Shadow Priest DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Season 4

Welcome to our Gearing Page for Shadow Priest. This section will cover everything you need to know about equipping your character correctly.

The video version of this guide is also available if you would like to watch along as I talk about Shadow Priest.

If you have a new piece of gear for which you need gems and enchant advice, you can find everything 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, the 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 possible. Critical Strike and Versatility are both lower in value. If it is not an obvious choice, sim your character to find out. For a more detailed explanation, you can read the Simulations page.

Simming your character is far and beyond the best way to determine if a piece of gear is, in fact, an upgrade. The trick is knowing how to do it in a way that produces reliable results. If you follow the Simulations guide page, you can use this to have a more practical gearing guide than simply following a BiS list.

In Season 4 you will have access to three raids that drop items from trash. For Vault of the Incarnates and Amirdrassil these items will be Bind-on-Equip, and for Aberrus they will be Bind-on-Pickup. This means you will only be able to buy and sell trash drops from Vault or Amirdrassil.

The following is the list of items that drop from trash as a Shadow Priest:

• Emissary's Flamewrought Seal — Vault of the Incarnates
• Primal Seeker's Leggings — Vault of the Incarnates
• Woven Stone Bracelets — Vault of the Incarnates
• Crucible Curator's Wingspan — Aberrus
• Bands of Purified Purpose — Aberrus
• Lost Scholar's Temporal Shoulderdials — Amirdrassil
• Whispering Fanged Cord — Amirdrassil
• Daydreamer's Glimmering Ring — Amirdrassil

In Season 4 Shadow Priest has several items that can proc off of dealing fire damage:

• Ouroboreal Necklet — Volcoross in Amirdrassil
• Seal of Diurna's Chosen — Eranog in Vault of the Incarnates
• Seal of Filial Duty — Broodkeeper Diurna in Vault of the Incarnates

As a Shadow Priest we have no way baseline to proc these effects, however the following additional items or effects do happen enough to proc them:

• Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno
• Incandescent Essence (Helm Enchant)
• Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch

In the best setups, you will want 2 of the three of these to saturate the proc chance. Generally you will prefer running Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno anyways and you will always have the helm enchant. This means Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch is not needed to saturate the proc chance as soon as you get Vakash and should use Blue Silken Lining instead.

In Season 4, you are able to upgrade gear from a variety of sources to get more item level. You will use Flightstones and Crests to upgrade items. You will naturally obtain these currencies from all forms of content in the game. These allow you to upgrade pieces depending on the track they drop in. This also lets you make crafted items up to 525 item level, which is 3 item levels lower than top-end Mythic raid gear.

For more information on the new Gear Upgrades system, check out our dedicated page below.

Note: the cost to upgrade items differs per slot but increases quickly as item levels go up.

With any season, there will be several different ways to build out your character optimally. Use this page as a tool with suggestions, but do not just look at the list at the bottom for the only way to gear up. There are plenty of ways to build your character correctly, depending on which pieces you get when. This page is designed to help make those decisions easier.

In this section, I am going to list the pieces of gear that I would focus on upgrading. This is generic advice and should be supplementary to you running your sims. Figuring out the best upgrade based on your character's current gear is always ideal.

• Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno
• Any Helm item to scale Incandescent Essence
• Seal of Diurna's Chosen
• Voice of the Silent Star
• Neltharion's Call to Suffering
• Nymue's Unraveling Spindle
• Spoils of Neltharus
• Umbrelskul's Fractured Heart
• Ashes of the Embersoul
• Tome of Unstable Power
• Ominous Chromatic Essence
• Whispering Incarnate Icon

Check each section for more details on the various slots.

Season 4 offers a way to target specific, powerful raid items with the new Antique Bronze Bullion. These are particularly useful for filling up slots if you get unlucky with certain drops in raid, especially for highly contentious items.

Here are the best items to spend your Bullions on in Dragonflight Season 4.

1. Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno
2. Seal of Diurna's Chosen
3. Neltharion's Call to Suffering
4. Whispering Incarnate Icon
5. Voice of the Silent Star
6. Ominous Chromatic Essence
7. Seal of Filial Duty

Outside of this ranked list you should keep in mind that you should buy the pieces that your character needs. All of these can naturally drop from raiding, you just use the Antique Bronze Bullion to supplement those raid drops. You should particularly prioritize the pieces that might be popular amongst other raiders.

There are many items that the Antique Bronze Bullion vendor sells that might be useful to purchase depending on the content you are looking to accomplish, use the above list as a starting point.

Here are the top trinkets to target as a Shadow Priest. Check out the sims below for more details about which trinkets to use and when. These are generic suggestions of what to target, but anything that is a big item-level jump might be an upgrade, even if it is not on this list.

When looking at trinkets, I wanted to specifically call out Nymue's Unraveling Spindle. This trinket has an interesting effect that buffs the damage it deals when a target is Immobilized. This can happen if a mob is stunned or rooted, but this is not possible for boss enemies. However, this also counts stationary targets such as Target Dummies as being immobilized. This same effect applies to bosses that like Target Dummies are immobile. For example, in Amirdrassil you get this increase from Volcoross and Nymue since those bosses are locked in place. On those encounters, this trinket is one of our best options.

• Dark Ascension + Idol of C'Thun
• Void Eruption + Triple Idol + Distorted Reality
• Void Eruption + Triple Idol + Mind's Eye

• Dark Ascension + Idol of C'Thun
• Void Eruption + Triple Idol + Distorted Reality
• Void Eruption + Triple Idol + Mind's Eye

Many people 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.

For neck and ring pieces, you can drop 5-10 ilevels in most cases to get our preferred stats: Haste and Mastery. That said, you should always sim yourself to see what is better as the secondary stat diminishing returns can still change your ideal setup.

• Eye of the Rising Flame
• Bromach's Disentombed Locket
• Ukhel Ancestry Beads
• Eye of the Vengeful Hurricane
• Ouroboreal Necklet

Make sure to use Tiered Medallion Setting to add 3 sockets up to your neck item.

• Seal of Diurna's Chosen
• Seal of Filial Duty
• Band of Burning Thorns
• Unstable Arcane Loop
• Circle of Ascended Frost
• Signet of Titanic Insight
• Ring-Bound Hourglass

This is a rough guide of what weapons to aim for. It is not an end-all-be-all list, and depending on your gear, you might find something that is even better. Be sure to sim your upgrades to know for sure, but you can use this list to help target things that will likely be strong.

Due to the strength of weapon item level I would strongly suggest not crafting weapons unless you have plenty of Sparks to spare.

For your main hand, you should try and get Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno as soon as possible; it will handily beat out all other options this season. Paired with a similar item level off-hand, this will be roughly 1% better than Dreambinder, Loom of the Great Cycle.

1. Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno
2. Dreambinder, Loom of the Great Cycle

This season you have plenty of string off-hands to choose from to pair with Vakash, the Shadowed Inferno. Any of the following will be a great choice.

• Echo's Maddening Volume
• Thadrion's Erratic Arcanotrode
• Scripture of Primal Devotion
• Icewrath's Channeling Conduit
• Trickster's Captivating Chime
• Rod of Perfect Order

With Season 4, we have a returned version of the Season 2 set bonus.

• 2-piece set bonus: Priest Shadow 10.1 Class Set 2pc
• 4-piece set bonus: Priest Shadow 10.1 Class Set 4pc

Based on the stats on these pieces and the pieces that drop across season 4 content, you should drop either the Chest or the Gloves. Which one to drop depends highly on your current gear and when you get the Tier set to drop. Vesture of the Smoldering Serpent is a decent chest while gearing up that drops early on in Amirdrassil, so most people will probably use Chest as the off-piece. That being said, you want to use Head, Shoulders, and Legs, ideally all the time.

Here are rough numbers for how strong the bonuses themselves are. This is not taking into account the actual gear pieces, just the bonuses themselves.

Due to the drastic increase in item level with this Tier, you will likely replace the previous Season 3 set bonus relatively quickly, but be sure to sim these changes to know for sure. Since the power of the Season 3 set bonus is mostly in the 2-piece bonus you might run 2-piece from both season for a while when you are first gearing up.

