Shadow Priest DPS Stat Priority — Season 4

The video version of this guide is also available if you would like to watch along as I talk about Shadow Priest.

The general stat priority for a Shadow Priest is:

1. Intellect;
2. Haste;
3. Mastery;
4. Critical Strike;
5. Versatility;

Intellect is our best stat, beating everything quite handily. This means gaining item level will typically be better than always having the most optimal secondary stats, as long as that piece is an Intellect increase. After Intellect, you ideally want Haste and/or Mastery on just about every piece of gear you can access. Haste has huge scaling potential with almost every spell in our toolkit, making it incredibly valuable. Mastery generally rewards playing well and directly buffs every spell in our kit. Critical Strike is typically right behind both of these stats and slightly better than Versatility for offensive power.

This is pretty generic advice but should be good enough for starting to gear your Shadow Priest. Be sure to sim yourself on various fight types to get an idea of what stats YOUR character wants.

When you sim your character, be cautious about any crazy changes with gems/enchants when the amount gained is lower than 0.5%. This is typically the threshold for margin of error and something you should take with a heavy grain of salt. Furthermore, just doing single-target no-movement sims (Patchwerk) is not always realistic when it comes to the value of stats like Haste. These are all tools, not something that should ever be followed blindly.

Keep in mind that secondary stats diminish in value. This point starts to diminish for Haste, Critical Strike, and Versatility at 30%, meaning it takes more rating starting at this point and rising from there to get a percentage point. For Mastery, this starts at 19% for Shadow Priests since our Mastery point conversion value is at 0.5, bringing the cap to 15%. We have 4% base Mastery, giving us a start to the diminishing return value at 19%. These are not points to aim for; just keep in mind once you hit these points, you will see the value of that stat diminish slightly.

What this typically means is that as you approach the first or second thresholds, it might make sense to start allocating enchants or gems in another stat to continue to get maximum benefit.

These statistics have been obtained by combining common sense, in-game testing, and simulations using SimulationCraft.

As you get towards end-game gearing in the patch, you might notice your sims producing some unusual results. In this section, I am going to go over more advanced secondary stat optimization to help you understand what your goals should be with stats as you reach the top item level. Everyone will have slightly different gear, and you will want to adjust this to what makes the most sense for your character.

Note that I strongly suggest still using Haste and Mastery stats on all crafted pieces as a strong base for your gearing, but feel free to swap this out if you want to micro-optimize.

This advice comes directly from simming different targets, movement and adding in adds to see how these change stats. If you follow the advice below, you will be well-rounded to handle these cases; as always, you can sim your own character if you are looking for something more specific.

THESE ARE NOT CAPS. THEY ARE GOALS. Your own sims will fluctuate around this depending on specific trinkets or other special effects.

1. Gear up your character, prioritizing getting as much Haste and Mastery as possible. Acquiring Intellect is your top priority.
2. Get to roughly ～30-35% Haste
3. Get to roughly ～19-21% Mastery
4. Get to roughly ～22-27% Critical Strike
5. Continue stacking Haste up until ～35% with Dark Ascension or ～42% with Void Eruption
6. Excess into Versatility

See each section below to understand things in more detail.

If you are just gearing your Shadow Priest, you should not drop everything to achieve the first goal. Instead, you should balance out your stats and bring up Haste and Mastery simultaneously. Once you get a decent amount of gear, then you can start optimizing as the goals describe.

This means you should NOT blindly get to 30-35% haste while ignoring Mastery. Instead, you should gradually acquire as much of both stats as you can until you start getting to more end-game gearing setups. This means roughly try and keep these stats even in terms of rating up until you start hitting the DR threshold.

Your rough goal should be anywhere in the 32-40% range. You will find that Voidform builds want about 37%-42% and Dark Ascension builds lean more towards 32%. Balance this out for how you like to play.

When using Hood of Surging Time inside of Mythic+ in particular you might notice you can afford to drop Haste a bit lower (30-32% range) to take full advantage of this item at the start of pulls. This is quite normal but you can always still flex with a bit more haste if you prefer that. The Hood allows you to drop this tiny bit of haste without things feeling different most of the time, giving you more flexibility putting those stats elsewhere.

Note that certain trinkets can also skew how much Haste your character and sim are looking for. In particular for Season 4, all of the following items could tweak your desired haste levels depending on the average proc of the item. This means that if you are running one or more of these items, it is normal to see your desired haste levels come down to compensate.

