Shadow Priest DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Shadowlands 9.2.5
On this page, you will find the best gear and best in slot items for your Shadow Priest in World of Warcraft Shadowlands 9.2.5.
If you were looking for TBC Classic content, please refer to our TBC Classic Shadow Priest gear and best in slot.
Gearing a Shadow Priest
Welcome to our Gearing Page for Shadow Priest, this section will cover everything you need to know about equipping your character correctly.
If you are more of a visual learner, you can watch the video guide version of this guide instead. We would suggest reading this side-by-side during the video to absorb the information the best.
If you have a new piece of gear that you need gems and enchants advice for, you can find everything you need on our dedicated page below.
While gearing, item level is rather important, mainly due to the relative value increase of primary stats. In the case of Shadow, this means we want to prioritize Intellect first over any other stat; in other words, item level of gear will generally be the most important factor when looking at replacing something. Secondary stats are still important as well, however, and currently Shadow wants to focus on acquiring as much Haste and Mastery as it can. Critical Strike and Versatility are both lower in value. If it is not an obvious choice, sim your own character to find out. For a more detailed explanation, you can read the Simulations page.
General Simulations
While we heavily recommend simming yourself, you can find some of our general simulations on the dedicated page below.
Mythic+
Mythic+ rewards gear based upon the keystone level you complete
Legendary Powers
Depending on the type of content you are doing, you will be crafting and equipping a Legendary Item for your character. To craft these, you need to gather different crafting materials, as well as learn the power associated with the Legendary you want to use. The guide below tells you everything you need to know while crafting your best Legendary as a Shadow Priest. The BiS list below will give recommendations for each slot, so you have options on which piece to craft depending on what gear you have.
Domination Sockets
As of Patch 9.2 the Domination shards and set bonuses are not relevant for new content. These only work in Torghast, Korthia, and the Maw.
Tier 28 Set Bonus
With the release of the raid we will start to acquire our Tier Set gear which enables the following set effects:
- T28 2-piece:
Shadow Priest 2-Piece
- T28 4-piece:
Shadow Priest 4-Piece
You can not only acquire these set bonus items from the raid, but also the weekly Great Vault as well. The set bonus is upwards of 15% single target DPS increase for Shadow, so you will want to prioritize getting this ASAP. This does change up the rotation priority in certain scenarios, so be sure to check out the Rotation page for exactly how to optimize for tier set damage.
Crafting Tier Gear
After you progress enough through the new campaign you will also get access to the Creation Catalyst. This gives you the ability to transform any Season 3 piece into a piece with the tier set bonus effect. This will give you the ability to craft your way to the tier if you have unfortunate luck getting it to drop in the raid or your vault.
Note the item level of the piece you create is identical to what you put in. So putting in the higher ilevel drops from the last 3 bosses in the raid will give you the most stats.
Creation Catalyst Stats
One quirk of this system is that the stats are static based on what you put in. Use the list below to determine which slots might make sense for you to craft (tier set or not). The first stat listed is the larger of the two stats.
- Helm - Haste/Mastery (TIER)
- Shoulder - Mastery/Versatility (TIER)
- Cloak - Mastery/Critical Strike
- Chest - Critical Strike/Haste (TIER)
- Wrists - Haste/Versatility
- Gloves - Versatility/Haste (TIER)
- Belt - Critical Strike/Haste
- Legs - Mastery/Critical Strike (TIER)
- Boots - Versatility/Mastery
Trinket Rankings
With the large variety of trinkets and different item levels, specific sets of sims have been run to help you decide which trinkets to aim at getting as a Shadow Priest. You can use the Composite rankings for generic raid performance, while single-target is specific to 1-target sims with mixed movement to gauge performance.
