The answer
Gnome
| Place | Race | Scenarios won | Range | Racial worth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Gnome | 79% | 52–84% | +3.4% |
| #2 |  Human | 21% | 16–48% | +2.1% |
| #3 |  Night elf | 0% | 0% | +0.3% |
| #4 |  Dwarf | 0% | 0% | +0.0% |
Scenarios won: in how many of the fights each race healed the most, counting only healing that lands (no overheal), mana included. Range: where that share lands if the one unconfirmed game value goes either way (the deciding question, below). Racial worth: healing gained over a priest with no racial.
Night elf and Dwarf never win a scenario; they're in the order of what their racials are worth.
Every set of shares on this page is rounded to whole percents that add up to 100.
- Why Gnome: mana. 73% of our healing fights run out of mana before the boss dies, and the Gnome has the most of it.
- If MP5 on gear pays every second in WoW Forever, mana stops mattering and it's nearly a coin flip: Gnome 52%, Human 48%. We test it on launch day.
- How much it matters: about 3.4% more healing. Pick what you love.
What a scenario is
A scenario is one raid boss fight, simulated from the healer's side. We built 10,000 of them, and each one draws at random:
- how long the fight lasts: 3 minutes in the middle, from 45 seconds to 10 minutes;
- the raid: 10, 20 or 40 players, and the buffs that come with it (Kings, Arcane Intellect, Mark of the Wild, Blessing of Wisdom, Mana Spring and more);
- consumables: mana potions and runes, or none;
- your healing gear, from fresh level 60 to raid-geared;
- who you heal (the tank or the raid) and how hard the boss hits;
- your talents: the Holy build or the Discipline build;
- every game value nobody has confirmed yet (listed in the full method).
All four races play every scenario, with the same draws. For every heal, how much health the target is missing is drawn at random, and the heal counts only up to that, crits included: healing after overheal. The fight's mana (your pool, regen while casting and while not, MP5, potions and runes) caps how much of the fight you can keep casting. The race with the most healing that counts over the whole fight wins.
The race-only priest heals with 10-minute cooldowns (Divine Grace for humans, Desperate Prayer for dwarves, Contingency Plan for gnomes) count once per fight, when they beat a normal cast.
Holy or Discipline, same answer. With the Holy build (31 Holy / 20 Discipline, Prayer of Mending) the Gnome wins 75% of its scenarios; with the Discipline build (31 Discipline / 20 Holy, Penance, Divine Aegis, Power Infusion) 85%. Healing the tank, 72%; healing the raid, 86%.
Built from the game, not from guides. Spells, talents and racials are read from the game's own tables for build 1.60.1.70450, the WoW Forever beta of 16 October 2026. Random seed 20261104, so every number here can be rerun exactly. Sampling error: ±0.8 points.
Why Gnome wins
Each race's racials as build 1.60.1.70450 has them, and what they're worth to a healing priest: the healing gained over a priest with no racial, in the middle scenario, and the spread across 8 in 10 scenarios.
| Race | Racials | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Gnome | Expansive Mind: +5% mana, always on. And 3 more Intellect than a Human. Eureka!: for 8 seconds every 2 minutes, non-periodic heals cost 10% less and heal 10% more. | +3.4%0.8–5.0 |
| Human | The Human Spirit: +5% Spirit, so more mana back every second. Ruthless: +2% crit chance. | +2.1%1.0–2.8 |
| Night elf | Elune's Light: +10% crit chance for 15 seconds, once every 3 minutes. | +0.3%0.2–0.5 |
| Dwarf | Earth Fury: crits heal 2% more. | +0.0%−0.1–0.2 |
Most fights run out of mana. In 73% of our healing scenarios the healer runs dry before the boss dies. There, more mana is more healing, and the Gnome wins 96% of them. In the other 27%, where nobody runs short, the Human's Spirit and crit win 68%.
Long fights turn it around. The Gnome's bigger pool counts once; the Human's +5% Spirit pays every second. The Gnome wins until about 6 min, the Human from 8 min.
The numbers as a table
| Fight length | Gnome | Human | Night elf | Dwarf |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 s | 67% | 33% | 0% | 0% |
| 45 s | 58% | 42% | 0% | 0% |
| 1 min | 52% | 48% | 0% | 0% |
| 1 min 30 s | 58% | 42% | 0% | 0% |
| 2 min | 72% | 28% | 0% | 0% |
| 2 min 30 s | 80% | 20% | 0% | 0% |
| 3 min | 84% | 16% | 0% | 0% |
| 4 min | 90% | 10% | 0% | 0% |
| 5 min | 92% | 8% | 0% | 0% |
| 6 min | 79% | 21% | 0% | 0% |
| 8 min | 37% | 63% | 0% | 0% |
| 10 min | 12% | 88% | 0% | 0% |
| 15 min | 3% | 97% | 0% | 0% |
Night elf and Dwarf win no scenario at any length; they're in the table.
The deciding question: does MP5 pay every second?
MP5 is mana per 5 seconds: gear with 10 MP5 gives you 10 mana every five seconds. The open simulator has an unconfirmed option where WoW Forever pays it every second instead, five times as much. Nobody has confirmed it in the game yet, so the model draws it: yes in 15% of the scenarios, no in the rest.
If MP5 pays every 5 seconds
- 84% Gnome
- 16% Human
If it pays every second
- 52% Gnome
- 48% Human
Gnome stays first either way. But if MP5 pays every second, healers stop running dry, mana stops deciding, and it's nearly a coin flip with the Human.
How we test it
On launch day, 4 November: put on gear with MP5 and watch the mana bar between casts, every five seconds or every second. This page gets the answer, dated, in its changes.
