Thinking about rolling a shadow priest for TBC any experts/p-server people have any wisdom they could shed on me?
I herd their dps can be so low that the tank can almost out dps them? And is that an issue? For soloing? 5 man’s? Etc
Can they hold their own in BG’s/arenas?
I know 1-2 is almost required in raid but is it difficult to find a raid spot?
Eh I was always top 3 in dps on raids in TBC, any fight. And I easily could go disc/heals with what gear I had for shadow. But as anything, gear is key, I think I had the blues pvp set to start.
Also, i kept up on guides/specs/rotations, the obvious expectations. Overall, shadow is an awesome spec, in pvp and pve, you won’t be disappointed!
You do more damage than that
Bgs you are a god. In arena you have a couple comps that you can do well in but disc is definitely the better pvp spec
Nope. You are a hot commodity due to your utility. It’s pathetically easy to get a spot as a shadow priest
Awesome in pvp. Highly desired in pve and not many people playing them. My biggest tip for shadow - be careful with shadow word death, its a dps increase but buffs can make you 1 hit yourself
Also forgot, you are a mana battery for the raid. So they are dependent on you for that as well.
Mana battery in a raid. So wanted there. It’s not a bad spec in tbc.
Reasonable In arenas, not great. Rogues and warlocks will bend you over as well as several other classes. But you take what you can get.
They are not really taken to raids for dps (though the dps shadow puts out is more mid of the pack) its for the things they can do.
They are really good at solo questing/pvp.
Good in 5 mans.
Really good in bgs/arenas in certain comps. (2s shadow rogue) (3s shadowplay, god comp)
Most guilds will only take two spriest, but im sure there are guilds out there taht will take more than two.
Shadow priest has the most complex and fun rotation.
Beats spamming 1 button.
Shadow does decent in arena, at least early seasons. They also do decent dps in pve. However, their most notable function is mana battery. So most raids will likely want one.
Their mana regen applies to the party, not the raid. That’s good for spriests, as it means raids will bring even more.
Not necessarily. When you’re filling out your raid group you’ll often find you only NEED one party to be mana batteried. The others are fine on their own. You obviously CAN choose to bring more, but in my experience, it was usually only one.
So I was recently a very passionate/dedicated/theorycrafting Shadow Priest on one of the more popular TBC private servers for a while, so I have a very fresh/recent take on playing one at a “meta” level.
In Kara/SSC/TK/BT/Hyjal tiers you are extremely competitive on DPS but there’s circumstances as to why, and it’s not necessarily because “Shadow Priest > all”. It’s due to balancing issues.
One of the biggest imbalances, so to speak, of early TBC meta is that few classes have the option of crafting certain epic profession gear that vastly outweighs the effectiveness of nearly everything else on offer in that first tier. As a shadowpriest, if you want to be anything even remotely competitive, you will need to be a tailor first off, and you will be crafting the Shadoweave set (the other is Spellweave). These sets require you to be a tailor to craft and use them. These weave sets give significant advantages to those who are able to craft and use them, and thus the difference between priests/mages who craft them and those who refuse to be a tailor and don’t will be extreme. Most guilds (that are worth a damn) actually require that their casters be tailors for this reason. Not only that, but these sets massively inflate the gap between you and the other classes who do not have the opportunity to acquire or use anything similar, and this is where the notion comes from that melee “sucks” in TBC, because early on, the casters with their completely imbalanced profession gear acquired literally right after hitting 60, utterly poop on the DPS of all the melee classes who lack gear options of similar parity right as they hit cap.
As a Shadowpriest, you will literally not be replacing Shadoweave until you get to T6. That’s right. It’s that strong. That means you use it all through T4, and T5. It takes until your competing classes can get measurably geared in endboss T5 and T6 loot before they start competing with your dmg.
On the other side of the coin, Shadowpriests are extremely valuable for mana returns to their group. It’s actually very common mid-fight to swap Shadowpriests around, and or specific people in to the shadowpriest group to cultivate mana returns for those it benefits the most. Most guilds will only bring 2, at the most 3 of them to a raid though, because Warlocks are just simply better from a DPS standpoint (they can also use shadoweave), and Warlocks don’t need a shadowpriest obviously because they can tap. So typically the 2-3 Shadowpriest groups will be filled with healers. The mana return is due to the 41pt Talent in the Shadow tree called Vampiric Touch, that makes a portion of your shadow damage gives mana to your party (while also being a DoT).
