Shadow Priest DPS Stat Priority — Dragonflight 10.0.7

The general stat priority for a Shadow Priest is:

1. Intellect;
2. Haste;
3. Mastery;
4. Critical Strike = Versatility;

Intellect is by far our best stat, beating everything quite handily. This means gaining item level will typically be better than always having the most optimal secondary stats, as long as that piece is an Intellect increase. After Intellect you ideally want Haste and/or Mastery on just about every piece of gear you can get your hands on. Haste has huge scaling potential with almost every spell in our toolkit, making it incredibly valuable. Mastery generally rewards playing well but does not always work with every spell in our kit, specifically certain pet spells like Idol of Yogg-Saron. Critical Strike is typically right behind both of these stats and roughly equal to Versatility.

With the changes to Dragonflight Shadow Priest has lost several talents and abilities that increased our Critical Strike scaling. Because of this you will see a reduced value in this stat, potentially even being worse than Versatility depending on the situation.

This is pretty generic advice but should be good enough for starting to gear your Shadow Priest. Be sure to sim yourself on various fight types to get an idea of what stats YOUR character wants.

When running a build that does NOT use Idol of Yogg-Saron this means just about every part of your damage scales with Mastery. In these cases, you should treat Haste and Mastery as being roughly equal to each other.

Keep in mind that secondary stats now diminish in value. This point starts to diminish for Haste, Critical Strike, and Versatility at 30%, meaning it takes more rating starting at this point and rising from there to get a percentage point. For Mastery, this starts at 19% for Shadow Priests, since our Mastery point conversion value is at 0.5, bringing the cap to 15%, and we have 4% base Mastery, giving us a start to the diminishing return value at 19%. These are not points to aim for, just keep in mind once you hit these points, you will see the value of that stat diminish slightly.

These statistics have been obtained by combining common sense, in-game testing, and simulations using SimulationCraft.

The gems, enchants, and consumables you will use are directly derived from your stat priority and you can find our advice on this topic on our dedicated page.

Intellect is your primary stat. You should look for this stat in all of your upgrades. It provides you with Spell Power, which increases the damage of your spells.

Critical Strike increases your chance to critically hit with all spells and abilities.

Haste increases your spell-casting speed and the tick rate of your periodic effects.

Mastery ( Mastery: Shadow Weaving) increases the damage of your spells for each damage over time effect you have active on that target. This only works with Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch, and Devouring Plague. While Voidform is active you get the benefit on every target as if they had all three dots active.

Versatility increases all your damage and healing done, and decreases all damage taken.