Shadow Priest DPS Castle Nathria Raid Guide — Shadowlands 9.2.5

During Shadowlands Season 4, Castle Nathria, Sanctum of Domination, and Sepulcher of the First Ones will each spend time being featured as a Fated Raid. During these times encounters within the specific raid will include an additional mechanic and items will drop at increased item levels. If you would like to learn more general information about the Fated Raids system as a whole, please see our overview below. Otherwise, continue to use this page for specialization-specific tips.

In this section, you will find information and guidance for Shadow Priests on each boss individually in the Castle Nathria raid. These are not complete encounter guides, but rather provide specific tips for doing the bosses as a Shadow Priest.

All recommendations are progression based tips and will not necessarily be the best for an overall DPS ranking.

The following recommendations are going to be from the perspective of a Necrolord and assume that you have Memory of Unity. Other covenants will be generally inferior and will not be suggested. The below suggestions also assume you have access to the T28 4-set bonus AND are equipping Shadowflame Prism. If you do not have tier or cannot use Tier AND Shadowflame Prism you will swap out Mindbender for Damnation.

Generally speaking we will show Twist of Fate for most encounters, especially the single-target heavy ones. If you are struggling to re-dot effectively, Misery could make sense as you learn the fight, but generally will perform worse.

With the introduction of Season 3 each raid boss will have a different Fated affix.

• Fated Power: Chaotic Essence
• Fated Power: Creation Spark
• Fated Power: Protoform Barrier
• Fated Power: Reconfiguration Emitter

These affixes are strong enough that you should try to play around them in a coordinated group. Most of them spawn relatively early on in the fight so it could be worth holding cooldowns and Bloodlust to line up with these large damage buffs.

We advise you to use the following talents against Shriekwing.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Twist of Fate
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Shriekwing: Shadowflame Prism.

• You can use Door of Shadows or Soulshape to easily line of sight quickly to keep DPSing for as long as possible.
• During intermission phases or when you are line of sighting the boss, be sure to cast Power Word: Shield on yourself and allies to gain Insanity via Hallucinations.

For more information, please refer to our Shriekwing guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against Huntsman Altimor.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Twist of Fate (or Misery, situationally)
• Level 35: Psychic Horror (or Mind Bomb, situationally)
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits (or Psychic Link, situationally)
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Huntsman Altimor: Shadowflame Prism.

• Between Misery and Twist of Fate, this will primarily come down to your ability to re-DoT effectively. Because of the shared health pool between the boss and the add there is no effective padding, so we can get very large benefit out of Twist of Fate uptime throughout the encounter. However, if taking this talent means you personally struggle to maintain DoTs on these two targets, you should use Misery until you feel more comfortable.
• To maximize damage, you should make sure you have a few seconds heads up before a Shadow of Barghast add is gripped in for killing. With this heads up, you can bank up Insanity or save cooldowns to nuke down the add ASAP.
• As a Necrolord, make sure you get effective casts of Unholy Nova by hitting the boss with the add for max damage.
• Psychic Link could produce a good amount of damage if you get good timings with the Shade of Barghast adds, otherwise this should be close to equal to Auspicious Spirits anytime there are just two targets.

In terms of CC for the Destabilize mechanic, here are the following spells you can use as a priest to keep them locked down:

• Psychic Scream;
• Psychic Horror;
• Mind Bomb.

For more information, please refer to our Huntsman Altimor guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against Hungering Destroyer.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Twist of Fate
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Hungering Destroyer: Shadowflame Prism.

This fight is fairly straightforward as a Shadow Priest, and will mostly come down to executing your single-target rotation and using your instant cast abilities to move effectively without losing active uptime.

• Keep in mind when Consume cast is coming, since you will be running away from this you want to make sure to save cooldowns till after this so your burst does not get interrupted. Depending on incoming damage you can cast some spells, but typically this is not a good time to use cooldowns.
• You could consider trying out Venthyr on this boss. It does enough self-healing that you could reasonably see gains over Necrolord if you get enough reversal damage from Mindgames. Specifically, the boss leeches health from the tanks on each melee swing, which counts towards Mindgames reversal. So while you have Mindgames up on the boss it will continue to deal damage to it up to the shield amount as the boss tries to heal itself but instead damages itself.

For more information, please refer to our Hungering Destroyer guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against Artificer Xy'Mox.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Twist of Fate
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Artificer Xy'Mox: Shadowflame Prism.

• Do not be deceived by the adds here, this is a single-target encounter if your raid does the mechanics correctly, so you should build for that specifically. If your raiders get trapped too often that will just snowball the fight anyways.
• You can use Door of Shadows to easily "blink" out of the Edge of Annihilation at the last second as a Venthyr.
• Utilize Leap of Faith to easily reposition the Fated affix Chaotic Essence. It spawns as a clickable object you are able to grip. This can be useful if it spawns and you want it somewhere else or on top of the boss.

