World of Warcraft: Forever Shadow Priest - Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities

In WoW Forever, the Shadow Priest rotation boils down to keeping your two DoTs up, using your short cooldowns as they are available, and filling the time with Mind Flay.

Before looking into any rotations there are a number of buffs you should cast on yourself and your group:

• Shadowform
• Inner Fire
• * Power Word: Fortitude
• * Divine Spirit
• * Shadow Protection (if expected to take Shadow damage from enemies)

*These also have raid-wide versions: Prayer of Fortitude, Prayer of Spirit , and Prayer of Shadow Protection.

Your rotation is made up of an opener, and a priority list during regular play. While the opener is to be followed step-by-step, the actual DPS rotation is a list of priorities that defines which spells are more important to use when you have multiple abilities ready to cast.

When starting an encounter, follow this sequence of spells:

1. Pre-cast Fade
2. Pre-cast Mind Blast
3. Shadow Word: Pain
4. Devouring Plague
5. Shadow Word: Death
6. Vampiric Embrace
7. Mind Blast
8. Mind Flay

As the encounter progresses, you have a priority of spells to cast. Actions listed higher in the list end up generating higher damage done, which is why they have a higher priority.

1. Maintain Shadow Word: Pain
2. Maintain Devouring Plague
3. Cast Mind Blast
4. Cast Shadow Word: Death
5. Maintain Vampiric Embrace
6. Cast Mind Flay

Similar to the single-target rotation, your AoE rotation will be comprised of both an Opener and a rotational priority.

When starting an AoE encounter, follow this sequence of spells:

1. Pre-cast Fade
2. Pre-cast Mind Blast on the primary target
3. Cast Shadow Word: Pain on all available targets
4. Cast Devouring Plague on the lowest health target(*)
5. Cast Vampiric Embrace on the primary target

As the encounter progresses, you have a priority of spells to cast. Actions listed higher in the list end up generating higher damage done, which is why they have a higher priority.

1. Maintain Shadow Word: Pain on every target
2. Maintain Devouring Plague on the lowest health target(*)
3. Cast Mind Blast on the primary target
4. Cast Shadow Word: Death on the primary target
5. Maintain Vampiric Embrace on the primary target
6. Cast Mind Flay on the primary target

*Alternatively, use it on the primary target if it needs to be burst down.

You can also cast Shadow Word: Death

• Mind Blast: A 1.5s cast spell that deals damage. 8-second cooldown. Use it whenever available.
• Shadow Word: Pain: Your main damage-over-time (DoT) spell. Apply to every enemy.
• Devouring Plague: Another DoT spell. Expensive mana-wise and stronger, but has a 24-second cooldown. It can only be applied to one enemy, but Devouring Contagion can spread it.
• Shadow Word: Death: Instantly deals damage to the target. 24-second Cooldown. If it fails to kill the target, you take 30% of your health as damage.
• Mind Flay: Your filler spell. Use it when there are no better spells to cast. It is a channeled spell, meaning it deals damage over time, but you must stand still while it channels.
• Shadowform: Our most iconic spell. When used, it reduces the mana cost of all our Shadow spells and increases their critical strike damage. While in Shadowform, starting to use a healing spell will remove it.

• Power Word: Shield: PWS is our #1 tool for preventing damage and, more importantly, spell pushback. While shielded, damage dealt to you will not cause pushback, nor eat stacks from Inner Fire, which is incredibly helpful while leveling or doing solo content.
• Fade: Instantly reduces your threat. Did you pull aggro from the tank in a dungeon? Hit Fade and let someone else deal with it.
• Resurrection: Revives a dead ally, only usable out of combat.
• Levitate: Our "mobility" ability. It allows us to float instead of falling, preventing fall damage. It also allows us to float above water, making Priests one of two classes able to do so!
• Mind Vision: Changes your camera to see the world through the eyes of your target. Useful for finding mobs you can target but cannot find the exact location of. Also very useful in PvP if you want to find someone hidden, like the enemy flag carrier in Warsong Gulch.

• Power Word: Fortitude/ Prayer of Fortitude: An hour-long buff that increases your target(s) Stamina, leading to a higher health pool.
• Divine Spirit/ Prayer of Spirit: An hour-long buff that increases your target(s) Spirit. Spirit increases Health and Mana regeneration out of combat. Most Mana users have tools that allow Spirit to increase their Mana regen in combat as well, making this a very useful buff. E.g. Priests have Spirit Tap and Meditation.
• Shadow Protection/ Prayer of Shadow Protection: A 20-minute-long buff that increases your target(s) Shadow Resistance. Shadow Resistance reduces Shadow Damage taken and increases the odds of Shadow Abilities missing their targets.
• Inner Fire: Increases your armor. The spell has 20 stacks, and every melee or ranged attack you take will consume a stack. Reaching 0 stacks removes the buff. Having Power Word: Shield up prevents you from losing a stack.
• Dark Inspiration: Causes Mind Blast or a full channel of Mind Flay to increase the Spirit of your group for 10 seconds. Shadow Talent.
• Inner Focus: A talent in the Discipline tree that reduces the Mana cost of your next spell cast by 100%. If it is a non-periodic spell capable of critting, it will also increase its crit chance by 25%. Pairs well with Mind Flay for the extra crit chance.

