How To Improve As Shadow Priest — The War Within (11.1.7)

This might seem like a silly mistake to the point that people might be making, but it is something seen fairly often. It is crucial for Shadow because you always have something to cast, and you operate at high Haste levels than most specs in the game do. This means that it is easier to miss a cast here or there, and throughout a fight, this can add up. Try always to mash the next button you want to cast while casting your current spell to make sure you cast it as fast as possible.

Perhaps the biggest learning curve as a Shadow Priest is learning how to deal with movement during a fight. While Priests can use Angelic Feather or Body and Soul for movement, being able to move without relying on these is a good way to improve DPS. It is important to master the following two guidelines:

First of all, it is important to understand the concept of something we call 'stutter-stepping.' Stutter-stepping means that you are moving small distances between your globals and fitting in any instant spells you may have to ensure you do not lose any casts. Luckily for Shadow, during Voidform, you get access to Void Bolt, which is instant and available often. Outside of Voidform, you can use Shadow Word: Death, Devouring Plague, or certain procs like Shadowy Insight. This means you can move a few yards after every instant cast ability you cast if you want to. Playing around with this is key to optimizing your damage. You can sometimes move into position ahead of time if you know a mechanic will force you to move soon. The goal here is that you slowly move to your destination over time, but you will lose no casts in the process. Using instant casts to cover your movement is ideal, but sometimes that is not enough. In the first place, because you may not be in Voidform when movement happens; in the second place , because certain fight mechanics do not give you the time to do this properly.

Secondly, you must learn to use Shadow Word: Pain in cases of movement. When doing the rotation normally, Mind Flay or Mind Spike is your filler spell. If there is a movement where the above-explained stutter stepping does not cover it entirely, the second most ideal way to deal with movement is to use some ability while moving. You can insert any available ability here, the point being you are pressing something while on the move and not only moving. Shadow Word: Pain is always available, so use this as a last resort.

Reviewing logs and understanding how to improve is a critical skill anyone looking to play the game at a high level needs to get good at. Relying on others to review your own play makes you detached from the process and less likely to improve naturally.

The first thing to do when reviewing your log is to compare it to something equivalent. Having another log to look at is crucial when comparing casts, buff uptime, and more to that specific encounter. WarcraftLogs lets you do this easily and even tries to find another player with similar gear as you to provide a more accurate comparison.

To compare a log select a specific encounter you would like to compare and select Compare at the top right corner.

Select your player and then select search.

From the entries that pop up try and pick one with a good match to your player. The higher up they are the better the parse was. Select the player name to pop up the comparison view. Finding one with a similar close kill time is also very important.

Now that you have the comparison pulled up you can compare various factors to see what you could have done to improve.

Before going deeper into the comparison I would suggest trimming the fight lengths to match exactly. This will make comparing things like cast counts more accurate. Select the portion on the timeline then click and drag to your preferred selection. Once you have this trimmed you can move on to the next section.

Inside the comparison feature here is a list of things to compare between the two to see where you might have gaps or opportunities to improve.

• Cast Counts
• Buff Uptime
• Debuff Uptime
• Cooldown Timing

Cast Counts

One of the most important things you can do inside of a log comparison is comparing cast counts. This should be easily seen in the damage done table.

Things to look at specifically:

• Counts of your rotational spells, what are you missing or prioritizing differently?
• Counts of cooldowns, are you getting the same number of casts?
• Manual casts of DoTs. Ideally you should have a low amount of manual Vampiric Touch casts.
• Are you missing casts across the board? That likely means you are moving too much without casting something.
• When did they use Spymaster's Web? This can often lead to large benefits if you tweak this to that specific fight.

Buff Uptime and Procs

The next thing would be to move onto the buffs section. There is a lot to look at here but here are a few notable ones:

• Did your groups use Bloodlust at similar times? If not this could result in a pretty big difference, consider comparing to a different log if so.
• If you are playing with Void Eruption be sure to compare the duration of the buff itself of Voidform. Large differences can mean you are missing the priority of our spells that generate Insanity like Void Bolt to allow for more casts of Devouring Plague during cooldowns to extend this duration.

While on this page you should also look at specific times you casted the various spells.

• Did you use Tempered Potion at the right time?
• Did you pair and time your cooldowns at the right moment? Some fights it might make sense to delay or move uses of cooldowns to line up with specific boss phasing.
• Check for differences in consumables like Augment Runes, Flask uptime, Vantus Runes, and Food Buff. Missing some of these could be a big deal!

One big thing to note is any potential externals the player might have gotten. If they are getting extra help from external Power Infusion from other Priests or something like that you should find another log to compare against.

In addition to buff uptimes you can also check for certain procs in this section. Sometimes someone just gets lucky with more procs which can also change how many casts of spells they get out. Here are some procs to look out for differences:

• Twist of Fate (can get lucky procs from healing spells like Essence Devourer)
• Weapon Enchant Procs
• Shadowy Insight
• Insanity generated from Maddening Touch
• Insanity generated from Auspicious Spirits
• Mind Devourer procs
• Deathspeaker procs

Debuff Uptimes

This is a bit of a smaller section, but it is critical that you keep up uptime on your DoTs. Use the below guidelines for what is generally good:

• Shadow Word: Pain - 99% or higher
• Vampiric Touch - 99% or higher
• Devouring Plague - 90% or higher

Cooldown Timings

I covered this in a previous section, but you also want to make sure you are comparing cooldown timings. Often times fights might have particular phases or mechanics where it might be optimal to NOT just simply use your cooldowns on cooldown.

You can check this using the casts tab and selecting each major cooldown and comparing the times they were used for each player.

One critical piece to check either inside a log comparison or stand alone is how you did with your rotation. By going to the Casts tab and clicking on Timelines you can get a good view of what things look like over a period of time.

While you are in this view I suggest keeping the Rotation Guide alongside and compare the sample opener with what you did in your opener. After that you can also check general cast priority to make sure you were roughly following things correctly. Note that these openers do not account for procs which might change a few spells here and there.

You can also check out lorrgs.io which is a fantastic tool for understanding what top logs are doing on a particular encounter. This gives you a timeline view to see timelines of casts of a bunch of Shadow Priests at a glance which can be incredibly helpful for specific fight cooldown timings.

Outside of log comparison there are a couple of other things to highlight when reviewing a log.

• Sometimes RNG might be in or out of someone's favor. Sometimes someone will just get more procs of certain effects which will naturally swing your damage.
• Comparing Mythic+ Dungeons is very challenging. Each dungeon from group to group is completely different in terms of routing, how fast things die, and other factors that influence the log itself. The best way to look at this kind of data is zoning in on bosses or specific opener packs individually instead of the entire dungeon as a whole when comparing.
• Record your gameplay footage. Often times watching yourself play a scenario back can lead to obvious notes of how to improve when you are able to hyper focus on your play afterwards.

When simming your character, it is important to sim for the types of things that your character is dealing with. If you just sim for simple Patchwerk 1 target, then that is all your character will be optimized for. I recommend simming a few times when determining if something is an upgrade across various fight types. For the sims we do internally, we use the following different settings: [Patchwerk, Light Movement, Heavy Movement] X [1 target, 2 target] X [No add, 3 small adds, 1 big add]. If you are new to Simulating your character, make sure you check out the Simulations page to learn more or check out the SimC Wiki.

To see full sims out there for Shadow Priests, check the GitHub Sim Charts Site. This site contains sims for almost everything you could need to get started on your Priest or if you are just looking for some direction when gearing your character. These sims are all run using Composite sim types. They take some of the scenarios described above and weigh them into a composite number based on how often that type of mechanic shows up in the current raid tier.