Shadow Priest at 70!

[Nexumbra]

I thought I'd write up a little primer about Shadow Priests for the guild, what you should look for and what your role is.

Shadow Priests are primarily a utlility class, which means that they assist other players more than providing a direct dps role. That does not mean that they cannot dps, but they provide the following benefits to a raid -

Vampiric Touch - You return to your party 5% of the damage you deal. If you do 800 dps, you return 40 mana per second. Healers and mana dependent dps love you. They will fight to be in your party group.
Misery - When this affects a target, it takes an additional 5% damage from all dps. Remember that when they show off their dps.
Shadow Weaving - A target can take up to an extra 10% shadow damage from you. This helps other shadow priests and warlocks.

Vampiric Embrace should generally not be used in a boss fight unless your tank can generate massive amounts of threat. This will not happen often.

TALENT SPEC

This is the "cookie cutter" talent spec for Raiding Shadow Priests.
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Priest -> Talent Calculator

You can be flexible on choosing between Spirit Tap and Blackout, because both are generally useless on Boss fights. Spirit Tap and Blackout are useful only for trash, or on trash that appear during boss fights.

Note that you should not choose Improved Vampiric Embrace. The extra healing is nice, but the extra aggro it generates is not nice. The extra aggro it generates means you have to stop dpsing more meaning you do less damage and return less mana. An experienced Shadow Priest rarely uses Vampiric Embrace.

GEAR
When you look for gear, there are 2 things to remember.

If you have 5 points in shadow focus, you only need to reach +76 hits to max out yoru ability to hit bosses with your spells.

After that, there are 3 important things to look for in your gear.
1. + Spell Damage.
2. + Spell Damage.
3. + Spell Damage.

In other words, + Spell Damage is your sole goal in gearing. Sure you can look for +stam gear for AOE damage on raids but more damage = more mana returned and more dps damage done.

Spell Crit is not very useful to a Shadow Priest as we have only 2 spells that can crit - Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death. Shadow Word Death is not a nice spell to have crit that often as it can take you from 100% health to 66%.

When choosing gear, I strongly recommend using this guide to choose what to aim for-
shadowpriest.com • View topic - Best Raiding Gear Available

Note that tailors have a significant bonus over other professions. Tailored gear won't be replaced by anything short of T5 drops. You may be happy with your dps in t4 raids with this gear, but you will be fighting for last place when you hit Sunwell because Shadow Priest damage doesnt scale well. Blizzard did this on purpose to make sure that Shadow Priests couldn't reach the point where they never went out of mana.

When you gem, focus on +damage. Ignore socket bonuses. If you look at a proper raiding shadow priest, you will note that the gems that are put in ignore socket bonuses and focus on + damage.

ROTATION
To max out your dps and use your mana efficiently, you should follow a proper sequence of spells known as a rotation.

In a normal battle, this is your order for casting -
1. Vampiric Touch.
2. Shadow Word: Pain
3. Mind Blast
4. Mind Flay
5. Mind Flay
6. Mind Blast
and at this point you should make sure that Vampiric Touch and Shadow Pain are always up, and make sure you use Mind Blast as soon as it comes off cooldown.

Shadow Word: Death should be used as long as (a) you can survive the backlash (note that it can crit so you may see 35% knocked off your health) (b) the healers can throw a quick heal on you (c) there isnt a risk of taking some bad AOE damage. For example, this is a bad spell for fighting the Prince in Kara because if you cast this at the time an enfeeble is used by the prince, bye bye.

Vampiric Embrace should only be used if you can keep under the tanks aggro and the healers are having problems. At no other time should it be used unless its part of a specific strategy.

If you start having mana problems and your fiend, inner focus and pots are on cooldown, the following should be dropped in this order.
1. Shadow Word Death
2. Mind Blast
3. Shadow Word Pain

If you are really out of mana, just make sure that vampiric touch is up and cast mind flay as it is your most mana efficient dps cast.

AGGRO MANAGEMENT
Shadow Priests have three ways to reduce threat.
1. Die and get Battle rez'd.
2. Stop dpsing.
3. .... That's about it.

Fade is a temporary threat reduction spell that has no long term affect in reducing your aggro. It reduces your threat by 2k temporarily, but that threat is restored the next time you cast a spell. Some priests believe that casting fade frequently k

[evilgoat]

Just thought I'd also shout it out, anything you ever need to know about a shadow priest.. shadowpriest.com • Index page

[Nexumbra]

Thanks for the help Evilgoat

[Edge94]

dude, please add some color. this is a giant wall of grayness.

[Brolly]

in tier 6 and sunwell gear you should go for spellhaste (min 1300 - 1400 spelldmg unbuffed ) but nice guide 4 beginners... i love my shadow priest


+Rep

[swagger1337]

dis priest are great to play for pvp