How much it matters
The Gnome's racials are worth about 3.4% more healing that counts than none; the Human's 2.1%, the Night elf's 0.3%, the Dwarf's about nothing.
In a single pull, it's close. With the same raid and the same gear, a Gnome out-heals a Human in 58% of pulls (48–68% across the scenarios). We count only the luck of crits; real pulls have more, so the real number is even closer to 50.
Pick what you love. The gap is real, but small.
The human factor
Simulators press every button the moment it's ready. People don't. But the Gnome's +5% mana is passive: a Gnome who never presses Eureka! still wins 35% of the scenarios. Pressing it half the time already draws level with the Human.
| How often the Gnome presses Eureka! | Gnome | Human |
|---|---|---|
| Every time | 78.9% | 20.9% |
| 3 times in 4 | 69.9% | 29.9% |
| Half the time | 60.4% | 39.5% |
| 1 time in 4 | 48.9% | 51.0% |
| Never | 35.0% | 65.0% |
After launch we count how often our own raiders press theirs.
Why other guides disagree
Our check against the open simulator is for Shadow (on the Shadow Priest page). For healing, four choices move a ranking, and a guide that makes them differently will disagree:
- Overheal. Crit racials lose much of their worth to overheal. The Human's +2% crit adds 1.07% raw healing but 0.69% that lands; the Night elf's 0.51% → 0.32%; the Dwarf's 0.33% → 0.13%. The Gnome's racials aren't crits and keep almost all of theirs (0.68% → 0.65%). A ranking by raw healing flatters the crit races.
- Mana. A fight with mana to spare can't see a mana racial. Where nobody runs short, the Human wins 68% of our scenarios; where the healer runs dry, the Gnome wins 96%.
- MP5 every second. The open simulator's unconfirmed option. Turned on, the Human's share goes from 16% to 48%.
- The build. The racials changed in build 70425: Eureka! went from your next 3 abilities within 15 seconds to every ability for 8 seconds, and the Human's Sword Specialization became Ruthless. A list made for the stress-test client (1.60.1.70245) uses the old ones.
The full method
Every unconfirmed game value, and the odds we gave it
Each scenario draws every one of these. The ranges on this page are how far a share moves when one of them goes one way or the other; the deciding question is the one that moves it most.
| Value | In the scenarios | Why it's unknown |
|---|---|---|
| Damage over time can crit | yes in 95%, no in 5% | the game's spell data flags these spells' ticks as able to crit (a spell without the flag never crit in 219 logged ticks); in Classic they couldn't; not yet seen in WoW Forever |
| Eureka! boosts Mind Flay | yes in 85%, no in 15% | the tooltip says non-periodic spells only, but the spell data lists exactly the channelled spells (Mind Flay, Starshards, Penance) and none of the damage or healing over time |
| Renew ticks can crit | yes in 95%, no in 5% | Renew carries the same flag |
| MP5 on gear pays every second | yes in 15%, no in 85% | the open simulator's unconfirmed option |
| Earth Fury's +2% | 2% of the crit bonus, up to 2% of the whole crit | the tooltip allows both |
| Improved Mind Flay's ramp | each tick ×1.2 the last (1, 1.2, 1.44), or +20% each (1, 1.2, 1.4) | the tooltip allows both |
| What Divine Aegis shields | the whole crit, down to only the part that landed | its tooltip says "the amount healed" |
How the model reads the game
The model reads the game's own tables (DB2) for build 1.60.1.70450, exported from wago.tools: every level-60 priest spell at its highest rank, WoW Forever's talent tree (a tree with one column per spec, each talent's value from its own curve), and the racials. The spells' data decides what modifies what: whether Shadowform, Twin Disciplines or Eureka! touches a spell comes from the spell's own flags, not from its tooltip. Nothing is a number copied from a guide.
10,000 scenarios with the random seed 20261104, so every number here can be rerun exactly. The fight-length chart reruns 2,000 scenarios at each of 13 fixed lengths.
What we typed in by hand
- The talent builds (51 points): Holy 31 / Discipline 20 with Prayer of Mending, and Discipline 31 / Holy 20 with Penance, Divine Aegis and Power Infusion.
- The races' stats against the priest baseline (Gnome +3 Intellect, Dwarf −1 Intellect and −1 Spirit): the game keeps them in tables wago.tools doesn't export, so the values are wowsims'.
- The priest's Spirit regen outside the five-second rule (6.25 + Spirit ÷ 8 mana per second), as the open simulator measured it in the beta.
- Spell hit against a raid boss (83% base, 99% at most) and crit from Intellect (59.5 per 1%): Classic's rules.
What isn't in the model
- Set bonuses, trinkets and procs: they help every race alike.
- Fights with more than one target, and movement beyond how much of the fight you get to cast.
- Power Infusion from another priest.
- PvP. The PvP racials (Will to Survive, Stoneform, Escape Artist and the rest) don't count here.
The data. The rankings, ranges, racials' worth and the fight-length sweep on this page as files, free to reuse with credit (CC BY 4.0): CSV and JSON.
Our prediction, before launch
Simulated on 19 October 2026, on build 1.60.1.70450, before WoW Forever launches on 4 November. After 9 December we grade it against our own raid logs, here on this page.
Changes
- Stress-tested and corrected. Two fixes in the damage engine (the Night elf's Starshards was hardly ever cast, and it got a hit bonus it shouldn't), smaller fixes in the healing model, and the odds of two open questions raised from the game's own spell data: damage over time can crit, 75% to 95%; Eureka! boosts Mind Flay, 50% to 85%. Shadow: Human 80% to 94%. Healing: Gnome 82% to 79%. Same build, same seed.
- Simulated and written, on build 1.60.1.70450.