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Raid Rx: Cataclysmic stat changes for healers


Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. Welcome to the special Blizzcon edition! I was on the floor listening into the first set of changes being announced and I managed to catch all the healing changes. Here's what we got!

Whew! What an exciting day at the convention for healers! This is just day one! Okay, let's break down all the major changes that will be affecting healers.


Removal of spellpower


In Burning Crusade, they unified healing and spell damage into a single stat: Spellpower. Now they're taking it a step further and completely nuking it altogether. The spellpower stat is being removed completely so that casters and healers won't have to worry about it.

Instead, to account for the increase of spellpower, the stat that controls this now is going to be intellect. As always, intellect will continue to account for the size of a player's mana pool.

Removal of MP5

Shamans and Paladins have been screaming to the heavens to get this useless stat out of the game. Your prayers have been answered. MP5 will be removed from the game. So how is mana regen going to be calculated?

We're going back to spirit on gear! Yes, you read correctly. Shamans and Paladins will be receiving gear that will contain spirit. This primarily controls the regen rate.

Meditation across the board

Not only that, just about all healing classes will be receiving a Meditation like ability in their talent tree. I suspect we healers are going to require speccing into this talent at some point in order to maintain optimum rates of regeneration.

So why not make it a baseline again? I guess it would be too overpowered for the other specs or such.

Tougher healers

Not exactly anything to do with our casting, but stamina is being universalized among all the classes. Supposedly, our health is going to increase even more and match the health levels of other armor wearers and classes. It might be possible for a healer to edge out a tank on health.

I do like this change. Sometimes a boss has an area of effect that does X damage. If a tank eats it, its no problem. If a clothie eats it, it can result in an instant death. At least this way, we still have some chance to survive a direct hit or two.

On the other hand, I understand that mitigation changes have entered play and are different than what they are right now. I don't think caster gear is going to have any type of mitigation levels on it which means we could still get one or two shot.

Haste increases resource regeneration

If I read this correctly, spirit affects the rate at which you regenerate mana per tick. I think haste accelerates the actual rate of ticks that go off. Without any numbers or anything, it's going to be difficult to tell if stacking haste or spirit is going to be the way to go for mana regen. Who knows? Maybe you need both.

Lastly, who knows what else the Archaeology and the Path of the Titans stuff is going to do us.

Be sure to check out the stat changes for the other roles!


Want some more advice for working with the healers in your guild? Raid Rx has you covered with all there is to know! Looking for less healer-centric raiding advice? Take a look at our raiding column Ready Check.