Once your gear is accounted for and you’re all prepped and ready to go, it all comes down to how well you push your buttons! As a healer, you will have less of a “rotation” and more of a priority system designed to help you maximize your output while also sustaining your mana pool for the duration of the fight — and most important, keep your teammates alive! This guide will cover the best approach to healing as a Shadow Priest in just about any encounter.
Spell Priority
Your goal during a fight is to always have your three periodic spells, Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch, and Devouring Plague active, while keeping Mind Blast on cooldown and filling any downtime with Mind Flay.
- Maintain Shadow Word: Pain
- This can be maintained by casting Mind Flay combined with Pain and Suffering
- Maintain Vampiric Touch
- Maintain Devouring Plague
- Cast Mind Blast
- Cast Shadow Word: Death if target is below 25% health
- Cast Mind Flay
Opener
Your opener as a Shadow Priest is a strange one. In a perfect world, you want to have 5 stacks of Evangelism as well as Empowered Shadow before applying your periodic spells. This can be done by casting Mind Flay twice, followed by a Mind Blast if you got Shadow Orbs, followed by applying your periodic spells. In that scenario your opener would look something like this
Followed by your standard rotation listed above.
Cooldowns
Shadowfiend
This functions effectively the same as it always has. Pick a target, summon your Shadowfriend, and let it do its thing. Each time the Shadowfiend attacks, you gain 3% Mana. You can use this either offensively for shorter encounters, or as a reliable way to get Mana back on longer fights.
Dispersion
Almost entirely unchanged, Dispersion allows you to take massively reduced damage while regenerating a lot of Mana for 6 seconds. Use this to cheese mechanics, restore Mana, or make your Healers’ lives easier.
Archangel
Archangel is a bit of a fiddly spell. Evangelism boosts our periodic damage, meaning we always want that active, but Archangel consumes all stacks of it. Fortunately, Archangel is not mutually exclusive with Evangelism, which means as soon as you consume those stacks, you are able to rebuild them. To best utilize this, once all your periodic spells are applied and Mind Blast is just about to come off cooldown, cast Archangel, followed by Mind Blast, followed by Mind Flay until you have 5 stacks of Evangelism once again.
Archangel also gives you a bunch of mana on use, which makes it a vital tool for maintaining full mana throughout a fight.
Divine Hymn
Divine Hymn is a big raid healing cooldown. This will be necessary for you to cast on some fights, and will likely be called out by your raid leader or planned ahead of time.
Hymn of Hope
Hymn of Hope is a powerful mana cooldown for your entire raid group, but it requires you to stand still and channel it (and not heal) for up to 8 seconds (reduced by your Haste). Look for the best time to use it so you don’t waste its cooldown or fall too far behind on healing during its channel time. It’s a good idea to call out when you use this so that your team can pair it with their other mana cooldowns, because it not only restores mana but increases maximum mana, so any abilities that restore a percentage of your total mana will restore more while it is active.
Ideally you should not be casting this as a Shadow Priest, but sometimes it can’t be helped.
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