PvE Restoration Shaman Stat Priority & Reforging

Restoration stats are going to be a careful balancing act as you have Haste thresholds to consider, Spirit for mana regeneration, and yet Intellect is still vitally important to make each heal impactful.

Stat Priority

1. Spirit (Up to when your mana regeneration personally feels good)
2. Intellect
3. Haste (12.5% to start)
4. Critical Strike
5. Mastery
6. Spirit (When over your desired amount)
7. Haste (When over your desired Haste threshold)

Spirit is going to provide mp5 (Mana regenerated per 5 seconds). Extremely straightforward stat in what it does, but very difficult to figure out exactly how much you’re going to want. In the end it’s going to be up to the type of content you’re tackling, and your personal comfort with how your mana pool holds up during said content. To min-max you generally don’t want too much Spirit as it takes up real estate from stats that will boost your heal efficiency or power, but you want enough that you won’t run OOM (Out-of-Mana) until the last second of an encounter. Early on this will be a primary focus as stats on gear are lower, and your heals are less powerful. It should be noted that this stat does scale the power of your Mana Tide Totem.

Intellect is your primary stat and is going to contribute to Spell Power and a small bonus to Critical Strike Chance. This is going to scale your heals to hit harder, including your HoTs (Heal-over-Time). Since this is a primary stat it cannot be reforged, so make sure to prioritize any buffs, enchants, gems, etc that give us more.

Haste is going to be complicated for Restoration. I’ll have a section below going over exactly what the thresholds are, how they’ll impact your heals, and more. This stat will reduce the cast time of your heals, at higher levels reduce the time of the GCD (Global cooldown), and at certain points increase the amount of ticks from HoTs and DoTs. You’ll want to hit your desired threshold in this stat and then get no more. Pumping out heals faster sounds nice, but can quickly drain your mana pool when you need two fast heals to do the same amount of healing as one strong heal. For the first strong threshold that is recommended to hit for Haste you’ll want 12.5% Haste on your character sheet.

Critical Strike increases your chance to get a critical strike with your heals or damage. Due to our passive, Resurgence, this stat is actually pretty valuable. It’ll double the effectiveness of your heals, including your HoTs potentially, and give you mana back. It’s definitely worth investing in crit where you can once you’ve reached your other stat goals.

Mastery is going to increase our heals by a percentage on low-health targets through our passive: Mastery: Deep Healing. No stat is “bad” for Restoration Shamans, but this isn’t going to be a high priority for us in this expansion.

Haste Thresholds

Haste will always have the benefit of decreasing your casting time, but there are certain percentage thresholds you’ll want to aim for to receive benefits such as an extra healing tick from Riptide, Healing Rain, Earthliving, Healing Stream Totem, and Healing Tide Totem. Getting bonuses for each of these is going to be at a different Haste %. As said above, if you want to keep things simple, especially when starting out, you’ll want to aim for 12.5% Haste.

First, there are a few passives that are going to affect these Haste thresholds that you should keep in mind if you have them active:

• Ancestral Swiftness (Tier 4 talent)
• Time is Money (Goblin Racial Passive)
• +5% flat Haste from general raid buffs

I’m going to keep things simple and talk about the flat Haste % you’ll see on your character sheet, rather than the Haste rating which you’d see on gear and contributes to your Haste %. Below is a table going over the caps:

These Haste thresholds keep going past what I’ve listed, but it’s basically impossible to consistently hit those from gear alone and you’d need to stack temporary haste abilities like Heroism/Bloodlust. The only healing ability that you should keep in mind when looking at the much higher thresholds would be Healing Tide Totem, since it’s a high-impact raid cooldown with considerable downtime, where each extra tick is a massive increase to throughput. For instance, you gain +3 ticks to Healing Tide Totem at 60.06% Haste. So if you took something like Elemental Mastery (Tier 4 talent), you could conceivably pair that with other Haste buffs and macro it with Healing Tide Totem to squeeze out extra ticks you couldn’t normally get otherwise.

Reforging

Reforging is going to be a crucial tool to manage our Spirit and Haste to have our mana generation meet the demand while also hitting the specific Haste threshold you’re looking to accomplish. You can only reforge secondary stats, so no Intellect or Stamina. You can also only reforge one stat into a stat that is not present on the piece of gear.

Stats to prioritize reforging into other stats:

1. Haste (When over the threshold you’re aiming for)
2. Mastery
3. Spirit (When over the amount you need)
4. Critical Strike

When choosing which stats to reforge the worse stats into, make sure to keep the priority list in the first section in mind. To start you’re going to be looking at Spirit > Haste (12.5%) >> Critical Strike >> Mastery.