A Raiding Shadow Priest’s Primer
Some of the information here is going to be my opinion, some of it collected theorycraft wisdom. Feel free to argue with the first, disagree, even vilify, if you want. However, if the Theorycrafting seems implausible to you, take your arguments (and math) to the appropriate places where they can set you straight. If I’ve missed something, you think something else should be added, you have additional questions, or you want to flame this, leave a comment.
What is a Shadow Priest all about?
A Shadow Priest is a priest who has chosen to focus their talents and gear into their Shadow tree to DPS, rather than heal. Currently, the Shadow Spec is one of the most important raid specs due to the extraordinary utility of the spell Vampiric Touch, which returns mana to the priests party while the DoT is on the target at a rate of 5% of shadow damage dealt. Often, a shadow priest’s personal DPS contribution will be respectable, though not at the top of the charts, but the combined benefits of the mana regen, the Misery debuff, and the Shadow Weaving debuff lead to incredible value.
Shadow Spec
There is always debate over what the most optimal spec is. One point here, another point there. For the Shadow Priest, there are a collection of talents in the Shadow Tree that are "must-have" talents. Aside from those talents, the points can be distributed as desired, though some specs are overall more successful.
Tier 1: Spirit Tap vs. Blackout
General wisdom is it does not matter which of these you choose. In terms of DPS, neither provides any tangible benefits. In some situations, Spirit Tap can provide benefits (boss with adds and having Improved Divine Spirit), while Blackout has no effect.
From the perspective of purely raiding, the marginal benefit of Spirit Tap is better than the no benefit of Blackout. For Soloers and Farmers, the blackout proc can be useful when targeting multiple mobs.
One other thing to consider is the impact of stun procs in a raiding environment. Being an uncontrollable phenomenon, it can adversely affect pulls. Whether that is something that concerns you is a personal choice or between you and your raid leader.
Tier 2: Shadow Affinity, Improved Shadow Word: Pain, and Shadow Focus
Shadow Affinity is one of the most important talents for a Shadow Priest. Not only do our damaging spells generate threat, Vampiric Touch generates threat for its mana return (in much the way Healing does) and Vampiric Embrace generates Healing Threat. A Shadow Priest doing a full DPS rotation will be one of the highest threat generating members in the raid and this is the only passive regeneration available. Other than this, ask for Blessing of Salvation if you get close to the tanks on threat.
Improved Shadow Word: Pain increases the number of your SW:P ticks from 6 to 8. At 6 ticks, SW:P already gains the full benefit of +Shadow Damage. This talent adds two more ticks at full damage, after talents and stats. This is a 33% buff to Shadow Word: Pain alone, and does not count the damage possible from having the extra global cooldown.
Shadow Focus increases you chance to hit with Shadow Spells by 2% per rank. Spells have a 17% chance to miss a level 73 target of which 16% can be negated. With a 10% improved chance for spells to hit, that means a Shadow Priest only requires 6% spell hit from gear freeing up more item value to be spent on +Shadow Damage. If you find yourself with more +spell hit on gear than you need, you can reduce ranks of this at 1 rank per 2% of unavoidable spell hit.
Tier 3: Mind Flay and Improved Mind Blast
Mind Flay is one talent point and is one of the mainstays of Shadow DPS. This is your Frostbolt. A frostbolt that is channeled and has a terrible damage coefficient.
Improved Mind Blast is used to reduce the cooldown on Mind Blast. The spell has an 8 second cooldown, and this can reduce it to 5.5 at max ranks. How many points you need in this is dependent upon a number of factors. 4/5 gives a six second cooldown which conveniently brackets Mind Blast around two un-hasted Mind Flays and is a very common choice. 1/5 reduces it to 7.5 which counts for two flays and an instant (or 1.5 second cast). 5.5 is useful if you have enough hast to bring Mind Flay to a 2.75 second spell, or do a Mind Flay interrupt rotation.
Tier 4: Shadow Weaving and Shadow Reach
Shadow Reach increases the range on Mind Flay to 24 yards. Sometimes those 4 yards make all the difference.
