Shadow Priest Best Legendaries in Shadowlands — Shadowlands 9.0.2
Legendary Powers are targetable, unique effects that you can imbue certain base items with through the Runecarving system. In Shadowlands, these enable you to customize your Shadow Priest, drastically improving your performance, and are arguably the most important aspect of your gear.
The purpose of this page is to help you pick the right legendary powers (and item slots for them) for your character, depending on the content you are interested in.
Introduction: Legendaries in Shadowlands
After completing enough Torghast runs you will be able to craft Legendary-level gear via through the new Runecarving system. Each power is unique, although several of them harken back to previous Legendary or tier set effects from past World of Warcraft expansions. In this guide we will go over each Legendary for Shadow Priest with full explanations and a final ranking.
Best Legendaries for Shadow Priest
For a video walkthrough of our options, check out my overview video where I go over each Legendary.
Any slots that are bolded are generally speaking the better version of the item you should craft. Depending on the slot the amount of primary and secondary stats can shift. This typically is not a large difference, but makes sense to min max around based on the gear drops that come from the raid since we can control the stats on these items.
Focus | Legendary | Slots | Source |
---|---|---|---|
Raiding | ![]() |
Legs or Waist | Torghast (The Upper Reaches, Layer 3+) |
Mythic+ | ![]() |
Hands or Wrists | Castle Nathria (Blood Council) |
Torghast and Open World | ![]() |
Legs or Waist | Torghast (The Upper Reaches, Layer 3+) |
For Call to the Void, the Wrists can also be smart to craft if
you get lucky with a good pair of Gloves early. Unfortunately, there are no
Haste/Crit or Haste/Mastery Wrists in dungeons or raiding, so you are relying
on getting a high level pair with not the most ideal stats. Crafting either
will be pretty equal, but I would lean towards the Wrists as a better short-term
upgrade that also is cheaper to craft.
Between Talbadar's Stratagem and
Call to the Void, you
will be setup to handle most situations from raid well, the question will be
what kind of damage pattern you are looking for. Talbadar's is inherently more
consistent, since it does not rely on proc gameplay. However, as Eternal Call to
the Void does have RPPM procs, it can be a blessing in disguise for progression
encounters if you get targeted with lots of mechanics where you are unable
to DPS effectively. Eternal Call to the Void also has much better stacked
AoE ability, whereas Talbadars is purely there for Single Target or Priority
damage (unless you are taking
Psychic Link).
We do want to give an honorable mention to the
Twins of the Sun Priestess Legendary, as it can provide a good amount of
benefit for a fellow party member that could end up surpassing the value of
Call to the Void for yourself, but that will depend on your
confidence with them. This will of course not be a DPS increase for you, and
if you end up shifting your timings of using
Power Infusion to suit the
person you are giving it to, it could very well end up being a DPS loss, so be
careful.
There is a possibility that you would gain a significant increase if you
join up with a second Priest and chain Power Infusion casts together to line up
with every Voidform, but this is highly prone to errors and should not
be attempted if you are not confident in everyone's timings.
Best Overall Legendary for Shadow Priest
Due to current tuning and overall usefulness of Legendaries, you should
craft Call to the Void first for the best overall performance in
raids and mythic+. If you want to optimize purely for raiding, crafting
Talbadar's Stratagem is the best play.
If you care about Raiding and Mythic+ you should try and keep
Talbadar's Stratagem and
Call to the Void within similar
ranks of each other, with maybe a slight lean towards
Talbadar's Stratagem.
Your third Legendary should be
Twins of the Sun Priestess in case you ever find a good
use for this power with your raid team.
Best Raiding Legendaries for Shadow Priest
Raiding content as a DPS will constantly throw different situations at you, so when picking an overall raiding Legendary you want something that will be able to handle as many scenarios well as possible.
Talbadar's Stratagem gives you a boost to your
Mind Blasts on any target that currently has
Shadow Word: Pain,
Vampiric Touch, and
Devouring Plague ticking on them at the same time. In addition to the cool visual, this Legendary is very strong in single-target, but, as you add targets, your uptime on
Devouring Plague naturally falls off making this harder to gain maximum benefit. Still, the large increase to your single-target and priority damage is great for most raid encounters, especially for progression.