• 2-piece set bonus: ~4.07%
• 2-piece and 4-piece set bonus: ~10.89%

• 2-piece set bonus: ~2.24%
• 2-piece and 4-piece set bonus: ~6.90%

Transitioning from Season 3 to Season 4, you will notice a larger-than-usual shift in item level corresponding to the increased difficulty.

While gearing, you will be prioritizing keeping the Season 3 set bonus until you get higher item level pieces, or enough to go all the way to the new Season 4 4-piece. This is due to the strength of the Season 3 2-piece specifically.

It is critical that you sim your character in order to determine when to swap out tier set pieces. You should always have a plan in mind and do not just swap gear out because it has a higher item level blindly.

At the start of Season 4, the Revival Catalyst will be available. This allows you to convert a valid Season 4 item into a tier-set item. When doing this, the secondary stats will change to static stats you can see below:

• Head — Mask of the Furnace Seraph(TIER SET BONUS)
• Shoulders — Devotion of the Furnace Seraph(TIER SET BONUS)
• Back — Shroud of the Furnace Seraph
• Chest — Command of the Furnace Seraph(TIER SET BONUS)
• Wrists — Cuffs of the Furnace Seraph
• Hands — Grasp of the Furnace Seraph (TIER SET BONUS)
• Waist — Sash of the Furnace Seraph
• Legs — Breeches of the Furnace Seraph (TIER SET BONUS)
• Feet — Sabatons of the Furnace Seraph

In Dragonflight you can further push your characters strength by utilizing your 2 embellishment professional crafted gear items. You can equip as many pieces as you want, but if they use embellishments, then you are limited to 2.

As a Shadow Priest in Season 4, you have a few options for your two embellished slots, depending on what you want to optimize for. The below list is the suggested options for embellished items ranked in order of overall power in Raid and Mythic+.

Check out the individual sections below to learn more about the top options.

If it was not clear, you can stack two of Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch Blue Silken Lining, Dreamtender's Charm, or Verdant Conduit which doubles the effects.

If you can afford to add it, use the Alchemical Flavor Pocket on one of your items. This optional crafting reagent can be added to an embellished slot. The key here is that even though it fits into an embellished slot, it does NOT take up one of your two embellished items, meaning you can have 2 embellished pieces AND a 3rd one with the flavor pocket. This can be a solid DPS increase in Mythic+ dungeons any time you die and do not have time to eat food again.

1. Allied Wristguards of Time Dilation (Progression Only)
2. Blue Silken Lining
3. Undulating Sporecloak or Choker of Shielding

1. Hood of Surging Time (Most Key Levels)
2. Blue Silken Lining (Max DMG for High Keys)
3. Allied Wristguards of Time Dilation (if not using Overengineered Sleeve Extenders for the battle rez)
4. Undulating Sporecloak or Choker of Shielding

In terms of personal DPS increase, the Allied Wristguards of Time Dilation are quite a weak DPS choice, less than using Blue Silken Lining with only 20% uptime. The difference is that these also provide an increase to Raid Throughput as well. If you take into account the Raid DPS gained for this it is closer to using Blue-Silken Lining with 60-70% uptime, depending on if you give the buff to healers or tanks instead of DPS.

Furthermore, these wrists can be crafted and used by every single armor class type. If you are in a group with others that also have this item (or similar item in a different armor type), the buffs individually apply to each raid member and can overlap (not stack). This means if you have 2 people in your group with this item, you can have 2 of the buffs active at once. If you combine this power with more group members, your Raid will not only get a large increase in damage, but your personal DPS will also get an increase.

Note that while this is a powerful embellishment for your group DPS inside of Mythic+, you may not want to use these, so that you can instead use the Overengineered Sleeve Extenders with the Tinker: Arclight Vital Correctors tinker to add that extra bit of utility for your group.

Finally, because this item is in the wrists slot, there is less of a hit in terms of item level by running a 525 piece. I would strongly consider crafting this item for progression content.