Shadow Weaving has a chance of applying a debuff to the target increasing all shadow damage by 2% per debuff, stacking to 5. This debuff is added to or refreshed by any Shadow Priest in the raid. The math works out that 4/5 is about the least you should go with to get that stacked as quickly as possible. 3/5 is workable if you will always have another Shadow Priest. 5/5 is the fastest you will put it up and the talent point is not a waste, though it may not be the most talent point.
Tier 5: Focused Mind and Vampiric Embrace
Focused mind is part of the mana efficient series of talents, reducing the mana cost of two of your most used spells by 15%. Since much of the purpose of a Shadow Priest is mana, being able to cast more efficiently for longer periods enhances your ability to provide Vampiric Touching to your party members.
Vampiric Embrace… even if you never, ever used it, you would take it because it is the prerequisite for Shadowform. But you should use it. Improved Vampiric Embrace is more debatable because it significantly increases threat generation when it is used. If you have tanks that can handle it, Imp. VE is quite nice to have.
Tier 6: Darkness
+10% Damage? Are you crazy? How can you justify not taking it? Most classes get 5% buffs.
Tier 7: Shadowform
This is why you became a Shadow Priest, because you wanted to be swirly purply bringer of death. +15% damage done, -15% damage taken. Pure win. Sure, you can’t cast holy spells (pfft! like you wanted to heal anyway), but you were brought in to DPS and this helps you do that. This is one of the two defining talents of the Shadow Spec.
Tier 8: Misery
This provides a 5% spell damage buff to your raid. Yes.
Tier 9: Vampiric Touch
This was the talent that took a sub-par DPSer that should be a healbot and turned them into one of the most desirable raid-specs in the game. I explained it above - your casters will love you. This is the other defining Talent of the Shadow Priest, and it is no coincidence it is the 41 point talent.
Outside of those, the talent points can be spent in a number of ways. The current "best" PvE spec is 14/0/47 (something more or less like this). This picks up Meditation (for mana regen) and Inner Focus (for free casting) our of the Discipline tree, and spreads a few more points in Shadow to fill it out.
Shadow Stats
Because it is mostly completely correct, I’m going to quote a section from the Elitist Jerks forum thread: Shadow Priest 101: How to Melt Faces Effectively:
3. What are the important stats for a Shadow Priest?
Spell hit: Point for point, 1 spell hit rating returns a larger increase in DPS than anything else. However, this is because spell hit can become capped, and IS capped very quickly for shadow priests. Against a boss type mob, you will have your spells resisted 17% of the time. 16% of this can be negated via spell hit. Of that 16%, ten can be negated through talents alone, meaning 76 spell hit rating is needed. For every 25 points of spell hit rating above this cap that can not be avoided, you can drop a point in shadow focus to spend elsewhere. However, never itemise for spell hit unless you need 4-6 spell hit rating to drop another point in shadow focus and have an item that gives a +damage bonus with a yellow socket.
Damage: Damage is your bread and butter stat. It, once hit capped, is the one and only stat worth getting in the sense that every other stat is translated to damage to see it’s value. For purposes of other comparisons, one spell damage will be considered the baseline. It does not matter whether the damage is shadow damage only or generic damage, both offer the same value and hence take whichever is higher (if all else is equal).
Spell Crit: Spell crit affects every single shadow priest spell that can crit. Yes, both of them. Only MB and SW:D are affected by spell crit, and they only crit for 150% damage, meaning that spell crit is a fairly weak stat for shadow priests. The current accepted conversion is roughly 6 spell crit rating = 1 damage. Yes, it’s that weak. And it does nothing if you are not using MB or SW:D.
Intellect: Intellect is only useful as it converts into spell crit. Assuming kings, it’s about 20 int per damage. Again, a weak stat.
Spirit: Spirit helps regenerate mana with Meditation (which is getting buffed in 2.3) and also adds damage via improved Divine Spirit. 9 spirit is equal to one damage, assuming kings, along with the regen benefits.
Mana per 5 Seconds: This helps regenerate mana. Good if it’s on a piece, but not needed.
Stamina: You only truly need a baseline hp level on Doomwalker and Naj’entus, both of whom you can wear PvP gear for. Ultimately, don’t worry about it too much.
