Shadow Priest Frequently Asked Questions — Shadowlands 9.0.2
On this page, we go over several of the most frequently asked questions regarding Shadow Priest in World of Warcraft — Battle for Azeroth Shadowlands 9.0.2. This will be updated as more common repeated questions surface over the course of the expansion.
Is There a Haste Cap for Shadow Priest?
No, there is not a set amount of Haste that you need to get as Shadow in order for the spec to function, or after which the stat becomes incredibly devalued. The same goes for Critical Strike, Mastery and Versatility. You will generally want to aim to just get as much Haste rating as possible, however past 30% Haste, Critical Strike, or Versatility these stats do start to take on Diminishing Return values. This starts at 19% for Mastery.
You can learn more about the stat priority on our dedicated stats page.
Which Race is Best for Shadow Priest?
All races are really close to one another in terms of the DPS benefit they
provide you, so the answer to this is generally to just pick what you like.
Perhaps more importantly, look at the benefits each of the races give you apart
from DPS; for example, tools like Rocket Jump or
Shadowmeld do
not directly increase your DPS, but the utility they provide you can be way
more useful to the group than any tiny DPS that another race could offer.
For more detail about racials as a Shadow Priest, check out my video guide.
Does Applying DoTs to Secondary Targets Increase Single-Target DPS?
Yes, but only for certain reasons. A good example here is the Council of Blood
encounter in Castle Nathria. Since the bosses reset their HP when one dies
the damage that is healed is effectively "pad" or extra damage that does not help kill
the boss. However, because of interactions with Vampiric Touch with
Shadowy Apparitions,
Dark Thoughts, and importantly
Auspicious Spirits
it is worth to leave Vampiric Touch on off targets for priority target damage.
That being said it is NOT worth to do the same for
Shadow Word: Pain.
If you want to learn more about the rotation and when to DoT which targets check out our rotation guide below.
Do I Use Misery or Searing Nightmare For Dungeons?
Both of these talents are excellent at what they do, but they both do it in
slightly different ways. Misery primarily excels whenever there are
targets spread around in an area, whereas
Searing Nightmare primarily
excels whenever targets are stacked in an area.
Misery provides you
with a fairly DoT-heavy playstyle and so ideally requires there to be a
relatively small amount of long living enemies.
Searing Nightmare tends
to perform better when there are larger groups of enemies that do not
necessarily have to live for a long time, but since
Searing Nightmare
also applies
Shadow Word: Pain its benefit extends to more sustained
fights as well.
Deciding which is better for which situation can be tough and depends on a few factors, including but not necessarily limited to the following.
- How you pull in a dungeon; are you doing packs of 3 mobs at a time or are you pulling 10 mobs at a time?
- Difficulty/Keystone level of the dungeon you are doing; how long are mobs generally going to be living?
- Design of the dungeon; does this dungeon have a lot of forced big pulls or are mob packs generally small?
These factors will change a lot from run to run, but at the end of the day
the choice between Searing Nightmare and
Misery largely comes
down to how you pull the dungeon. If you prefer a more classical Shadow
playstyle that leans heavily on you multi-DoTting, then you will find that
Misery delivers that perfectly. If you like the idea of being able to spread
Shadow Word: Pain to large groups of enemies and having a large amount of
AoE burst damage, then
Searing Nightmare will do that for you. If you
are not sure, it is suggested you pick
Searing Nightmare because this
will suit you well for almost any situation in dungeons, whereas
Misery has a few more conditions it needs to meet for it to
potentially be better.
For a deeper discussion on when to use which talents check out out full guide on the talents page.
Which Level 50 Talent do I Use for Dungeons?
Every option in this row has a clear path to success in terms of dungeon content,
that all depends on how you pull the dungeons and what you can afford to do.
Both Ancient Madness and
Surrender to Madness are great
talents for Mythic+, but depending on how you plan on pulling the dungeon you
can see one or the other pulling ahead.
Ancient Madness provides you
with a larger burstier
Voidform and does better with bigger pulls,
less of them. Surrender to Madness on the other hand does better with
smaller pulls but more of them, especially if you can alternate between
Voidform and Surrender to Madness on each pack. For most keys
and especially if you are not sure exactly how you will end up pulling the
dungeon, Surrender to Madness should be your default pick, it is very
flexible and easy to use inside of a dungeon environment.
What about Hungering Void? With current gear levels you can
actually match
Voidform uptime with Hungering Void compared to
Surrender to Madness, making it a great generic choice depending on how you
pull the dungeon. If you find yourself fighting too many packs without
Voidform while using Hungering Void, you probably should have taken
Surrender to Madness instead.
If you want to learn more about Hungering Void you can check out
Publik's YouTube Video going over the talent.
For a deeper discussion on when to use which talents check out out full guide on the talents page.
Should I Always Finish a Mind Flay Cast?
No, you should not. Mind Flay is regarded as a filler spell, which
means it is only used when nothing else more important can be cast. You
typically want to start thinking about re-casting Mind Flay about
halfway through the channel to make sure that if you get a
Dark Thoughts proc you have enough of a cast left to fit in that
global cooldown.
Mind Flay has a base channel time of 4.5 seconds, which is reduced
by Haste. The global cooldown is imposed on most spells in the game and it
prevents you from casting multiple spells at the same time; the base global
cooldown lasts 1.5 seconds, which is reduced by Haste. As you may be able to
tell, the duration of Mind Flay is triple that of the global cooldown, and so
as a rule of thumb you can say that Mind Flay has a duration equal to 3 global
cooldowns, or 3 globals as they are popularly referred to. They both scale with
Haste in the same way as well, so no matter your Haste, Mind Flay will always
last exactly 3 global cooldowns worth of time.
The above is relevant because Mind Flay deals its damage over 6
ticks, over the course of its duration. Since we have established that Mind
Flay does its damage over 3 globals, we can state that Mind Flay does 2 ticks
of damage per global. This means that there is no loss to cancelling Mind Flay
early, as long as you do it after every global and not during a
global.
If you want to learn more about the rotation check out our rotation guide below.
When Should I Refresh My DoTs?
Vampiric Touch and
Shadow Word: Pain both benefit from
something we call 'Pandemic'. This means that you are able to refresh both DoTs
when they are at 30% or less of their duration without getting penalized for
this. What this essentially does is extend the window you have to refresh your
DoTs. As an example, Shadow Word: Pain lasts for 16 seconds, so its Pandemic is
4.8 seconds. In other words, the best time to refresh Shadow Word: Pain is when
it has 4.8 or less seconds left and if you do so at or below this threshold, it
will add the remaining time to the original duration. If you were to refresh
Shadow Word: Pain when it has 3 seconds left, that would leave the new duration
at 19 seconds as an example.
Devouring Plague is a very unique DoT, but does benefit from certain
refresh mechanics.
Devouring Plague rolls over damage when refreshed,
meaning that whatever damage the DoT has left when you refresh the DoT gets
carried over and added as a multiplier to the new DoT's ticks. As such
refreshing has no "cost" associated with it, even though we spent the insanity
to cast the spell. This should not really change your rotation much, just do
not feel like you have to wait for the current DoT to finish before recasting it.
You still want to try and refresh around 1s remaining to get maximum
DoT uptime for our
Mastery: Shadow Weaving.
If you want to learn more about the rotation check out our rotation guide below.
Changelog
- 03 Dec. 2020: Added link to video guide on Racials for that question.
- 23 Nov. 2020: Clarified a few answers based on Shadowlands data.
- 12 Oct. 2020: Page updated for the Shadowlands pre-patch.
More Priest Guides
Guides from Other Classes
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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