For more information, please refer to our Artificer Xy'Mox guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against Sun King's Salvation.

• Level 15: Death and Madness (or Fortress of the Mind, situationally)
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Misery (or Searing Nightmare, situationally)
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Shadow Crash (or Auspicious Spirits, situationally)
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void (situational options: Ancient Madness or Surrender to Madness)

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Sun King's Salvation: Shadowflame Prism.

The Kael'thas encounter is the biggest AoE fight we have in the raid, however the boss does come out during intermission phases, which are mostly single-target. I would cautiously swap to AoE/cleave talents as needed; keeping some single-target choices might be the better balance needed to kill the boss. If your raid is struggling with adds Death and Madness, Searing Nightmare, Shadow Crash, and even Surrender to Madness if you are feeling spicy will make quick work of each wave of adds. That being said for progression as a Shadow Priest, you probably want to go for more priority target damage rather than massive stacked burst AoE, which is why I prefer using Misery and Auspicious Spirits.

• From my testing, Searing Nightmare will be very strategy dependent, and likely not worth it for most progression kills. The adds typically are not clumped for very long, and you will lose considerable single-target and spread-target damage. Only use this talent if your strategy needs more stacked burst AoE.
• Utilizing Unholy Nova will be challenging on this boss. Since the ability does snapshot square root scaling, you need each add it hits to live for the full duration to get maximum damage. If you use this ability and a mob dies right away you will have lost considerable damage on the remaining adds.

For more information, please refer to our Sun King's Salvation guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against Lady Inerva Darkvein.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Twist of Fate (or Misery, situationally)
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Lady Inerva Darkvein: Shadowflame Prism.

• Depending on how good your group is at stacking adds, you could see some poor results with Shadow Crash since you need them to be perfectly stacked. For this reason it might be better to use Auspicious Spirits as your raid gets used to the fight.
• In addition to the point above, if your group is killing adds too quickly you likely will not get great results out of Misery and would be better off just tagging them for Twist of Fate uptime.

For more information, please refer to our Lady Inerva Darkvein guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against The Council of Blood.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind or Death and Madness
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Twist of Fate or Misery
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void

We advise you to use the following Legendary against The Council of Blood: Shadowflame Prism.

You will probably see better usage out of Misery compared to Twist of Fate, but this will largely depend on your uptime of Twist outside of typical execute and how important it is to DoT incoming adds. In addition, Shadow Crash is going to mostly be pad damage, and with Auspicious Spirits you will gain better priority target damage generally speaking on this boss. Regardless of your talent choice here, it IS worth it to cast Vampiric Touch on the off-target bosses for a priority target increase, but not Shadow Word: Pain.

• Depending on where your raid team is struggling with this boss, you can choose to build more single-target than multi-target since the last phase will just be a single boss.
• Unholy Nova will be extremely hard to time in this boss. Since the bosses reset their health when one of them dies, you only want your Unholy Nova to hit exactly 1 boss each cast, otherwise you are padding damage that will be healed AND dealing less priority target damage due to the square root scaling.
• On Mythic, I would suggest trying out Death and Madness, as the amount of adds that are out really starts to favor this talent over Fortress of the Mind.

For more information, please refer to our The Council of Blood guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against Sludgefist.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Twist of Fate
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Sludgefist: Shadowflame Prism.

• Be mindful of the Destructive Impact vulnerability phase and hold as many cooldowns as possible for this part of the encounter. It only lasts for 12s, so ideally you are using Void Eruption just before the phase and you already have all your setup DoTs active when he phases.
• Utilize Leap of Faith to easily re-position the Fated affix Chaotic Essence. It spawns as a clickable object you are able to grip. This can be useful if it spawns and you want it somewhere else or on top of the boss.

Below are rough guidelines you can use to time your cooldowns with each Destructive Impact vulnerability phase. Note that depending on the affix timing of the boss you should consider delaying cooldowns to line up better with these damage buffs.

• 0:00 — Use all cooldowns on pull. This includes Void Eruption, Power Infusion, and Mindbender. Because the first vulnerability happens quickly and sometimes a bit sooner than 1 minute you should use Unholy Nova earlier than you would otherwise, just before your first Voidform.
• 1:00 — Save your 2nd cast of Mindgames/ Unholy Nova for this first vulnerability window and use your 2nd Mindbender.
• 2:10 — Use your 2nd Void Eruption cast of the fight along with Power Infusion, Mindbender, and Mindgames/ Unholy Nova.
• 3:20 — This is the second small window, where you will just use Mindbender and Mindgames/ Unholy Nova.
• 4:30 — This is the big push as the boss will be enraged by this point. If your group chooses to Bloodlust here you should use your potion. The rest of your cooldowns should all be up, including Void Eruption, Power Infusion, Mindbender, and Mindgames/ Unholy Nova. This is basically a re-hashed opener, and you should have everything ready to blast the boss.