The only thing I would mention, in addition to this is that, following 2.4, the passive regen provided by Spirit is affected by Intellect in a rather complicated fashion, and the relative values are more important for mana regen than the absolute values of those two stats. The more +Shadow you have, the more mana return from VT, and the less passive regen is important.
To make the math even easier on Spell hit, this table from Shadowpriest.com breaks it down for you:
Spell Hit Caps:
* 76 hit is the cap with 5/5 Shadow Focus
* 101 hit before you can go to 4/5 Shadow Focus
* 126 hit before you can go to 3/5 Shadow Focus
* 152 hit before you can go to 2/5 Shadow Focus
* 177 hit before you can go to 1/5 Shadow Focus
* 202 hit before you can go to 0/5 Shadow FocusAll numbers rounded up to the next whole number.
1% hit = 12.6 hit rating at level 70.
Shadow Method
While some classes can use a simple rotation of spells and abilities, Shadow Priests require a more flexible system. Most Shadow spells either have long durations, long cooldowns, or both! Instead of a rotation, Shadow Priests use a Priority System, where spells are arranged in a conceptual order of importance, and each cast is evaluated as to which spell is the most important at that cast time.
Vampiric Touch is considered to be the most important spell of a Shadow Priest, and on any boss mob you can, it should be up as close to 100% of the time as you can make it. It is important to be aware of its duration, as you want one cast to fully expire before the next one is applied for maximum dps benefit. You want to use a DoT Timer addon to keep track of its duration and allow you to maximize its uptime.
While VT is the most important spell, it may not be the first spell you cast. The other spell you want as close to 100% uptime is
Vampiric Embrace, if it is going to be used, is probably the next most important spell. This spell on its own generates no threat, but does put you on an enemies aggro table. You can cast this any time after the pull, even while waiting for the tank to build threat, so long as you do not begin dealing damage.
Shadow Word: Death can be used to increase DPS, however the resultant self-damage is hazardous at times. Generally, any time your damage is increased (during Curator’s evocation, for example) or there is raid damage, you want to avoid using SW:D.
If you are using SW:D, you are probably also using Mind Blast. Mind Blast is on a shorter cooldown, so I place at a lower priority because it will not be taken out of combat as long to begin with. Also, if using VE, the health boost from MB+VE can soak some of the health lost by the SW:D immediately prior.
Mind Flay is the bread and butter of your dps casting. when you aren’t doing anything else, eat this. Or, I suppose, have your enemy eat this.
Shadow Style
As was noted above, Shadow Priests first and foremost want to be at or near the hit cap. Point for point, spell hit is the most important stat on items. Once you are at the spell hit cap, the only important stat is +Shadow Damage, and the more +Shadow Damage you have, the more lackluster the other stats become.
Shadowpriest.com has two excellent guides to gear. So excellent, in fact, I won’t even bother to summarize them here.
Best Raiding Gear Available
Best Pre-Raid Gear Available
A lot of the craftable gear is exceptional, and those lists reflect that. If you are a tailor, the Frozen Shadoweave set, while not the best, can last you well into tier 5 and tier 6, as will the Engineering helm.
Gems and Enchants
Gems and enchants follow the same rules as gearing in general. Spell hit if you need it, +Damage beyond that. For slots where that is not available, anything that improves your ability to regen mana (mp5 or spirit), threat reduction or stamina would be your choices.
For a meta gem, the current gem of choice is the Ember Skyfire Diamond which conveniently requires red gems, since you will be stacking the "Runed" gems (Blood Garnets, Living Rubies, Crimson Spinels). You should only use a different color gem if the total spell damage you gain is equal from the gems and the socket bonus to what a red gem would provide.
Shadow Links
Shadowpriests have ShadowPriest.com as an excellent resource for all things shadowy.
The Elitist Jerks forums have thread dedicated to the theorycrafting of this spec: Shadow Priest 101: How to Melt Faces Effectively
Apanthrope has a Gear Longevity Chart that, while not ranking gear, shows you the ranges people actually use it in.
He also has some interesting thoughts on Shackle and Mind Control.
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