Call to the Void provides you with passive Insanity generation that procs based on your current channeled
Mind Flay or
Mind Sear. So, if you are channeling Mind Flay and get a proc, you will spawn a Void Tendril that will cast Mind Flay on your current target for passive damage and 3 Insanity gain per tick. Alternatively, getting a proc while channeling Mind Sear will cause a Void Lasher to channel Mind Sear at your current target that will do passive damage and generate 1 Insanity per tick per target. Since this proc reacts based on your spell, it becomes extremely versatile in almost every raid fight, assuming you are casting your channeled spells. It is not anything super impressive, but it will provide nice passive gains.
Twins of the Sun Priestess is a bit of a wild-card pickup, but if you find yourself not getting great benefit from the previous Legendaries, you could use this to augment another player's cooldowns. This really is not a DPS increase to you, but could be a net gain for the party. With a
Power Unto Others Conduit, you do get a bit of a cooldown reduction, but that is only a gain if the person you are casting it on does not mind getting the cast de-synced after subsequent uses.
- Lastly, as a purely last resort option, you can use
Norgannon's Sagacity to help with heavy movement points in the fight. Technically, if you play perfectly, you should never need this, and use your instant cast spells to move to where you need to be ahead of time, but this could be good if you are learning a fight for the first time and want to keep casting.
Best Mythic+ Legendaries for Shadow Priest
Mythic+ typically leans towards wanting more AoE damage, but since you will still spend about half of your time on bosses and Prideful mobs, having single-target is still quite valuable in terms of overall dungeon damage.
Call to the Void is equally suited for Mythic+ as it is for raids, being a fine passive addition for trash packs as well as still being good on bosses. All around it will at least do something in terms of the overall dungeon worth nothing.
Norgannon's Sagacity can be another okay option if you are struggling with damaging packs and moving at the same time. There are not a lot of great options for pure AoE.
Shadowflame Prism is a 5-target cleave Legendary that can do okay damage on 2 or 3 targets, but even then to get full value out of this Legendary you are missing out on
Mind Sear and
Searing Nightmare casts. Unfortunately, this opportunity cost makes this Legendary hardly worth crafting in the first place, at current tuning levels.
Best Torghast Legendaries for Shadow Priest
If you plan on running Torghast with a group of people, consider referring to the Mythic+ recommendations if your group is large enough that you have to heal for most of the time.
Torghast Legendaries are in a similar boat as Mythic+ for us; depending on how you pull, the value will swing quite widely and there really is not a "best" Legendary for this reason.
Stable Phantasma Lure is a unique Legendary that augments your Torghast run by increasing the Torghast-only currency you get inside each run. The amount will vary, but could potentially add up to be enough to let you buy an additional Anima Power, making it extremely powerful compared to our other options for Legendaries.
Call to the Void is a decent enough Legendary to run in Torghast, although if you are doing lower sets of floors that you outgear, you are probably not casting much
Mind Flay and therefore not getting quite maximum value out of this Legendary than you would otherwise.
Norgannon's Sagacity can be a useful choice here if you are on higher level floors and find yourself kiting mobs to prevent taking damage often.
Changelog
- 11 Jan. 2021: Update Legendary rankings for Talbadar's Stratagem.
- 03 Jan. 2021: Add embed video to the page.
- 15 Dec. 2020: Fix gear slot for EcttV for all types of content.
- 04 Dec. 2020: Fix typo in statement on Haste heavy Gloves from raid/dungeons.
- 03 Dec. 2020: Added link to video guide.
- 29 Nov. 2020: Update Eternal Call to the Void Crafting Slot recommendation
- 20 Nov. 2020: Page added.
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This guide has been written by Publik, Shadow Priest theorycrafter and SimC dev at Warcraft Priests. He currently raids in The Exiled on Arthas-US.
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