Shadow Priest DPS Guide — The War Within (11.1.5)

In The War Within, Shadow Priest continues on the builder-spender design while also having some interesting damage over time and AoE mechanics. The talent tree offers ways to build your own Shadow Priest, where you can choose between two different core cooldowns ( Void Eruption or Dark Ascension) and then capping it off with thematic Idol spells aligned to the Old Gods. The spec has lots of options, and playstyle can vary widely depending on the talents, so there is a lot to talk about!

Strengths

• Flexibility with cooldown style choice.
• Powerful sustained priority target AoE damage with Psychic Link and Voidform.
• Great self-healing through Mental Fortitude, Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague, scaling well with additional targets.
• Access to one of the best single player external DPS cooldown, Power Infusion. Can now be given away easily with Twins of the Sun Priestess.

Weaknesses

• DoT management can require a lot of focus and can be reliant on Shadow Crash hitting correctly to deal reasonable AoE damage.
• Lots of spells and abilities, which could be overwhelming depending on talents.
• Need to plan out movement specifically, cannot just stop casting whenever you want for optimal damage.
• Poor interrupt for PvE content.
• Struggles dealing damage to short-lived enemies.

To level your Shadow Priest you will mostly be focusing on applying your Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain to as many mobs as possible and rotting them down with damage over time effects. Once all the enemies you care about have DoTs active you then perform your single target rotation on the mob with the highest health.

If Shadow Priest sounds interesting to play and you would like to level a fresh Priest, check out the leveling guide below to get you to the end-game with ease!

Shadow Priest gameplay combines the basic builder-spender idea used in other specs while twisting in being an active DoT class with lots of cooldowns to use. The basics of the rotation involve getting as much uptime as possible on your cooldowns while making sure to keep up all 3 of your DoTs on as many active targets as possible, especially Devouring Plague.

If you are new to Shadow Priest, or maybe just want a quick start guide to the spec, we suggest first looking through the Spell Summary first, as well as the Easy Mode page linked below. This will get you up and running on your Shadow Priest in no time!

If this is not your first time playing Shadow Priest, you can jump right into the Talents and Rotation sections of the guide to start mastering the ins and outs of playing your Shadow Priest in a PvE environment.

While gearing these days can seem overwhelming or challenging, there are a few things to remember will make this process a bit less painful. Check out the gearing page to decide what pieces to aim for from various forms of content.

With any gearing setup, if you are looking to optimize your character, you should always ensure you are using the correct consumables, gems, enchants, and more on your Shadow Priest. All the little things can add up to a noticeable difference in damage! The stats page goes over each stat in-depth and why we like (or do not like) each secondary enhancement.