I am going to be maining Shadow Priest and going to be playing a lot. I know Shadow Priest is a support spec, this will be almost a brand new archetype class to me that i will be playing. Do you have any advice on how to improve as a support spec or how to just improve as a shadow priest in general? One major question i have to ask is how and when should i use Mass Dispel? I may have the spell named wrong but how should i use Dispel Magic? Is it similar in use to how I use Mass Dispel? Can someone break it down to simplest form possible for me please?
Hi welcome to the right side of history.
As far as MD think of it as a trinket for your healer to get them out of cc, best used whenever you dont have a cooldown like dispersion or life swap and your healer has no trinket.
MD is also good for removing Divine shield and Ice block as well as Spellwarding. This can allow you to kill someone if you have the cc chained on their healer to do so.
Dispel magic, commonly known as purge, (often people refer to a more iconic ability that does the same thing e.g. referring to all interrupts as ‘kick’) is what you press when you get kicked shadow or to remove key defensive cooldowns like Blessing of protection and Alter time. It gives insanity as well as removing benefits from the enemy team.
I would recommend watching when your healer is about to be trapped to grip them using a macro. It is game winning often for me.
Something I would also recommend is learn when you should pool your insanity. Sometimes you want to hover around 100 so when you get cc on the healer you can just spam devouring plagues and do massive damage in a window. Devouring plague stacks up to 5 times before diminishing returns so make good use of this fact. You can get a dot that ticks for a million.
Always pair trinket and life swap. With dispersion being usable while ccd there really isn’t much of a point to trinketing to press any other defensive aside from lifeswap. And with fade and SWD you can prevent a lot of cc on yourself with foresight.
Ask anymore questions you have I’d be happy to help if I can.