enough for my liking. Checking randoms in Dalaran is probably not the best way to go about researching your class either.

Firstly I would say that you shouldn't stack any one stat... I don't even like the description of stacking, what you want to do is arrive at a balance of stats that will provide longevity and throughput. There are several theories as to how to min/max that balance, but it's far more grey than DPS... that's because DPS get to measure their role in very black and white numbers, healers don't get the luxury.

Personally I prefer a slight haste bias (when compared to crit), this is mainly due to the fact that i've healed as every class in the game (except shaman) and the haste benefits afforded to Paladins and Druids opened my eyes to the power of lowering both the GCD and your cast times. I find as a holy priest you are often GCD capped more than anything else... basically you want to be able to cast 3 or 4 spells in the space of 1 or 2. For me lowering the GCD is a powerful tool and something that is completely underrated.

Haste is a far superior throughput stat as well... crit while great for burst healing is a poor throughput stat when viewed in the long term. I'm not going to go into mathematics in this post but I have in the past and haste has almost double the effect to HPS than crit does. Crit on the other hand is a nice regen stat and burst healing (particularly for CoH and PoH) can't be underestimated.

SP is also a very good throughput stat, i'm not so sure it's a stat to ignore, more SP is always a good thing and the most used Holy Priest spells are relatively small heal spells, take CoH for example. Making your CoH stronger is rarely going to end up in overhealing... where SP doesn't mean much is to your spells like Gheal and even Flash heal (to some extent), but generally you wan't your CoH, PoH, Renew & PoM to hit as hard as you can get.

Personally, I think a raid buffed crit rate around 30% is pretty decent, if I hit 35% I would really try to stay away and prefer haste. I always try to keep my haste rating around 400 and will go for more if I don't compromise other stats. I try to grab as much SP as possible but I don't prioritise it for gemming and enchanting. Instead I prefer to prioritise Spirit and balance some Int with my enchants... this is because spirit results in regen and SP and Int is a very nice regen stat when you factor in replenishment.

If you get to a stage that you think you find it hard to go oom then I guess you could start looking at putting some crit/haste/sp in it's place. However with the environment as it is I'd argue you could possibly chain cast more and even if a lot of the extra spells you cast result in overhealing it's probably better to ramp up your playstyle/cast rate than customise your gear for more HPS.

[Verzerrung]

Thank you very much Danner and Worshaka, you have been very helpful.

[TwistedPower]

I like enough haste to drop my universal cooldown at least by about .3-4 with raid buffs. Having a 1.1 universal cooldown can realy help when you have to cast multiple spells realy fast in a row, especially for hardmode. Also if i remeber i belive there is a soft haste cap or somthing along those lines. Its somewhere on eleitest jerks where they talk about haste.

[Biernot]

If you need more mana regen:
INT > MP5 > Spirit (> CRIT)

INT gives by far the most regen. If you count all the common raid buffs you have in a 25-man, 1 int ~ 0.8-0.9 mp5 (replenishment, spirit mana reg, hymn of hope, mana tide totem, blessing of kings, shadow fiend, ...). SPIRIT only nets you ~0.4 mp5.

If you need more throughput:
SPELL > HASTE > CRIT (> SPIRIT > INT)

In theory, HASTE gives the most throughput. But in a raid, holy priests benefit more from raw spellpower. The reasons are: most of the time, allover throughput of holy priests is already high enough. What needs improving, is the situational reactive healing (person takes damage, has to be healed as fast as possible). But most spells of a holy priest for such a situation are already instants (CoH, PoM, [imp.,emp.] renew, SoL FH), so haste brings little to that.

So you need to decide, what you need.
socketing for throughput:
YELLOW: haste/spell, RED: spell, BLUE: spirit/spell
socketing for manareg:
YELLOW: int, RED: int/spell, BLUE: spirit/int

For pure manareg, mp5 instead of spirit would be a litte bit better, but as spirit also gives you spellpower through talents, it would be stupid.

META should always be 21int/manaproc, because it is far to good, to be sacrificed for some poor 25spell/2%int or others.