- Author: Passion
- Date: August 6, 2022
- Updated: August 7, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
The Shadow Priest rotation is divided into two parts, the opener, and the regular rotation. The opener is different because of the way your Damage Over Time effects like Shadow Word: Pain interact with your stats, as explained under “Snapshotting Explained“. The rotation is generally easy to understand but can be tricky to master, making Shadow Priests easy to start with but giving them a lot of room for improvement and player skill.
The rotation will be mostly the same throughout the expansion, but once you have the 4-piece bonus from Tier 10 your priorities will likely shift around a bit, focusing more on Mind Flay.
Basic Opener
- Cast Vampiric Touch, gaining your first stack of Shadow Weaving
- Cast Devouring Plague, gaining your second stack of Shadow Weaving
- Cast Mind Blast, gaining your third stack of Shadow Weaving and Replenishment
- Channel Mind Flay, gaining your 4th and 5th stacks of Shadow Weaving
- Cast Shadow Word: Pain with 5 stacks of Shadow Weaving
Basic Rotation
The rotation for Shadow Priests can be much better described as a priority system, where you always attempt to do the highest priority task and if you can’t, you move on to the next. This is because your rotation is never fixed and will constantly shift because a lot of your timers don’t line up with each other.
- Apply Shadow Word: Pain if missing
- Apply Vampiric Touch if missing
- Apply Devouring Plague if missing
- Cast Mind Blast
- Fill time with Mind Flay
- Cast Shadow Word: Death if moving
- Cast Devouring Plague if moving
AoE Rotation
2-5 Targets
With 5 or fewer enemies you will likely have high health enemies in the mix. For these lower amounts you want to make sure you blanket everything that will survive long enough (Around 12+ seconds) with DoTs, and then either Mind Flay or Mind Sear, depending on how many targets.
- Apply Shadow Word: Pain to all enemies that will survive more than 12 seconds
- Apply Vampiric Touch to all enemies that will survive more than 12 seconds
- Apply Devouring Plague to a single priority target
- Cast Mind Blast on a target with Vampiric Touch if you or your group need Replenishment
- Cast Mind Sear if 3+ targets
- Cast Mind Blast
- Cast Mind Flay
5-8 Targets
At this point it is less likely that your DoTs will be worth it, but there may still be some priority targets. If you for example have 3 high health enemies and 4 low health enemies, you should throw your DoTs on the high health enemies and then channel Mind Sear onto a low health enemy, so that it hits all the high health enemies.
- Apply Shadow Word: Pain to a high health enemy if missing
- Apply Vampiric Touch to a high health enemy if missing
- Apply Devouring Plague to a high health enemy if not up on any enemy
- Cast Mind Blast on a target with Vampiric Touch if you or your group need Replenishment
- Fill time with Mind Sear
8+ Targets
When you reach this many targets there is rarely any reason to try and use your DoT spells, at this point you can simply start using Mind Sear and ignore your other abilities, unless you still have a high priority kill target. I recommend trying to cast your Mind Sear on the target that will die last, just to be sure you don’t end up having to recast it because your target died.
Snapshotting Explained
Snapshotting is a term used to explain how various effects interact with your stats. Damage-over-time effects will generally either scale dynamically with your stats such as Spell Power, Critical Chance and Haste, constantly updating as your stats change, or they will “snapshot” your stats at the moment of casting, meaning if you cast it with 40% Critical Chance and then go down to 15% Critical Chance, the damage-over-time spell will still have 40% Critical Chance. Some classes may be able to maintain a snapshot by refreshing the effect before it finishes, but this is generally not true for Shadow Priests, though the rules do change from spell to spell which are explained in their individual section below.
Shadow Priests have a somewhat unique interaction with the talent Shadow Weaving. Every time you you hit with a shadow damage spell, you gain 1 stack of Shadow Weaving, up to a maximum of 5 stacks. All of your damage-over-time effects snapshot your current stacks of Shadow Weaving, so if you have 1 stack at the time of casting, your DoT will only have a 2% damage increase even after you gain more stacks. This is not very important for Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague but is key to maximizing Shadow Word: Pain damage, explained below.
Abilities Overview
When do you use IF + Shadowfiend?
Shadowfiend is best used either at the start of the fight, or just before Bloodlust goes out for your group, you want to make sure it gets the Bloodlust buff. Otherwise just throw it out when you’ve got procs like trinkets and tailoring cloak lined up for maximum damage.
