Shadow Priest DPS Stat Priority — The War Within (Season 1)
On this page, you will find out the optimal stat priority for your Shadow Priest. We first present the stat priority, before delving into more complex explanations. Our content is updated for World of Warcraft — The War Within (Season 1).
If you were looking for WotLK Classic content, please refer to our WotLK Classic Shadow Priest stat priority.
Best Shadow Priest Stat Priority in The War Within
The general stat priority for a Shadow Priest is:
- Intellect;
- Haste;
- Mastery;
- Critical Strike;
- Versatility;
Intellect is 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 access. Haste has huge scaling potential with almost every spell in our toolkit, making it incredibly valuable. Mastery generally rewards playing well and directly buffs every spell in our kit. Critical Strike is typically right behind both of these stats and slightly better than Versatility for offensive power.
Largely speaking, you should prioritize Mastery over Haste for Single Target and Haste over Mastery for AoE environments.
Secondary Stat Optimization
In this section, I am going to go over more advanced secondary stat optimization to help you understand what your goals should be with stats as you reach the top item level. Everyone will have slightly different gear, and you will want to adjust this to what makes the most sense for your character.
Note that I strongly suggest still using Haste and Mastery stats on all crafted pieces as a strong base for your gearing, but feel free to swap this out if you want to micro-optimize.
This advice comes directly from simming different targets, movement and adding in adds to see how these change stats. If you follow the advice below, you will be well-rounded to handle these cases; as always, you can sim your own character if you are looking for something more specific.
THESE ARE NOT CAPS. THEY ARE GOALS. Your sims will fluctuate around this depending on specific trinkets or other special effects.
- Gear up your character, prioritizing getting as much Haste and Mastery as possible. Acquiring Intellect is your top priority.
- Haste, to around ~15-20%
- Mastery, to around ~15-18%
- Critical Strike, to around ~10-15%
- Dump the rest of stats into Mastery on Single Target or Haste on AoE
See each section below to understand things in more detail.
Early Gearing
If you are just gearing your Shadow Priest, you should not drop everything to achieve the first goal. Instead, you should balance out your stats and bring up Haste and Mastery simultaneously. Once you get a decent amount of gear, then you can start optimizing as the goals describe.
Haste
Your rough goal should be anywhere in the 15-20% range. For single-target situations the less you can get away with, the better, as Mastery is usually more valuable. I would never go below 15%, as the rotation gets hard to pull off at lower levels. As you move towards AoE, you want to prioritize Haste as your most important stat.
Mastery
For single-target situations, Mastery is our best stat. You want to get a good baseline of Haste and Critical Strike and effectively dump everything else into Mastery in the 15-18% range in ideal setups. For AoE, you can drop this down a bit more to prioritize Haste, but it is still our 2nd best stat.
Final Stat Tuning
Early on in the season, you will not have as much wiggle room with stats, and it will be more difficult to reach optimal setups.
There are several ways to move stats around; choose whichever makes sense for you:
- Swapping out Gems
- Swapping out Enchants
- Finding other pieces of gear, likely in slots like Waist or Cloak
There are many, many different "Best-in-Slot" setups with this, and you should not blindly copy what another player is doing. The important thing is to get your character setup to follow the goals outlined above, recognizing there are several paths to doing that with different items.
When trying to push content, particularly in Mythic+, you should consider leaning more into Versatility (especially after reaching your desired levels of Haste and Mastery). This stat is crucial for living mechanics as you scale up key levels. By keeping Haste at least 10000 rating and Mastery around 15000 rating each, you can safely dump the rest of the stats into Versatility for a relatively small damage loss but a massive defensive gain. Keep tabs on your Critical Strike, though; you typically want to have a baseline of at least 3000 Critical Strike in any build.
Diminishing Returns on Stats
Keep in mind that secondary stats 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%. 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.
The following is the list where the first Diminishing Return threshold starts for each stat at level 80. Note that it will continue scaling into further reduced amounts as you continue to stack.
- 21000 Critical Strike, or 35% (includes 5% baseline)
- 19800 Haste, or 30%
- 23400 Versatility, or 30%
- 21000 Mastery Rating, or 19%
What this typically means is that as you approach the first or second thresholds, it might make sense to start allocating enchants or gems in another stat to continue to get maximum benefit.
How To Choose Gear For The Shadow Priest
When looking for upgrades using Raidbots to sim your character is a great tool to use. Oftentimes, the minute changes between stats can be hard to figure out on your own, and this website will help you make these decisions.
Simming your character takes into account your specific build and setup and personalizes gear choices based on these settings to give you more personalized results, which factor in all the procs and variables within the spec.
When you sim your character, be cautious about any crazy changes with gems/enchants when the amount gained is lower than 0.5%. This is typically the threshold for the margin of error and something you should take with a heavy grain of salt. Furthermore, just doing single-target no-movement sims (Patchwerk) is not always realistic when it comes to the value of stats like Haste. These are all tools, not something that should ever be followed blindly.
Best Gems, Enchants, and Consumables for Shadow Priest
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.
Stat Explanations
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. Crits deal double damage by default, but several effects can increase your crit damage, and make crits even stronger.
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.
Changelog
- 09 Sep. 2024: Reviewed for The War Within Season 1.
- 21 Aug. 2024: Updated for the launch of The War Within.
- 23 Jul. 2024: Updated for The War Within pre-patch.
- 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
- 25 Apr. 2024: Add new video link.
- 22 Apr. 2024: Update secondary stat goals for Season 4.
- 19 Mar. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.6.
- 08 Feb. 2024: Add Versatility video link.
- 21 Jan. 2024: Add extra clarity on stacking Versatility.
- 15 Jan. 2024: Clarify Haste thresholds with Hood of Surging Time and mention the value of Versatility for pushing Mythic+ dungeons.
- 07 Nov. 2023: Add note about Crit/Vers scaling with cantrip items.
- 06 Nov. 2023: Updated stat thresholds and goals for Patch 10.2.0.
- 04 Sep. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7.
- 13 Aug. 2023: Add video link.
- 10 Aug. 2023: Add secondary stat deep dive section for optimizing top end gear.
- 23 Jul. 2023: Reviewed from the recent hotfixes.
- 10 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5.
- 25 May 2023: Add extra note about Ominous Chromatic Essence.
- 22 May 2023: Add more detail on Haste soft caps.
- 01 May 2023: Updated stat priority references to bugs that were fixed in 10.1.0.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Priest Guides
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This guide has been written by Publik, Shadow Priest theorycrafter and SimC dev at Warcraft Priests.
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