- Author: Passion
- Date: August 6, 2022
- Updated: August 7, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
Professions are a crucial part of your World of Warcraft character, potentially offering a large boost to your damage, healing or survivability, while also allowing you to generate some gold.
This section will cover some of your best options for professions as a Shadow Priest.
Best Professions
Like with most other classes & specs in the game, Engineering will be your strongest profession. For the second profession slot, we recommend Tailoring, though Jewelcrafting is also a very competitive option.
Engineering is the king of professions for PvE content, offering a vast, vast array of different benefits.
The main benefit of Engineering lies in the Hyperspeed Accelerators gloves enchant, which gives +340 haste rating for 12 seconds, on a 1 minute cooldown. This translates into a ~10% casting speed increase with a 20% uptime, which is already amazing on its own — but it becomes even bigger when you use the Accelerators when your various trinkets proc. As Shadow Priests, this helps compensate for our lack of offensive cooldowns.
Additionally, as an Engineer you have access to the Nitro Boosts boots enchant, passively giving +24 crit rating and coming with an on-use effect which massively increases your speed for 5 seconds, allowing you to move out of dangerous AoE effects, catch up to your target quickly or catch up to your group when you get distracted looking at cats on your other monitor and so much more. This gadget is especially beneficial for Shadow Priest as it lacks any form of mobility, and thus being able to blast off at a moment’s notice is huge for us.
Furthermore, Engineers also gain access to a superior cloak enchant in Springy Arachnoweave. This is better than the standard Enchant Cloak – Greater Speed enchant that everyone else has to use, but bear in mind that it is worse than the Tailoring cloak enchant, Lightweave Embroidery, so you’d only use it if your 2nd profession isn’t Tailoring. The slow fall effect is useless for us as we have Levitate, but it’s always fun to use.
Finally, just like in previous expansions, Engineers can use powerful explosives such as Saronite Bombs and Global Thermal Sapper Charges.
As a Tailor, you gain access to the Lightweave Embroidery cloak enchant, a proc which gives you +295 spell power for 15 seconds with a 45 second internal cooldown. This translates into a possible +98 spell power bonus on average if it procs exactly every 45 seconds, or a +74 spell power bonus on average if it procs every 60 seconds, which is absolutely massive.
However, there is an opportunity cost attached to this bonus, as it prohibits you from using the standard cloak enchant, Enchant Cloak – Greater Speed, making it slightly weaker in practice. This trade-off is still very much worth it for us however, as stacking your cooldowns along with this proc can result in a massive DPS boost, which trumps what other professions can bring — though not by a lot.
Tailoring is pretty weak on the gold generation side, unfortunately, so the cloak enchant is the main benefit. However, there’s also some useful cloth gear you can craft yourself, which can be very useful for fresh level 80 characters, saving you some gold by not having to buy it on the Auction House.
Useful Professions
The following professions are considered viable, but offer a lesser benefit compared to the best professions, so they’re not recommended. If you’re not focused on making your character 100% optimal, you can use any of these professions just fine.
Jewelcrafting is an extremely potent profession for most classes / specs and that includes Shadow Priests. Not only do you gain access to powerful, Jewelcrafter-unique gems, but you also get to sell gems to others, giving you a modest income through this profession.
The main benefit of Jewelcrafting is the Jewelcrafter-unique gems, Dragon’s Eye, which are more powerful than regular gems, but are limited to 3 equipped at a time. The main ones you’ll be crafting as a Shadow Priest are Runed Dragon’s Eye, and using 3 of those will result in a +48 spell power increase compared to using regular epic gems — Runed Cardinal Ruby. This is 1 spell power better than what Alchemy offers, and 2 spell power better than what other professions offer — wow!
As an Alchemist, you gain access to the Mixology passive effect, which increases the effectiveness of flasks and elixirs you consume, but only if you can craft them yourself. This results in a +47 spell power increase when using Flask of the Frost Wyrm, our preferred flask. This is 1 spell power better than what most other professions offer — truly a huge boost! 😛
Alchemy is one of the best professions for gold generation, as potions, flasks and elixirs are always relevant and in high demand.
As a Scribe, you gain access to the Master’s Inscription of the Storm shoulder enchant, which provides a +46 spell power increase over the standard enchant available to everyone, Greater Inscription of the Storm. This bonus ties Enchanting, Leatherworking and Blacksmithing, and is only marginally worse than what the “better” professions offer, so if you enjoy Inscription, it’s a very viable choice.
Scribes also get to make Glyphs & scrolls, providing a nice source of income, but many will argue that the real benefit in Inscription comes in not having to grind The Sons of Hodir reputation for the shoulder enchants!
As an Enchanter you gain access to the Enchant Ring – Greater Spellpower enchant, which you can apply to both of your rings for a +46 spell power boost. This bonus ties Inscription, Leatherworking and Blacksmithing, and is only marginally worse than what the “better” professions offer, so if you enjoy Enchanting, it’s a very viable choice.
You also get to enchant your own equipment without needing to tip another enchanter, which results in a neat amount of gold saved, on top of the gold you can generate by enchanting others.
As a Leatherworker you gain access to the Fur Lining – Spell Power bracer enchant, which proves a +46 spell power increase over the standard enchant available to everyone, Enchant Bracers – Superior Spellpower. This bonus ties Inscription, Enchanting and Blacksmithing, and is only marginally worse than what the “better” professions offer, so if you enjoy Leatherworking, it’s a very viable choice — though we’d generally recommend one of the other options.
There are sadly no other useful benefits gained from Leatherworking as you can’t even use leather armor, and you generally don’t get to make much or a profit with it either.
