Shadow Priest Basics

Celathil — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:15:43 GMT

I have played a shadow priest for awhile now (albeit not as long as my holy pally) and have learned a few things. To begin this will cover the basics leading up to ssc/eye because I am assuming that if you are in there you know your class. The basics of what I will be covering are talents, stats, gear, and spell rotation. This stuff is very basic but once you have a grasp of this you will soon be able to come to a raid and not gimp yourself. Before I get into this though I will say I am not a expert, these are solely my opinions and though they may be rooted in fact, you may disagree with a few of my points.

In regards to talents I have to say how utterly disgusted I am with a lot of people who first spec to shadow. The vast majority in my opinion do so in order to “zomg melt ur fac3” and end up dumping way too many talent points into the shadow tree. The most common build and the most balance in my opinion is a 14/0/47 build with the most notable talents including; Inner focus in discipline, and leaving out imp VE. Now for those new they will think leaving out imp VE is a bad thing. But once you start raiding you will see you can’t always use VE let alone the talented version of it. Simply put it is amazing in kara through mag, and from my limited experience on the PTR with Zul’Aman. The real problem is when you have 1k+ shadow damage and are doing fights with aoe damage or adds the healing will cause too much threat. One fight that comes to mind is Void Reaver and A’lar, with void reaver at about 40% (depending on your tanks TPS) you will probably pull agro or be close to it. A’lar is different in that it depends on how well your off tanks are doing, some nights I can use it and other nights I cannot, you just have to use your best judgment. So what I am saying is that it isn’t hard to get your spec, a simple search of the priest forums will give you the exact numbers and talents, I believe it is even stickied on the top of their page. Your stats are quite basic and easy to figure out for raids (a bit more challenging in pvp but I’ll save that for a later blog). Once you get your hit rating cap (99% hit) which is 76 +hit rating after talents. Your next stat priority is damage, now some disagree and say that mp5 is better and that it allows you to go through longer fights, etc. Well you will see why in the following paragraph on why I disagree. Back to stats, going into raiding (kara doesn't count) you should have +76 hit rating, ~880-1,000 shadow spell damage and 7k health self buffed. Now some may look at it and thing that is impossible but it is actually very simple. The only gear that I use right now that is from raiding is Rytssin’s Lost Pendant (+stam, +shadow dmg), malefic girdle, and cloak of dalaran. The rest is tailoring and heroic gear/rewards, and my beloved darkmoon card: Crusade (+80 spell damage) trinket. With the gear listed above, combined with the arena season 2 mace/dagger you can easily be topping 1.1k shadow damage without even setting foot within a 25 man. But we cannot forget that to achieve this we must take up a very costly profession, tailoring. What you will be making is your Frozen Shadoweave, and Spellstrike sets along with (if you know someone in ssc/eye) belt of blasting. In order to make these sets you will either a) have to spend the next 3 weeks of your life farming primals b) use the money you had for your epic flying mount c) get exalted with aldor/scryer and then AH everything but the armaments/tomes and the marks/signets. You will probably cry by the time you make all the stuff and refuse to kill another water elemental again. Now I said I would address the mp5 vs dmg issue in this paragraph. You have the regen while casting talent in disc, VT up all the time, and your gear does not have any innate mp5 on it. The mp5 is nice but it isn’t needed at this point, what you can easily due (which you should be doing on the ssc/eye learning level) is elixer/flask up, bring your oils, food buffs, and bring plenty of pots. Even if you just do your dailies and use the unstable mana pots you get from the skettis escort that will help your gold costs a lot. Now you can have the best gear but it won’t mean anything if you don’t know a simple spell rotation. There are two rotations that depend on the stage of the fight, there is endurance and nuking. The endurance is fairly simple, VT-> Inner Focus-> SW:P-> Mind Blast-> MF-> VT -> MF, etc. What it is, is just keeping your dots up and using MF between Mind Blast cool downs, with a good tank you shouldn’t really even have to watch your threat too much except for at the beginning. The nuking build isn’t as much as a spell rotation as it is cool down management, what you have to do is keep your dots up then; MB-> MF-> SW:D with the spacing between the MB and SW:D you are able to keep MB and SW:D from being up on the same time for a decent amount of time. But please note, if you are constantly doing this a) it will put stress on healers in VE isn’t up b) you will be generating a crazy amount of threat. Now each fight will come down to a different rotation since especially now since the burning crusade, blizzard has done a good job of mixing up the scripting on the fights so there are a lot of variables. Now you are bound at some point in your raiding career to be on the verge of pulling agro, what you need to do is don’t freak out and start running around. If you were playing the way you were supposed to be you should have time to think it out, just go to the endurance rotation. A good tank will be able to generate more TPS than what your endurance build generates so you should just use that rotation till you have dropped comfortably in threat to resume. In conclusion take what I have said with moderation, if you are in ssc/eye you probably know what you are doing. This was for people who just went/new to shadow and have no idea what to do for that kara/gruul’s that is coming up. Just keep your head on your shoulders and use basic game mechanic knowledge to help you maximize your dps. Since remember, the more damage you do the more you are useful to your raid.

The Daily Quest : basic

Shadow Priest Basics