As you advance and gets better gear, a good healer will find himself asking "which secondary stat should I invest in"? There are 4 secondary stats that benefit healers, crit, surge, alacrity and power. But how do I decide which one is best for me? Which one should I prioritize to maximize my performance?
One thing I saw in many of the healing guides is that alacrity is the worse one, considering it lets you spend more resources, but doesn't increase your regeneration rate. As a result you will ran out of resources faster, making this stat the worse one to have. I completely disagree. In a theoretical testing scenario, if you had a static amount of resources and needed to calculate how much healing you can do, than it's true that alacrity wouldn't increase the healing done, only the time it takes you to cast it. This however, has nothing to do with the real world (I mean, game world) of actually healing a FP or Op. If it was, you would only be spamming your most efficient heal and only care about HPF (Heals Per Force) replace force with energy\heat\ammo depending on your favorite healer class. This is obviously not the case in any real healing scenario.
When you heal any group content that you aren't massively out gear, from your first FP at level 10 to a Nightmare Mode Op. you'll notice that healing normally comes in bursts, you either go all out to trying to keep up with the damage, or working on topping health bars, taking preventive measures for the next incoming damage, or regenerating your resources. Often you will find yourself throwing anything you can master to maximize healing output, disregarding resources. I can hear the screams "NO WAY!!! if you disregard resources you'll ran out and wipe", I'm sorry, but when, for example, your are in a situation where the tank takes massive damage that you need to heal as fast as possible or he'll die, you have to do it, otherwise you'll get the "best resource management award medal" and a dead tank. After this point there are 2 options, either you can regenerate more resources before the next crazy damage burst, or you'll die because you are either not ready for the content, or something bad that shouldn't happen happened and you need to try again. There is no way around it, one of the most important criteria of any healer is his ability to do burst healing when needed.
Enter alacrity, simply put, faster casting time and lower GCD increases your burst healing capabilities, making you better equipped to handle massive damage bursts. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying alacrity is better than crit, surge or power, all of these will increase your burst healing ability as well, all I'm saying is that this is a very important stat as well and, unlike many guides out there are saying, shouldn't be avoided or ignored.
An important thing to consider when you choose what to invest in is Diminishing Returns (DM). This basically means that the higher your crit\surge\alacrity rating, the more you need to advance it further. So all the formulas of crit>alacrity or any other x>y which disregard the current amount you have is completely irrelevant. For any healer with 500 crit and 0 alacrity, alacrity>crit and vise versa. The answer to which stat you should invest in, is often "your current lowest one".
So what are the actual numbers? I can't give you exact ones, because it depends on your class, style and the role you are usually playing in a group. However as a general rule most theory crafters agree on, you should aim to get all these stats to around 300, at which point power, which has no DM, becomes the best one. So next time your hear someone saying this healer type doesn't need this stat, be glad that you know better.
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