There's another benefit to maxing STA on character creation - you die significantly less often because you have more HP to last until after the opponent is dead.
I made a halfling (for the extra STA) druid with all points put into STA, so starting STA 110 and starting WIS 95(!)
The druid is now level 40 and already has 179 WIS. Should I end up taking this druid to the endgame it will be significantly more durable - most importantly for raids - than any other druid around, excepting only those who did the same thing. Later on when much of raiding requires surviving AOE damage, this toon will still be alive to heal and nuke when others of the same class, who chose the WIS route instead on creation, will already have fallen.
I played a high elf cleric for years that I'd started off as max WIS, and for most of my raiding experience I definitely did regret the lack of stamina, it made survival and success more difficult than it needed to be.
Depending on your class there are other benefits to max STA as well. For example, my druid's DS is that much more effective since I can absorb more hits. Regen can do more healing on average, with more HP to heal. When I get heal aggro, I'm much less likely to go down before someone can taunt off.
I am 100% convinced that in terms of the time investment I have saved already a great deal of time by going STA instead of WIS. Mana, after all, will always regen at the same rate with any given set of buffs, whether your WIS is 100 or 200, and until it come time to raid the size of your mana pool doesn't really matter a whole lot.
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