Bonus healing now carries a little damage too

In WoW: Forever, items with bonus healing also carry about one third as much bonus damage. Blizzard confirmed the rule at the 13 September Deep Dive panel, as part of a wider itemization pass that gives spellcasters more level-up weapons worth equipping. A healing staff you used to shelve outside dungeons now pulls a little weight while you solo quest too.

That one third comes from the item itself, not a talent you spec into. Do not confuse it with Spiritual Guidance, a separate Holy Priest talent that cuts spell damage to about a third of spell healing on your own character sheet. One lives on the gear, the other on your talent page.

Dee, an armored knight, compares two staves by a campfire at night, one glowing with gold healing light and a small spark of flame.
The healing light is the stat. The spark is the one-third of damage that comes with it.

Spirit still feeds mana for Priests, Druids and Paladins

Several healer talents still pull mana from Spirit, and Forever raised a few of them. Priest Meditation now returns substantially more mana from Spirit, Restoration Druid Reflection boosts mana regeneration while casting, and Holy Paladins gained a new talent, Reverence, that lets them regenerate mana from Spirit while casting. Across all three, Spirit matters mainly through the talent that keeps its regeneration working mid-fight, not as a flat stat on its own.

Holy Precision, a Priest talent, raises hit chance with Holy spells by up to 18 percent. Blizzard built it specifically so healing Priests are not expected to wear hit-rating gear, which frees up item budget for Spirit, Intellect or healing power instead.

Spirit, Intellect or healing power: what should you chase?

Players are already asking this on the WoW: Forever subreddit, comparing same-level green items that roll Spirit against ones that roll Intellect or healing power. The replies do not agree. Some argue healing power wins outright because it is the only stat that directly raises throughput, while others say Spirit matters more once your mana-regen talent is slotted in, since it keeps paying off mid-fight instead of only between pulls. Nobody in the thread treats Stamina as something you can skip either.

Blizzard’s 1 October beta notes say lower spell ranks receive less Spell Damage and Spell Healing benefit and have a lower chance to activate certain talents. The notes give Rank 1 Frostbolt at level 60 as an example, with a 0% Frostbite activation chance. That changes the mana tradeoff from the Classic habit.

What stat priority is still unconfirmed

Blizzard has said what each stat does. It has not said how much of each one a given class needs at a given level, and the beta patches weekly, so any fixed ranking published today could be wrong by next week. Whether the one-third bonus-damage rule covers every bonus-healing item, rather than a subset, is also still unconfirmed. Shaman Restoration has not had its own class deep dive yet, so its mana-regen talents are not part of this picture.

The Wowdee add-on + app will compare two items by the healing they actually carry, including that one-third bonus damage, against the character who would wear them, instead of leaving you to guess from a tooltip.

Still to come

Not yet settled by our sources or tested in game:

  • Whether the one-third bonus-damage rule applies to every bonus-healing item, or only some.
  • A ranked priority between Spirit, Intellect and healing power. None has been published.
  • Shaman Restoration's own mana-regen talents, since Blizzard has not published a Shaman class deep dive yet.

Sources

Beta notes are dated because Forever is still changing.