The rotation is actually not complex, but I could get behind describing it as fun. It’s actually no different than what it would be in Classic, except you have literally 1 additional ability, SWD, or Shadow Word: Death. Basically you put up Pain and Vampiric Touch, put Mind Blast on CD whenever possible, and then spam Mind Flay. Rinse repeat. SWD where applicable (more on this later). The “fun” of it I guess comes from trying to find that perfect timing sweet spot with everything where you’re not clipping your dot ticks or Mindflay ticks, Mind Blast comes off cooldown just in time to be used inbetween Mindflays, and then on-top of that managing your mana. Shadowpriest is extremely mana-intensive, which means you will be spending most of your days outside of raid farming gold for mana pots, or if you aren’t a Leatherworker, using Herbing to gather mats for your guild Alchemist to make mana pots. You will go through a lot of mana pots. Even when spamming mana pots, your mana isn’t sustained and you will eventually go oom if using your optimal rotation.
The reason I said SWD where applicable, is because using SWD actually does significant damage to you as a portion of your shadow damage output, instantly, in burst. That means that during many boss fights, using SWD is a liability to your healers, and since you are not going to heal yourself and you have no passive methods of healing, you will basically slowly kill yourself or put yourself at risk of dying easier to some stray boss mechanic. Some greedy shadowpriests will find deplorable healers to keep them healed up or your raid might overgear the content to the point that they can afford it, but generally, SWD spam on CD is often advised against in sensitive, progression attempts.
When given the floor to use SWD in tandem with your optimal rotation, the damage is indeed very high for the first several tiers, but again, it’s nuanced. You go OOM immensely fast, and guess what happens when you go OOM? You stop doing damage. Guess what happens when you stop doing damage? You stop providing your group mana. Meaning, if you go OOM, you’re a waste of a raid spot. So much of the job becomes about making sure you are able to be always doing damage from 100% to 0% of the bosses’ health, which means not totally blowing your mana on your most optimal rotation all the time. You have to stretch it out, basically keep your finger off the Mindblast/SWD button occasionally and moderate their use.
Finally one of the aspects that people tend to forget or ignore, is that Shadowpriest threat/aggro is terrible. This is another thing that will ultimately throttle your damage and affect your rotation, because point-for-point, Shadowpriest threat generation per-damage point is insanely higher than other classes arbitrarily. Doing your optimal rotation will guarantee pulling aggro and killing you and other people in TBC raids where you typically will not survive a hit from a boss or raid mob as a squishy priest. So you will eventually learn to throttle yourself not only for mana conservation, but your own survival. Your threat is so immensely high, you can let the tank get a measurable lead, and still catch up quickly if spamming your optimal rotation with SWD. It’s pretty bad.
So the real challenge of Shadowpriest during encounters, imo, is challenging yourself to find the right moderation to, while popping mana pots on CD, make your mana last the whole fight, and not be too high on threat.
PvP? They’re pretty amazing for BGs because you can just run around Shadow Word: Death kill-stealing and be top of the BG leaderboard, but the best Shadowpriests stack the heck out of resilience and are basically dispel bots while spreading dots around.
Arenas though? Warlocks are more desirable. Shadowpriests basically have no defensive cooldowns other than fear on a long cooldown and guess how the rogues feel about that with their cool new ability you will learn to hate to the ends of the earth, Cloak of Shadows…
Spriests can heal through most of the damage caused by swd through vamp embrace.
Also, the spriest rotation is way more complex that the one button spam in tbc. Looking at you hunter, locks, mages.
I can tell you don’t have much experience with Spriest (played well) in TBC.
Imp Vampiric Embrace is not specced in optimal Spriest talent builds, for one.
For two, Vampiric Embrace, even when using the base spell without the imp talents, causes way too much threat and is usually strictly ill-advised in nearly 100% of situations. Healing aggro is a much higher threat generator in TBC, and if you use Vampiric Embrace on-top of the already way too out of hand Spriest threat co-efficients, you’re basically asking to die.
You will, a vast majority of the time, never be using Vampiric Embrace in a raid encounter. Unless you like standing there waiting, which means you arent regenning your party’s mana, which means, like I stated, you’re useless.
Sure, shadowpriest is more complex than 1-button spam, but that’s a pretty low bar.
You were just playing with bad players then. Shadow isn’t a top 3 dps raid spec in TBC. IT’s near the bottom. It does fine, but it’s really there just to boost the warlock DPS, and give mana to people who need it.
So no one can play a sub tier spec optimally? Because I was normally within top 5 in WotLK as well…
On top of that, we were one of the top raid guilds, Silent Noise, on Ysera at That Time… lol
This isn’t true, especially initially.
In late T5, T6 and Sunwell, yes. It is basically true. You’re pretty much bottom of the meter, but still very valuable for the mana.