Shadow Priest Mists of Pandaria: Remix Guide — The War Within Pre-Patch

Welcome to our MoP Remix Guide for Shadow Priest! This page contains everything you need to know about getting the most out of your Shadow Priest in the Patch 10.2.7 special feature, Mists of Pandaria: Remix.

This page is focused only on Shadow Priest in MoP Remix. If you want to know more about MoP Remix in general, such as its rewards, check out our dedicated page below.

Below, you will find our recommended leveling build and talent pickup order for your Shadow Priest in MoP Remix. There are various ways of leveling in MoP Remix, and we offer some builds for the most relevant ways.

Note that this Leveling section is specific to MoP Remix. For our Dragonflight Leveling Guide for Shadow Priest, please check our dedicated Leveling page.

Gems are one of the unique ways to augment your character in MoP Remix, offering offensive, defensive, and utility benefits. On this page, we list the best gems for each type. To learn more about Gems in MoP Remix in general, check out our dedicated page below.

Your Meta gem is your most powerful gem that scale with the item level of the item they are socketed on. You can have 1 Meta gem equipped on your Helm only. The following gems are all great choices as a Shadow Priest, pick the one that sounds the most fun to you!

• Tireless Spirit
• Lifestorm
• Oblivion Sphere
• Locus of Power (Early Gearing)
• Funeral Pyre

Note that Locus of Power can be particularly strong at lower gear levels, but once you start acquiring more Prismatic gems, the value will fall off.

Currently there is a bug with Tireless Spirit that makes Devouring Plague still cost 5 Insanity when talented into Distorted Reality. This is certainly still strong in groups but does diminish the value for you when using that talent.

The Cogwheel gem grants you a familiar movement ability to augment your character. You can have 1 Cogwheel gem equipped on your Boots only. This choice is very much preference; I have listed the ones I think are most valuable as a Shadow Priest.

• Blink
• Spiritwalker's Grace
• Soulshape
• Stampeding Roar
• Door of Shadows

The Tinker gems will give you a range of powerful effects that will end up giving the most choice when it comes to playstyle and damage output. You can have a total of 12 Tinker gems on your gear:

• Shoulder: 3
• Wrists: 3
• Gloves: 3
• Waist: 3

To indicate strength of these gems I have put them into a tier list indicating strength. Gems in the higher tiers will generally be more powerful. Not every gem is listed, only the top gems for Shadow Priests.

Tier	Tinker Gems
S-Tier	Windweaver Lightning Rod Opportunist (If the target can be stunned) Slay Enkindle Brilliance (See note below)
A-Tier	Victory Fire (Fights with Adds/Open World) Hailstorm Wildfire Incendiary Terror Sunstrider's Flourish Explosive Barrage Mark of Arrogance (Scales well with high AoE damage taken fights)
B-Tier	Meteor Storm Frost Armor (Defensive) Cold Front Memory of Vengeance (With consistent damage taken) Storm Overload
C-Tier	Ankh of Reincarnation Freedom Bloodthirsty Coral Static Charge Vampiric Aura Vindication
D-Tier	Arcanist's Edge (Once you also have at least one absorb effect) Tinkmaster's Shield Brittle Searing Light Grounding Vampiric Aura
F-Tier	Fervor Holy Martyr Deliverance Righteous Frenzy Savior

Note that Brilliance gets significantly better when running with other Shadow Priests or specs like Balance Druid that also gain a lot of value from the effect. This effect also STACKS, meaning the more people that run this in the raid the more you get to spam Devouring Plague.

Your Prismatic Gems will be used to give your character more secondary or tertiary stats to a piece of gear. These gems have 4 different qualities like normal items will (Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary) and you can combine them together to get a higher tier gem.

In total you can have 21 Prismatic gems on your gear:

• Chest: 3
• Legs: 3
• Neck: 3
• Rings: 3 each
• Trinkets: 3 each

As you progress, you will start accumulating quite a lot of secondary stats. Shadow prefers running as much Haste and Mastery as possible, but Critical Strike and Versatility are also quite nice for scaling certain gems damage as well. Get a solid baseline of Haste and Mastery, and then balance out everything else.

As a Shadow Priest the spec wants a comfortable level of Haste (~30%) and then your goal should be to stack Mastery up until 19%. After that you want to get a solid footing of Critical Strike (20-25%) and Versatility (~10-15%). After this, you can then invest more into Haste and Mastery and begin capping Critical Strike.

The following is a list of the available Legendary Prismatic gems. Each has equivalents with similar names at lower ranks.

• Perfect Quick Topaz - Haste
• Perfect Masterful Amethyst - Mastery
• Perfect Deadly Sapphire - Critical Strike
• Perfect Versatile Diamond - Versatility
• Perfect Sustaining Emerald - Health
• Perfect Swift Opal - Speed
• Perfect Hungering Ruby - Leech
• Perfect Stalwart Pearl - Armor

While leveling up, you can also leverage the Gear Upgrade system to easily upgrade pieces of gear that you currently have. Normally this is quite expensive to do so, but when you get drops at a higher item level than what you have equipped you get a steep discount applied. This can be particularly useful to upgrade any Rare or Epic item drops you get from various pieces of content.

As you continue to progress through the end-game, here are your rough goals for secondary stats. You do not need to strictly cap Critical Strike and Haste due to gems increasing how much of these stats you gain naturally.

• 60-70% Haste
• 60-67% Mastery
• 70% Critical Strike at Most
• Dump everything else into Versatility

To keep things simple while leveling and learning the spec, use the slider to select your level, and watch as the leveling rotation grows with each level!

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

When using our slider, note that some talents may appear sooner than you expect them to in the rotation. This is because we have two recommended builds above, each taking talents at slightly different times, and sometimes entirely different talents.

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.

After you hit max level you can use the mainline rotation guide with the appropriate talents checked for your optimal rotation.