• Psychic Scream: Our Fear spell. Be careful when using this, as affected enemies will run away from you in random directions incredibly fast. This will usually lead to extra enemies being pulled by the effect.
• Mind Control: Take control of an enemy humanoid within the level range of the spell. Enemy players are humanoids, making this a really good spell to run enemies off a bridge or cliff. Some trash mobs have special abilities or buffs that you can use on your allies with this as well.
• Shackle Undead: Allows you to immobilize and incapacitate an Undead enemy, as long as they are within the level range of the spell.
• Mind Soothe: Reduces the aggro radius of a target humanoid enemy. Useful when trying to skip certain enemies in dungeons.

• Cure Disease + Abolish Disease: Priests have the ability to cleanse diseases from allies with these two spells. These spells have the same Mana cost, so as soon as you learn Abolish Disease, you will always want to use it instead of Cure.
• Dispel Magic: This is your dispel and purge spell. When cast on an ally, it will remove a magical debuff. When cast on an enemy, it removes a magic buff.

In this section, we will cover topics about your rotation and questions that may arise from it.

While Mana is a large concern while leveling, at max level Mana is not a problem for Shadow Priests. Thanks to the Mana cost reduction from Shadowform and the regen from Meditation, Shadow effectively has full regeneration while in combat and casting spells.

This comes from the 50% Mana cost reduction from Shadowform and the 50% Mana regen from Meditation. For instance, instead of regenerating 20 Mana per second to cast a spell that costs 100 Mana, you're now regenerating 10 Mana per second to cast a spell that costs 50 Mana.

The only situation you may realistically run out of Mana is during AoE encounters that require you to cast many Shadow Word: Pains. In those situations it is recommended to use a talent build with Spirit Tap to get procs with killing blows or Vampiric Embrace to get some extra regen, as it procs Spirit Tap without the killing blow requirement.

As a Shadow Priest, it is unlikely that you will pull threat. As a caster, as long as you are not in melee range, you must reach 130% threat to pull enemies away from your tank, giving you a larger leeway than melee players.

If you happen to pull threat, make sure to use Fade to drop your threat temporarily and reduce your damage output to let the tank catch up. We recommend having a threat addon to monitor it.

As a side note, Mind Blast has an increased threat modifier, so it will usually be the spell you cast that generates the most threat.

As mentioned earlier, Mind Flay is a channeled spell. You must stand still while channeling; otherwise, you will interrupt it and miss out on the remaining damage.

The damage from Mind Flay is not uniform. It has three moments when its damage is dealt: at 33%, 66%, and 100% of the channel.

You always want to fully channel Mind Flay thanks to Improved Mind Flay. This talent overcharges each tick of Mind Flay. If Mind Flay normally would tick for 100, with Improved Mind Flay, the three ticks would be 100, 120, and 144 for the last tick. This means that not getting that last tick is a huge DPS loss.

In World of Warcraft, whenever you cast a spell, there is a wait time until you can cast the next one. If the spell has a cast time, you will usually not notice that, but you will notice it clearly when you cast an instant spell like Shadow Word: Pain or Shadow Word: Death. This wait is called Global Cooldown or GCD.

Shadow is a "turret" spec in Forever, meaning that a large part of your rotation, Mind Blast and Mind Flay, require you to stand still, or you just cannot cast them.

If you know movement will be necessary, you should plan ahead and use your instant cast windows to move during them.

For instance, let's say you need to move 30 yards in 10 seconds for a raid mechanic. What you can do is slowly move towards that location every time you have an instant cast spell in your rotation. Alternatively, you can use your instant cast spells while you are moving. It will result in a worse rotation, but is still better than dealing no damage at all while moving from point A to B.

Shadow has four instant cast spells in its rotation. They should be used in this order:

1. Apply Shadow Word: Pain to enemies without it
2. Devouring Plague
3. Shadow Word: Death
4. Vampiric Embrace
5. Refresh an already existing Shadow Word: Pain

When it is time to cast any of these spells, you can move while casting that spell and while waiting until you can cast the next one. This wait is called Global Cooldown or GCD. This gives you windows of 1.5s to move freely every now and then. Use them wisely.

For most specs, including Shadow, the baseline GCD is 1.5s. This period is reduced by equipping items that increase your casting speed (Haste).

More WoW Forever Priest Guides

Holy Priest Healer Leveling Discipline Priest Healer Talents Discipline Priest Healer Rotation Shadow Priest Ranged DPS Leveling Holy Priest Healer Rotation Holy Priest Healer Guide

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