In the beginning, it’s a struggle for Shadow.
Due to how low you secondary stats are. Which leads to how often you can generate shadow orbs (fishing for them either Mind Flay and SW:P damage ticks… so need lots of haste) on top of low mastery means it’s a crapshoot when/if you get your chunky Mind Blast and Mind Spikes off.
Then on top of that, Shadowy Apparitions are not worth putting points into because they don’t float, they walk and are targetable by enemy players. Warriors can actually build rage by auto attacking them and then get to you with full rage and dump it all over you face and put you into the ground.
Then with low critical strike rating, you won’t get many critical strikes from Mind Blast itself without the Mind Spike Critical Strike in next Mind Blast buff which leads to unreliable Paralysis proc which roots the target in place for 2/4 seconds when you critically strike with Mind Blast.
However…
Once you’re geared up and playing properly, you can smoke fools in a couple hits.
Even better once you get 4 set Dragon Soul as your Shadow Fiend will grant you 3 orbs each time it hits. Making you have 3 orbs for each Mind Spike and Mind Blast.
I was critical striking with Mind Blast for over 100k when most non tank Hp pools were hovering around 150k.
But you better get used to using Mind Spike properly. Since it stripes your dots, you need to dot up the right targets and then focus fire nuke a single target down like the enemy flag carrier or I typically dispel buffs from a weak healer and nuke him and rinse and repeat. Depends on how well coordinated your enemy team is and how skilled they are.
This is from the perspective of world PvP, Random Battlegrounds and Rated up to 2400 Battlegrounds.
Once I got my gear though, I was easily 2-3 shotting people in random BG’s on a regular occurrence.
Still kick myself for not have the proper setup to record those days. Miss them lol
Slightly different as this was on the MoP beta with MoP talents but I was using Cata PvP gear at Cata level cap of 85.
The last 2 videos are from the perspective of Swifty facing up against me 3 separate times in Arena. You can see how I handled him.
Aneurysm VS Swifty in Arena