The below optimizes total cooldowns, and de-syncs Power Infusion. You can choose to move this around based on your lust timings, these are done so that you get maximum casts of the ability while still having it for the last pillar.

• 0:00 — Cast Power Infusion on pull, this is done to maximize uses but still get it for the last pillar.
• 0:50 — Cast Void Eruption so that it is running while the pillar is active.
• 0:55 — Cast your first Fae Guardians right before the first pillar.
• ~2:00 — Cast your second Void Eruption before the second pillar.
• ~2:00 — Use your second Power Infusion. As long as you use this before ~2:20 things should sync.
• 2:25 — Cast your second Fae Guardians right after the second pillar (on cooldown basically).
• ~3:10 — Cast your third Void Eruption before the third pillar.
• 3:55 — Cast your third Fae Guardians when it comes back off cooldown.
• 4:25 — Cast your fourth Void Eruption for the last pillar of the fight. Depending on Fae Guardians timings this might vary a bit, but you should get this before the last pillar. You will also use your third Power Infusion cast for this pillar.

These cooldown timings are following the suggested Sludgefist strategy that suggests using Bloodlust on pull or for the last Vulnerability phase where he gains his enrage. If you use different timings you might want to shake things up slightly or move your potion to correspond with Bloodlust, since you will only get one potion.

Since the vulnerability window lasts just 12 seconds, it is very important that you are already setup by the time the boss has started his charge. This means you should pre-cast your cooldowns so that they are already up and ticking by the time he has gone vulnerable. Save on hit abilities like Mindgames to use during this window. This is basically the only time where banking up 100 Insanity and double casting Devouring Plague can net you positive results. Also feel free to use Void Torrent inside of Voidform, to get even more burst damage during this window.

For more information, please refer to our Sludgefist guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against Stone Legion Generals.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind (or Death and Madness, situationally)
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Misery (or Twist of Fate, situationally)
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits (or Psychic Link, situationally)
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void or Surrender to Madness

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Stone Legion Generals: Shadowflame Prism.

This fight has a lot of add management, so depending on your raid's group AoE it might be better to build for more priority target damage so that the correct adds are dying at the right time, rather then all of them phasing at once. This fight becomes very straightforward so play it like you do normally and you will do just fine. Make sure to keep good track of when your group will be phasing; the last thing you want to do is pop cooldowns as you are about to phase into the intermission, since the bosses take almost 100% reduced damage during this phase. For this reason, it is typically better to hold cooldowns during intermission for when the boss(es) become active again.

• Your use of Mind Flay vs. Mind Sear will mostly come down to if you need the priority damage or not, so keep this in mind as the adds come out.
• Similar to Huntsman, using Psychic Link is straight up even or worse than Auspicious Spirits on 2 targets, and worse on 1 target. However for the other points in the fight that are more than that you can see gains with this talent.

For more information, please refer to our Stone Legion Generals guide.

We advise you to use the following talents against Sire Denathrius.

• Level 15: Fortress of the Mind
• Level 25: No specific recommendation
• Level 30: Misery (situational options: Twist of Fate or Searing Nightmare)
• Level 35: No specific recommendation
• Level 40: Auspicious Spirits
• Level 45: Mindbender
• Level 50: Hungering Void

We advise you to use the following Legendary against Sire Denathrius: Shadowflame Prism.

This is a multi-phase fight with just about every different kind of mechanic available. The first phase has lots of stacked low health mobs that will benefit from Shadow Crash or Searing Nightmare, but the rest of the fight is single-target or spread multi-target where Misery, Twist of Fate, and Auspicious Spirits will shine better. Pick the build that makes the most sense for your raid or the part you are currently progressing.

As a Venthyr you will want to try and save Mindgames in phase one for each Insatiable Hunger add cast. This is the red line that people soak, so typically safe to cast this as the lines go out so the debuff is up before the adds complete the charge/cast. This hit does significantly more damage than the initial hit of Mindgames, and is well worth optimizing around. Since this does not happen outside of phase 1 unfortunately this only works in that phase.

For Phase One, your primary objective will likely be clean add damage as phasing him too quickly will cause problems. This is where Shadow Crash can come in handy for the add waves (or even Searing Nightmare if you want to pad), but it is generally not worth it for the rest of the fight. For those of you that are Venthyr you can save Mindgames until just after the adds spawn, to get extra damage from the healing reversal part of that spell.

For Phase Two, you immediately see why Shadow Crash starts to look bad, as it makes damaging all enemies slightly more difficult, especially with Remoria and the boss teleporting throughout the phase. In terms of progression, you probably should use Auspicious Spirits for this very reason. This also plays into why Misery can be strong here to save you several globals per set of adds so that you can focus on other things going on in the fight.

For more information, please refer to our Sire Denathrius guide.