Shadow Priest DPS Spec, Builds, and Talents — Dragonflight 10.2

While optimizing talents on a contextual basis is the highly recommended method of setting up your build, the Talent builds listed below work great for specific purposes.

Note that these builds are generic recommendations for various content. For more specific recommendations for the Raid and Mythic+ in Season 3, check out the dedicated pages below.

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

If you want an overview and breakdown of every Talent, check out the Spell Summary first to help navigate your build choices.

Several of our talents actively change your rotation, specifically your priority in given situations. You can find out more in the rotation section below.

This section is meant to give more context to choices in our talent tree. This section will not cover every Talent but rather give you reasons and answers for how to make a build.

In our class tree, our goal is first to pick up all the damage in the tree, which is mainly concentrated on the right-hand side. Your standard build will start you out with:

• Shadow Word: Death and Shadowfiend for free.
• Start off with Death and Madness and either version of Mind Control or Dominate Mind.
• Grab your movement ability by getting Dispel Magic, Improved Flash Heal, and Angelic Feather.

From there, you can choose where to spend your last few points. For most content, I would suggest grabbing Purify Disease and From Darkness Comes Light for better off healing. After this, you will want to get Leap of Faith, Shackle Undead, or Void Tendrils so that you can get Power Infusion in the next section. As soon as the next section unlocks, you will want to spend points in that first before considering circling back.

Assuming you unlocked the section appropriately, you want to straight away pick up the following to max out your damage:

• Power Infusion and Twins of the Sun Priestess
• Twist of Fate
• Throes of Pain (note you will need to pick something else to path here)

To fill out this section, you will most likely pick up Vampiric Embrace and San'layn to get to Throes of Pain, but you have options. Other good things to note are grabbing more movement with Body and Soul and a defensive talent with Tithe Evasion. In this section, you have quite a lot of freedom of what to pick, and you can even come back to the top section to grab more off-healing if you want that. You might also want to grab Mass Dispel if you can use this well.

Note: you will want to spend 2 points in Unwavering Will if you plan on getting Angel's Mercy.

For the bottom section of our class tree, we have some focused talents around Mindgames you will want for damage, but you still have lots of choices around that. Here is the base you will want to take in all content:

• Mindgames, Manipulation, and Shattered Perceptions
• Divine Star or Halo. Generally speaking, Halo will be your default, but using Divine Star in open world or dungeon content can be a good alternative.
• Consider adding Crystalline Reflection if you find yourself casting Power Word: Shield often, and the fight has lots of raid-wide damage.

If you have followed the suggestions to this point, you now have lots of points left over to fill out your tree. This is where you can build your Priest the way you need for what you want to do, here are some common paths to consider:

• Defensive: Angel's Mercy, Light's Inspiration, and Translucent Image
• Off-Healing: Binding Heals, Surge of Light, and Power Word: Life
• Utility: Void Shift
• Essence Devourer anytime you are using Mindbender and want some more off-healing.

Moving on to the Shadow Priest spec tree, we can navigate some interesting choices here, all framed with how you want to do your damage.

With Psychic Link, our damage pattern is identical in almost any situation since our single target damage effectively is our AoE damage.

This is the utility section of the tree where picking up all the damage you need, generally speaking, is relatively easy. Start your build off like so:

• Devouring Plague for free.
• Shadowy Apparitions, Misery, Thought Harvester, and Surge of Insanity.
• Pick up Dispersion and Silence for your standard utility.
• Pick up Psychic Link anytime you fight more than one target.
• On pure single target, you can fill with any one of the following: Intangibility, Mental Fortitude, Last Word, or Psychic Horror. In most cases, I would default to Mental Fortitude.

In this section of the tree, you will fill out the base part of your kit with some definition. Before going forward, it is important to start considering where you want to end your tree to make sure you pick things that all work together well.

• First off, you need to pick your cooldown, either Void Eruption or Dark Ascension. See the section below to help make this choice.
• Regardless of your choice of cooldown, the following abilities make sense in just about every single build, and I would suggest starting with them: Ancient Madness, Shadowy Insight, Mind Spike, and Mind Melt.
• Always pick either Mind's Eye for more priority target, or Distorted Reality as the default option.
• When facing more than 2 mobs, I would strongly suggest adding Shadow Crash to make DoT management easier.
• Fill out the remaining points before the final section. Mental Decay, Phantasmal Pathogen, and Dark Evangelism are good for a single target. Maddening Touch and Mind Devourer are good mixed damage options.

The major choice you need to make in this section is which cooldown to select. Unfortunately, these cooldowns do not have a clear definition. Generally, they will come down to numbers rather than a specific playstyle that one is better at compared to the other. That being said Void Eruption does have some amount of identity, specifically being great for generating more Shadowy Apparitions and an extra instant cast for movement with Void Bolt. With this understanding, you effectively end up taking Dark Ascension whenever Voidform does not make sense, rather than wanting to take it for a specific reason. For most content, you will find Dark Ascension to be more useful when you need damage every minute, instead of the 2-minute cadence of Void Eruption.

Dark Ascension does have some synergy with Mindbender and Idol of Y'Shaarj builds since they line up their cooldowns together, and most builds utilize this combo for Season 3.

For the final section of talents, you must decide your end goals. At level 70, you can comfortably get two or even three Idol talents to finish your build. Generally, builds utilizing two or three Idol talents are better than those with zero or one. While there are many different combinations of Idols, I will only be going over the more common ones.

• Idol of Y'Shaarj + Idol of C'Thun
  • Mindbender, Inescapable Torment, Idol of Y'Shaarj, Void Torrent, Insidious Ire, Idol of C'Thun, Deathspeaker and Mastermind.
  • Strengths: Best Single Target
  • This is our base build we use for almost everything.
• Idol of Y'Shaarj + Idol of N'Zoth + Idol of C'Thun
  • Mindbender, Inescapable Torment, Idol of Y'Shaarj, Deathspeaker, Screams of the Void, Idol of N'Zoth, Void Torrent, Malediction and Idol of C'Thun.
  • Strengths: Great for Multi-Target and AoE
  • Builds off the standard build to add more AoE with Idol of N'Zoth.

In the open world, you can go into "War Mode." Enabling War Mode provides the following benefits:

• PvP talents enabled in the outdoor world.
• 10%+ increase in World Quest rewards at maximum level.
• 10%+ more experience gained while leveling.
• Earn Conquest Points, which can reward gear every week.

With the benefits of enabling War Mode for leveling and PvE content, it is recommended enabling the feature to maximize your leveling and rewards at maximum level. However, you will make yourself available for open-world PvP, and the possibility of being "ganked" while leveling or doing World Quests exists.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents best for leveling and doing solo / small group PvE content. Below is a ranking of Shadow Priest-specific PvE talents.

• Catharsis is a great boost to damage in the open world if you find yourself in solo content or 1v1s.
• Driven to Madness gives you your cooldown back faster for better uptime.
• Psyfiend can be a nice talent if you are okay with another active ability; otherwise, Void Volley is a good backup.