- Composite Trinket Rankings
- Composite Trinket Combo Rankings
- Single Target Trinket Rankings
- Single Target Trinket Combo Rankings
Stats
Many people have a tendency to overthink the distribution of their secondary stats. An important thing to remember is that a higher quantity of stats is nearly always better than a better quality of stats. Because of this, wearing higher item level gear with worse stats tends to be better than lower item level gear with great stats. Keep this in mind when considering gear. For more stats information, please refer to our dedicated page.
Valor upgrades
With Patch 9.0.5 you now have access to upgrade gear obtained after the patch with Valor points. You can learn more about this system on the dedicated Valor page.
Pre-Raid Best in Slot Gear
This item list is specific to pre-raid gearing and focuses on the best gear to get before stepping into Sepulcher of the First Ones. Most of these pieces will come from dungeons, but you can also fill in some slots from the previous raid of Sanctum of Domination.
Note that Mythic+ gear can drop up to 262 item level with up to 278 coming from the weekly Great Vault. Tazavesh, the Veiled Market is now available as Mythic+ which does add some more options for gearing up.
With Patch 9.1.5 you can also run Legion Timewalking while that event
is active. Nothing from its available dungeons is absolutely BiS but you can
fill out your gear with some more Haste/Mastery pieces or
Moonlit Prism if you still need a good trinket.
Note that there are plenty of alternative items that are also good, just look for Haste pieces with ideally Mastery on them.
Best in Slot Gear from All Sources
The list below shows the best piece of gear for each individual slot that drops in Sepulcher of the First Ones. Alternatives will be listed from Mythic+ anytime the raid-drop piece is not well itemized. This means you will need to get lucky with your weekly vault to get comparable item level though.
Many of the slots are set in stone due to Tier Slots, these pieces will be marked specifically and should be targeted over alternatives.
Each tier item has an additional off-set slot provided since you do want to
prioritize getting 4-set even if its not the best 4 pieces. In addition, BiS setup
with Necrolord when you get access to Memory of Unity will have you
use
Pallid Command on Waist/Gloves/Ring/Head slot and then
Shadowflame Prism on Gloves/Head. You'll need to play around with slots you
craft these on based on what tier you have access to.
The Soulwarped Seal of Wrynn is currently not implemented in SimC as we are
not exactly sure how the proc rate scales with health. This item was not implemented or
available on the PTR so no testing was done. That being said the item appears to be
very strong and likely will be BiS but stay tuned for further testing.
Note that most of the trinkets that drop from the raid were not testable on PTR and thus we do not have data for these and they are not simmable. As such trinket rankings will be off until things are stabilized and we get some in game test data.
Changelog
- 31 May 2022: Page reviewed for Patch 9.2.5.
- 26 Feb. 2022: Swap out bis weapon and trinkets after early tuning.
- 22 Feb. 2022: Add BiS lists for 9.2 and discuss Tier set options.
- 01 Nov. 2021: Added note about Legion Timewalking and Moonlit Prism viability.
- 08 Sep. 2021: Updated 2nd BiS trinket after new sims for Forbidden Necromantic Tome have finished.
- 23 Jul. 2021: Clarified upgrade path for Shards of Domination.
- 18 Jul. 2021: Swapped out trinket charts for links to the Priest sim page.
- 13 Jul. 2021: Clarify domination socket note.
- 06 Jul. 2021: Added video link and updated gear rankings from latest hotfixes.
- 01 Jul. 2021: Added Tome of Insight as 2nd BiS trinket.
- 29 Jun. 2021: Updated for Patch 9.1.
- 09 Mar. 2021: Removed note about Tablet of Despair.
- 09 Mar. 2021: Added note about Tablet of Despair.
- 09 Mar. 2021: Added Valor section.
- 07 Feb. 2021: Added overall BiS list.
- 11 Jan. 2021: Updated BiS lists as per stat priority change.
- 07 Dec. 2020: Fixed Raid BiS weapons and adjusted pre-raid Trinket BiS.
- 23 Nov. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands launch with Pre-Raid and Raid BiS lists
- 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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