The Blue Silken Lining embellishment can be applied to various crafted items. This provides you with a flat amount of Mastery if you are above 90% health. At 525 Item Level it gives 1042 Mastery. If you fall below 90%, you will lose the effect until you go back above that threshold. In a perfect scenario, if you can keep this effect up 100% of the time, it will easily beat out every other option, but in reality, almost every encounter or dungeon will cause you to lose uptime of this. Luckily, Shadow does have some options to help here, namely Mental Fortitude. The other positive here is that Mastery as a stat does very well in single target and AoE environments, making it scale well as you add targets. The trick is knowing how much uptime you can expect, making it somewhat inconsistent.

With the scaling of gear in Season 4 this has continued to perform incredibly well, and handily beats other choices as long as you can have 30% average uptime or higher. This gives you a large ceiling of damage and even worst case scenario it should perform very well relative to other choices.

The big caveat here is that you can have 80% uptime, but it is significantly less useful if you do not have it active during your cooldowns. Conversely, if you have this up for your cooldowns, you will get a good chunk of the value.

Use the below list to understand how average uptime of Blue Silken Lining compares to other embellishments.

1. Hood of Surging Time — Roughly equivalent to 75% uptime of Blue Silken Lining in a Mythic+ Environment
2. Allied Wristguards of Time Dilation — Raid DPS gained is equivalent to 60-70% uptime of Blue Silken Lining
3. Allied Wristguards of Time Dilation — Personal DPS gained is equivalent to 10% uptime of Blue Silken Lining

This is a powerful embellished item that should be considered for Mythic+ environments. It gives you a powerful burst of haste starting off every trash pack but does not provide much benefit in most boss encounters. For this reason, I would strongly consider this item in dungeon scenarios , particularly during Fortified weeks. Generally speaking, this can get worse as you go up in key level as you lower your total buff uptime, but for most groups, this will be a great item.

Note that this does mean you need to use Shoulders, Chest, Gloves, and Legs tier piece items to maintain your 4-piece set bonus.

Generally speaking, the embellished items are about 1-3% of your DPS each (so up to 6% total). If you are in a position where you are struggling more with surviving compared to dealing damage, I would suggest using Undulating Sporecloak. This option is one of the weakest offensively but does still help out defensively, albeit minor. Alternatively, you can also use Choker of Shielding for an on-use defensive option.

If you are looking to optimize damage on progression content, I would use at least one Blue Silken Lining and choose to use Allied Wristguards of Time Dilation for the raid DPS gain or just run double Blue Silken Lining.

In Mythic+, I would consider using Hood of Surging Time in favor of any of the other options, depending on preference paired with Blue Silken Lining. Alternatively using double Blue Silken Lining is still a great choice, especially for Tyrannical weeks.

If you are looking to instead optimize your character with more defensive power, I would suggest looking at using Undulating Sporecloak and/or Choker of Shielding. These options are DPS losses compared to other choices but could end up saving your life under dire circumstances.

The important thing when gearing up is also to consider the item you are replacing. The above advice is generic for equal opportunity costs, but while gearing, if you are struggling to get an item in a specific slot, you likely want to spend your Spark to replace that ASAP and then match it with the corresponding strong embellishment. For example, if you are struggling to acquire a good Neck, Torc of Passed Time with Blue Silken Lining might be a strong candidate for your Spark craft. On the other hand, if you are struggling to get a good pair of wrists, consider Allied Wristguards of Time Dilation or Vibrant Wildercloth Wristwraps with Blue Silken Lining.

After crafting your two embellished pieces, I suggest simming your character to see what profession item upgrades are the most DPS for your character. You can craft every slot with the various professions via crafting orders, and filling out your gear with 525 items can be quite lucrative.

If we look at all gear items from the Raid, here are the top slots that will likely be good long-term investments to craft. Keep in mind that simming your character will always be the best; this is just a starting point.

• Vibrant Wildercloth Slippers
• Vibrant Wildercloth Wristwraps
• Vibrant Wildercloth Girdle
• Torc of Passed Time

Other items can definitely still be an upgrade; make sure to sim your current gear setup to see what makes the most sense to craft.