WoW Journal - 16-August-2006

I just realized how little the character stats matter for a priest. My Alliance priest is level 52 now, and was doing the Blasted Lands quests where you hand in various monster parts for a +25 buff to one of your stats. But you can only have one of those buffs up, so you need to think a bit when and in what order you hand in the quests. So what +25 stat buff would I want to have on my priest to help me soloing faster? The surprising answer was: none of them.

I already explained several times my solo combat tactics. I pull with spells, raise my bubble shield, and finish the mob with my wand (during which time I regenerate mana). So the first two stats are quickly eliminated from the competition: Neither strength nor agility adds anything to the damage of spells or wands, they only increase the damage output of melee weapons, bows, and guns. So while warriors, hunters, or rogues would be highly interested in strength and/or agility, for a priest these stats do absolutely nothing.

Next on the list are stamina and intelligence. These two stats increase your health and mana pool, respectively. But curiously the size of my health and mana pool doesn't play any role in my chosen tactic. My health is always above 90%, my shield is nearly always up, and when it breaks, I stop shooting and recast it, giving the mob only one or two hits on me. Whether I have 1000, 2000, or 3000 health doesn't matter at all here. And the same is true for my mana pool. As I regenerate mana during combat, I never completely deplete my mana pool when soloing, and the size of my mana pool has very little relevance. Only if I need to kill a mob fast (usually a caster with a large damage output, which I need to kill fast with spells) or when I get adds and can't regenerate much during combat do I use all of my mana. But in standard soloing combat I can fight for hours without my mana ever dropping below half. Note that this is only true for soloing, in groups, and especially in raids, combats are often a lot longer, and as priest your role is that of a pure healer, so you can't regenerate mana while shooting your wand. So in a group the size of your mana pool becomes extremely important, because if you run out, it could mean a wipe. All of my gear has some intelligence stat bonus, for that reason. Intelligence *does* increase my spell damage slightly, by improving my spell crit chance, but +25 int only increase my crit chance by +0.25%, so the effect is tiny.

The only stat that has any influence at all on my soloing priest is spirit. Spirit determines how much mana I regenerate. Unless you have specific talents, you don't regenerate any many while spellcasting, and in the 5 seconds after your last spell. When idle, a priest regenerates 12.5 mana plus Spirit/4 per tick, with a tick being 2 seconds. So +25 spirit just adds 3 mana per second to my mana regeneration rate. That helps to reduce downtime, but the effect isn't huge.

Secondary stats like armor, attack power, or defence also play no role for a priest. Although I'm not quite sure whether armor protection is applied before or after damage absorption by the power word : shield, if it is before, the armor would make my bubble last longer. But cloth never has high armor values, my armor damage reduction is around 15%.

Of course other classes depend much more on stats, especially melee fighters. The equipment of the main tank has a significant impact on the success of a whole raid. As a priest you can afford to be a lot more relaxed about epic loot distribution. Epics are nice, but when I put my 175 fire resistance gear on, which consists mainly of green and blue items, I'm still not gimping myself all that much.

Good summary of the effect of the different stats is found at WoWWoW.de and on WoWWiki.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link