• Ominous Chromatic Essence
• Spoils of Neltharus
• Vessel of Searing Shadow
• Under Red Wings procs of Ruby Whelp Shell

Your next goal should be getting to the first diminishing return value for Mastery, at 19%. This is less important than the haste goal, but once you reach at least 30% haste, you should then roughly move enchants/gems to favor more Mastery up until 19%-21%. This will hit a point where you will roughly get the ratings to be equal in the 5500-6000 range.

Once your Mastery is at this threshold, you typically do not need to continue stacking the stat, and you can move on to adding even more Haste (up to about 40%) and/or Critical Strike and Versatility.

Note that certain trinkets can also skew how much Mastery your character and sim are looking for. In particular for Season 4, all of the following items could tweak your desired mastery levels depending on the average proc of the item. This means that if you are running one or more of these items, it is normal to see your desired mastery levels come down to compensate.

• Ominous Chromatic Essence
• Spoils of Neltharus
• Nymue's Unraveling Spindle
• Pip's Emerald Friendship Badge
• Emerald Coach's Whistle
• Blue Silken Lining

Once you reach ～32% haste and ～19% Mastery, you can make the choice to start moving any excess stats into even more Haste (up to 40% or so), Critical Strike, or even Versatility.

For our builds Critical Strike can be quite valuable, but generally you should not run more than 4000 (～27%) Critical Strike rating. This is typically the cutoff point for most builds, some are okay even running as low as 3000. Going below 3000 is generally not suggested for any build as a Shadow Priest.

Versatility is typically the last stat you want to aim for, and depending on the build, this will be easier or harder. In particular Dark Ascension builds are satisfied running lower amounts of haste (32-35% range) and about 19% mastery. Due to it not being as haste-hungry as Void Eruption you can more easily dump excess stats into Versatility after getting a solid footing of Critical Strike. Endgame builds with Dark Ascension can easily run 3000-3500 Versatility being fully optimal.

Void Eruption variants do not prefer to run as much Versatility for pure offensive power, simply so that they can stack more haste. Void Eruption builds will typically only run 1500-2000 Versatility when optimizing for pure damage.

There are several ways to move stats around; choose whichever makes sense for you:

• Swapping out Gems
• Swapping out Enchants
• Adjusting Temporary Rune on your Weapon
• Finding other pieces of gear, likely in slots like Waist or Cloak

The goal of your gearing at this point would be to get the most value out of your stats without subjecting them too much towards diminishing returns.

There are many, many different "Best-in-Slot" setups with this, and you should not blindly copy what another player is doing. The important thing is to get your character setup to follow the goals outlined above, recognizing there are several paths to doing that with different items.

In addition, depending on the items in your current gear set, you might see Critical Strike and Versatility be more competitive than normal. Cantrip items such as Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno or trinkets like Belor'relos, the Suncaller scale with Critical Strike and Versatility, but not Haste and Mastery. The more of these items you use, the more it is normal for your sims to start showing more value in Crit/Vers.

When trying to push content, particularly in Mythic+ you should consider leaning more into Versatility (especially after reaching your desired levels of Haste and Mastery). This stat is crucial for living mechanics as you scale up key levels. By keeping Haste at least 6000 rating and Mastery around 5500 rating each you can safely dump the rest of stats into Versatility for a relatively small damage loss but a massive defensive gain. Keep tabs of your Critical Strike though, you typically want to have a baseline of at least 3000 Critical Strike in any build.

As an example, going from the fully optimal stat setup with Void Eruption in Mythic+ which runs 2000 Versatility to one that runs 4000 Versatility is less than a 1% damage loss. This means for high push environments adding more Versatility will be more common.

The below video goes over more tips for adding Versatility to your gear while pushing Mythic+ dungeons.

The gems, enchants, and consumables you will use are directly derived from your stat priority. You can find our advice on this topic on our dedicated page.

Intellect is your primary stat. You should look for this stat in all of your upgrades. It provides you with Spell Power, which increases the damage of your spells.

Critical Strike increases your chance to critically hit with all spells and abilities.

Haste increases your spell-casting speed and the tick rate of your periodic effects.

Mastery ( Mastery: Shadow Weaving) increases the damage of your spells for each damage over time effect you have active on that target. This only works with Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch, and Devouring Plague. While Voidform is active, you get the benefit on every target as if they had all three dots active.

Versatility increases all your damage and healing done, and decreases all damage taken.