Blacksmiths can add 2 extra gem sockets to their gear — 1 on wrists, and 1 on hands. Socketing 2x Runed Cardinal Ruby into them translates into a +46 spell power bonus. This bonus ties Inscription, Enchanting and Leatherworking, and is only marginally worse than what the “better” professions offer, so if you enjoy Blacksmithing, it’s a very viable choice — though we’d generally recommend one of the other options.
Apart from using the special socket, Blacksmithing can be a great source of gold generation once you manage to gather epic recipes! However, it will all depend on your realm’s economy, so take that into consideration! Since we can only use cloth equipment, we will be limited to either placing our crafted equipment in the Auction House or selling it in Trade Chat!
Skinners gain access to the Master of Anatomy passive, which offers a +40 crit rating boost. This is weaker than all of the other professions mentioned in this list, but at least it’s something.
Skinning is generally not that good at gold generation either, so it’s overall not a great profession.
Sub-Par Professions
The following professions do not offer any DPS-increasing benefits and are thus not considered viable for Shadow Priests in PvE.
Herbalists gain the Lifeblood active skill, which heals you for 3600 over 5 seconds, with a 3-minute cooldown. This can occasionally come in handy, particularly while leveling, farming, or questing, but will generally never be enough to save you in a dungeon or raid.
On the flipside, Herbalism is one of the strongest professions for gold generation, as herbs are used in Alchemy and Inscription, and thus always in demand. This makes it a good profession to have on an alt, particularly a Druid!
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About the Author
can you adequately explain why Engineering went to the 1st bis profession, something is different than 3.3.5 wotlk where the bis were JC and Tailoring? Thousands of hours of actual real theorycrafting was done by the spriest gods back in the days from worlds top guilds and access to the bible of bibles shadowpriest.com is still there through the Internet Archive where everything is explained in details, much of the info is visible normally still after digging in mmo-champion’s forums.
Well we can start by simming using current tools. A quick test with accurate settings and 30000 iterations at 120+-5 second fight gives us 233 DPS with Engineering and Tailoring over Jewelcrafting and Tailoring, so right out of the gate the numbers agree with engineering.
On top of that, the DPS that Engineering provides is partially AoE, allowing it to perform even more on any cleave fight or AoE fight. For example, Freya.
The on-demand Haste from the glove enchant gives us the ability to either stack or stagger cooldowns based on what would be best at the time, and seeing as Haste is one of the best stats for Shadow Priest scaling, this is a fantastic boost.
On top of all of that, Rocket Boots. You could remove all the other aspects of Engineering for Shadow Priests and I would still say get it for Rocket Boots. You can boots + Dispersion your way out of any sticky situation. Rocket Boots also allow you to keep up with the rest of your raid, that should all also be Engineers. Getting into position faster minimizes your DPS downtime.
There is a lot of information on shadowpriest.com and the web archives of the site that is fantastic, but a lot of the information is unfortunately incorrect also. A lot of it is incorrect simply due to inaccurate tools of the time.
important part was missed: is something different than 3.3.5 wotlk. As far as i know – no.current tools are in beta, i have tested them, they are not as ok as the latest official Simcraft for 3.5.5 was, they are not as configurable as simcraft was too. So we have same mechanics, same items, same stats, same everything so its simple: it’s impossible to have same inputs and have different outputs.AOE fights and other situationals are out of the question. I see for years people comparing apples with peers for creating ‘BIS” lists, people coming from ‘non-retail’ wotlk servers actually, each pulling his own way out of personal interest to be right but then confusing everyone in the world who reads this guide here or that guide there or whatever non-shadowpriest.com/Muqq guide. NO. The BIS lists are based always and only on one single type of fight: Patchwerk. And thus professions, going hand in hand with the BIS lists. There are formulas which tell accurately and exactly the numbers by which they add to the dps. Same information is also available still in mmo-champion not through internet archive website.Rocket Boots – total and utter nonsense and absolutely irrelevant. For 15 years as spriest with Realm 1st LOD on retail wotlk in 2010 speaking for 3.3.5 here specifically i have NEVER EVER failed a mechanic because of lacking nitro boots. Not only that, on the contrary i have constantly seen and continue to see even to this very day people failing such ‘move-out-asap’ mechanics even with nitro boots. So totally scratch that argument too. Zooming around with them and being cool is perfectly fine, i’m both hands in for that, but mechanics wise, dps wise – no added value.i mentioned shadowpriest.com above as the most accurate source, so to that last point above about lots of info there not being incorrect – no! All of the information for gear and mechanics and everything there in the latest months of the expansion was as accurate as it can ever be, the tools mainly simcraft, but other spreadsheets too.icy-veins accurately puts jc/tailor as bis and eng 3rdIF there is anything different in classic vs original wotlk, looping to the 1st point – then everything what we’re talking about is for the bin and whatever old sources regarding spriest should be forbidden for mentioning or at most pointed for getting the relative idea about sp (because still, most of it would still be true), it should be explicitly stated in bold that the information in the current guides are for classic wotlk, not original one so people dont read one and apply to the other and vice-versa, leading to confusion and pointless arguments.
Simcraft has been proven over and over to have been inaccurate, especially for Shadow Priest with various methods of snapshotting.
You are more than welcome to play your way, but these numbers are tested over and over again. We have plenty of data and information regarding Shadow Priests in WotLK Classic.
If you want to use a different guide, feel free to, but all of the testing and theorycrafting that has lead to these lists, and this information, can be found on the Shadow Priest discord at discord.gg/classicshadow.
Thats great! But that is not every player. That is not every scenario, and that is not every guild. Not only that, but as I mentioned, rocket boots allow you to reposition and resume DPS earlier.
You are free to play without Rocket Boots, but a lot of guilds would absolutely never include you in their roster if you skip Engineering.
Nice troll.