Shadow Priest Leveling Guide from 1 to 70 — The War Within Pre-Patch

When it comes to gearing out your Shadow Priest, you should always take the piece with a higher Intellect value, typically referenced by the item level of that piece. Intellect is far and away our better stat and will make everything you do hit harder and kill mobs quicker.

When you get pieces of gear that have the same Intellect you should roughly prioritize pieces with Haste, Mastery, or ideally both to be slightly more optimal.

Starting at level 10 you gain access to talent points. I suggest using the following talent build for leveling your Shadow Priest:

The build suggested for leveling is focused around DoTs and moving quickly through the leveling process. When leveling, particularly in a group, mobs will not live very long, so we prioritize just being able to get DoTs up on a target and then moving on to the next one. This lets you continuously pull mobs with Vampiric Touch and Shadow Crash and let your dots do the heavy lifting for you. Once you have your DoTs active on the enemies you care about then you can use your other spells.

This build also give you access to several instant cast procs to make casting on the move easier, namely Shadowy Insight and Deathspeaker. For higher health targets you can use Dark Ascension and spells like Void Torrent or Halo depending on your hero talent of choice.

NOTE: Hero Talents start at level 71 and are NOT available during pre-patch.

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Starting at Level 71, you gain access to Hero Talents. For leveling purposes I strongly suggest going with Voidweaver spec. This not only further enhances the DoT playstyle due to Inner Quietus but also is much better for short lived encounter compared to Archon which does better on enhancing our cooldowns and long lived encounters.

While leveling up feel free to use whichever path best suits you, eventually we will get all of these points so the ordering is not super important. That being said if you are looking for a rough guideline you can follow the below list. This is optimized for outdoor use and Dungeon gameplay for leveling up. Use the following order for leveling up your Hero Talents as a Voidweaver:

1. Void Blast - 4.4%
2. Void Empowerment - 4.6%
3. Void Infusion - 0.9%
4. Collapsing Void - 5.2%
5. No Escape or Dark Energy - 0.0%
6. Devour Matter - 0.0% (most of the time)
7. Voidheart - 6.0%
8. Inner Quietus - 2.9%
9. Voidwraith - 0.8%
10. Void Leech or Embrace the Shadow - 0.0%

Starting at Level 1, you only have Smite, so just spam this for now.

Before combat, make sure you have the following buffs active:

• Power Word: Fortitude
• Shadowform

1. Keep up Shadow Word: Pain on as many targets as possible.
2. Keep up Vampiric Touch on as many targets as possible.
3. Use Shadow Crash to quickly apply DoTs to targets.
4. With Misery talented use Vampiric Touch to refresh and apply both DoTs on as many targets as possible.
5. Use Shadowfiend as a cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
6. Use Dark Ascension as your main cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
7. Use Power Infusion as a cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
8. Use Devouring Plague to spend Insanity for damaging a single target.
9. Use Void Blast during Entropic Rift.
10. Use Void Torrent on cooldown.
11. Use Shadow Word: Death on any target below 20% health.
12. Use Shadow Word: Death on any target below 20% health or with a Deathspeaker proc.
13. Use Mind Blast on cooldown.
14. Cast Mind Flay: Insanity to spend procs of Surge of Insanity.
15. Use Shadow Crash to do some AoE damage.
16. Use Halo as a sort of AoE filler spell when facing multiple enemies. Generally not used in pure single target.
17. Use Mind Flay as your filler spell.
18. Use Smite as a filler spell.

You also have the following spells you can use:

• Power Word: Shield for an extra defensive shield.
• Psychic Scream as an AoE Crowd Control ability.
• Desperate Prayer as a defensive ability.
• Mind Soothe to help skip past enemies.
• Dispel Magic to remove buffs off enemies.
• Fade to help skip past mobs with the reduced aggro radius.
• Fade to help skip past mobs with the reduced aggro radius or as a defensive.
• Silence to interrupt enemies casting.
• Dispersion as your most powerful defensive ability.
• Flash Heal if you are running low on health.
• Flash Heal if you are running low on health or for the defensive buff of Protective Light.
• Angelic Feather for movement.
• Vampiric Embrace for powerful healing during large damage windows.
• Angelic Feather or Power Word: Shield for movement.
• Dominate Mind can control certain enemies to get a temporary pet to help you level.

Check out the link below to learn more.

In addition to these active abilities, you will also gain some passive abilities that will impact how you play as you level up:

• At level 10, you also gain our baseline Mastery ability, Mastery: Shadow Weaving. This does not change your playstyle much; just know that you will deal more damage to targets if they have your DoTs are active on them.
• Shadowy Apparitions spawns out a ghostly version of yourself every time you cast Mind Blast, Devouring Plague, or Void Bolt if that target has Vampiric Touch active. This drastically increases the value of Vampiric Touch, so make sure you DoT up most mobs with it unless they will only live a few short seconds.
• Misery makes DoTing easier and allows you to almost never need to press Shadow Word: Pain except for movement scenarios.
• Psychic Link unlocks your AoE potential, giving most of your spells cleave to targets with Vampiric Touch active.
• Shadowy Insight causes your main DoT spell to occasionally give you a free cast of Mind Blast.
• Deathspeaker adds another proc into your kit to help with on the move gameplay.

In this section, we will go over each of the War Mode/PvP talents you should consider using while leveling up.

1. Catharsis is your most powerful open world PvP talent. Be sure to track this buff to know when you are capped on Shadow Word: Pain damage.
2. Psyfiend will do a sizable chunk of damage on a relatively low cooldown.
3. Driven to Madness allows you to use your main cooldown more often. Feel free to start using this on cooldown instead of just saving it for big packs or important enemies.
4. Use Mind Trauma until you unlock more talents.
5. Use Phase Shift until you unlock more talents.
6. Mindgames gives you a more utility based filler spell that generates Insanity. Use this right above your normal filler spells like Mind Flay.

Congratulations on reaching Level 80! Now that you have hit Level 80, we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level.