Timeless Azeroth

Gear & Stats

Holy Priest gearing in early TBC is primarily about reaching strong Bonus Healing while maintaining enough regeneration to stay aggressive with Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing usage. As haste becomes more available in later phases, it becomes one of your strongest throughput multipliers, but early gearing will often prioritize raw healing and sustain first.

Holy Pre-Bis

Holy PvE BiS Phase 1

Stat Priority

Stat weights for healers shift based on assignment, fight length, consumables, and raid composition. Treat the list below as a guideline rather than a rigid rule. General priority: Spell Haste (later phases) > Bonus Healing > Spell Critical Strike > Spirit > Intellect > MP5 > Stamina. In early Phase 1, haste is scarce, so you will often gear primarily for Bonus Healing and regeneration. Once haste becomes more common on items, it rapidly climbs toward the top because it reduces cast times and can lower your global cooldown when you are GCD-limited.

Stats Explained

Spell Haste Rating

Haste increases throughput by reducing cast times and lowering the global cooldown for instant casts. This matters most when you are GCD-limited, which becomes increasingly common with a Circle of Healing-focused spell profile. Haste also increases mana consumption because you spend more casts and GCDs over time, so its value rises the most when your sustain is already stable.

Bonus Healing

Bonus Healing is the most reliable early gearing lever because it directly increases the impact of nearly every heal in your kit. A strong early benchmark is roughly 2,000 Bonus Healing before heavily prioritizing secondary throughput stats. More healing per cast also reduces the number of spells required to stabilize damage, indirectly improving efficiency.

Spell Critical Strike

Critical heals increase output by 50% compared to non-crits and improve Inspiration uptime when you are casting single-target heals. Crit is often limited on early gear, but it becomes a meaningful throughput stat later, especially with Circle of Healing usage. Some overhealing is inevitable, but crit still has value by compressing healing into fewer casts during spiky damage.

Spirit

Spirit is a core sustain stat for Holy Priests and also increases healing through Spiritual Guidance. With Meditation, a portion of spirit-based regeneration continues while casting, which is why Spirit is generally preferred over MP5 when other item stats are comparable. Spirit also becomes more valuable as Intellect rises due to the TBC regeneration formula.

Intellect

Intellect increases maximum mana, contributes to spell crit, and improves spirit-based regeneration via the TBC regeneration formula. In practice, Intellect and Spirit scale together: higher Intellect increases the return you get from Spirit, which is why balanced sustain itemization remains strong throughout progression.

MP5

MP5 provides fixed regeneration regardless of the five-second rule and is strongest when you are forced into continuous casting. It typically ranks below Spirit because Spirit contributes to both sustain and healing, but MP5 remains valuable on long encounters and in early gearing if you frequently struggle to maintain aggressive healing.

Stamina

Stamina is not a throughput stat, but it matters more for Priests than most healers due to low base health and cloth armor. In early phases, especially while wearing Primal Mooncloth, stamina can be noticeably low. Do not hesitate to make small survivability concessions or use item swaps on encounters with frequent random-target damage.