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Cyverion
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Joined: 21 Feb 2009
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re: Shadow Priest Basics

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Welcome to the new shadowpriest guide, updated for 3.1!

Shadowpriests completely changed with wrath of the lich king, and have gone from being a mediocre DPS class with unmatched utility to a regular DPS class that can provide replenishment and has excellent AoE and multiple target damage.

First, basic specs:

PvE specs

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I changed the basic spec slightly. Improved spirit tap is a horrible talent, and you should never pick it up. The 5 points in improved spirit tap I used to pick up psychic horror, improved ve, and max out focused mind and 1 throwaway point in imp pw:s. What to do with those 5 points is really up to you.

PvP specs
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is the 'basic' PvP spec.

For PvE, the traditional major glyphs are:
- Shadow
- Shadow Word Pain
- Mindflay

For PvP:
- Innerfire
- Shadow Word Pain
- Mindflay or Dispersion

Damage cycles:
Shadowpriests can now achieve 5000+ single target DPS without too much effort. While in most fights shadowpriests will not be fighting for the top spots, the damage we can put out is respectable and quite close to other classes that provide replenishment.

To simplify things very much, keep the spells up in this priority:
Vampiric Touch
Mind Blast
Devouring Plague
Mindflay

Shadow Word Pain should only be cast once all relevant debuffs are on the boss. It is much better to wait a few seconds to put up SW: P to ensure that scorch/curse of elements/judgement of the crusader are placed on the boss than to start 'rolling' a shadow word pain with crappy modifiers. By extension, make sure to recast shadow word pain every time you get a debuff that temporarily increases your damage - like thaddius polarity or the crit modifier on loatheb.

Gear:
Stack +damage wherever you can. A loose rule of thumb is that 1 damage is worth 2 crit or 2 haste, and that spirit and int are more or less worthless. You should gear up for 11% hit, or 10% hit if you always raid with a dranei.

For a good guide to best in slot gear, check out:
http://www.shadowpriest.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=20419

A short summary of how to value gear is from this:

int.....spirit..spellpower..spellhit....spellcrit...spellhaste
0.27....0.28....1.51........1.76........0.98........0.94
crunched out from folks at shadowpriest.com using simcraft (thanks Keldarn).

As you can see, a 19 damage red gem is much better than a 9 spell damage/8 crit gem (29 vs 21 dps). You only want to use non-red gems when required to do so for a metagem bonus OR if the socket bonus is >= 5 damage.


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