The guide missing some information or is not clear in some points.. you say Aoe but you dont specify the number of targets… since Mind Sear is not hitting out target, do we cast it on 3+ mobs (hitting only 2 mobs) or on 4+ mobs (hit 3 mobs)? What if we fight 2 targets? Do we only multi-dot SW: Pain or we also cast Vampiric Touch?
That should be corrected now with the newest update, hope it helps!
The guide reffers to SW:P as the most power dot which is not. It also states that “copying your Haste, Spell Power, Critical Strike Chance, and other empowering effects” and also “You will always want to cast this ability while having the enhancing effects from your trinkets and potions up…” which is not true. SW:P only snapshots crit and % percentage damage effects (like corerctly stated about Shadow Weaving), but it doesn’t snapshot Spell Power or Haste.
Thanks! I didnt know… so if it does not snapshot spell power, then when you have a spell power proc (Tailoring back enchant) then the dot you already have on target automatically doesm ore damage?
Late to the party on this but if anyone is confused your Mind Flay refreshing the SWP updates the SP portion each time SWP gets refreshed.
This should be corrected in the new version
how do you figure it doesnt snapshot for spellpower? when i pop trinkets it seems to snapshot
It snapshots them for the duration, but refreshing the spell with Mind Flay will refresh the spell power.
Question regarding snapshotting:
– You have mentioned a few times that “you generally do not have to worry about snapshotting” when applying Vampiric Touch (VT) and Devouring Plague (DP). I believe you would try to snapshot these DoTs with Spell Power, Critical Chance, and percentage based buffs/cooldowns/procs. Let’s say you have an on-use or proc-based trinket, and the duration of it’s effect is in it’s final few seconds, would you break rotation to reapply VT and DP in order to snapshot the DoTs and have them still receive the proc benefit after the buff has faded from you? Do you think you would ever reapply SW:P (deliberate cast) in the same scenario, or it really wouldn’t be worth it because you will refresh that with Mind Flay soon afterwards anyway.
Thanks.
You can snapshot for VT and DP sometimes, but actually calculating it and figuring it out mid fight is a big risk/reward that can potentially lose you a big chunk of your damage. Refreshing SWP with a deliberate cast is unlikely, simply because SWP isn’t actually that strong as a spell.
I would definitely say that if Lust is about to fall off that a Spriest should maximize Global Cooldown timer by using a Mind Blast into Devouring Plague before the buff falls off to snapshot the haste onto DP. However, I think this should only be done if DP is around halfway finished on the target. I do this sometimes when I have DP applied to target before Lust goes off; I’ll MB+DP to apply the haste buff as Lust drops.
I’m troubled by something, I was doing the rotation on a dummy and got about the same DPS doing the whole thing with and without Mind Blast. Is not casting Mind Blast in the rotation at all a thing?
There is potentially a level of Haste in which you would skip Mind Blast, but you won’t reach that yet, and it will likely only be with Bloodlust and a bunch of proc running in Phase 4-5.
Be careful when testing on dummies, they have a lot of weird behavior that isn’t consistent with anything else. Some things do proc that shouldn’t, some things don’t proc that should.
Hello,
thank you for the guide.
I have a question regarding Mind Flay interruption to reapply VT, DP or cast MB when off cooldown. I couldn’t find if it’s dps increase to interrupt the cast after 2nd tick to cast higher priority spells (i.e. everything else).
As long as you cast after the second tick with as little delay as possible, you want to interrupt Mind Flay for Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague, but not always for Mind Blast.
“Channel Mind FlayMind, gaining your 4th and 5th stacks of Shadow Weaving”
… but Mindflay grants 3!!! stacks of Shadow Weaving!
It grants one stack per tick, meaning you can interrupt it after 2 ticks when you have 5 stacks.
thx 4 quick response… but ! Why isn’t it better (or easier) to change Basic Opener by MF with 3ticks before MB with IF… I can only confirm, this is much more effektiv
Because you want your Mind Blast cooldown to start rolling as soon as possible, which means casting it as soon as possible.
Hey, shouldnt we use Mind Blast as often as possible now (and start the rotation with it), because of the 4set-bonus in phase 2 ?
Nope, it still doesn’t bridge the gap. You still want to use it whenever you can reasonably fit it, but it remains firmly where it is in terms of priorities.
Thank you for this guide! Long reign the Shadow Priests ♥
YO! Hi everyone i purchased the edition of a lvl 70 burst first time playing woltk, i LOVE sp and affliction, what class would be more fun now. Thx
Short question regarding to shadow weaving.
If it affects all renewed swp with the stacks when it was first applied. Does that also mean that it would keep SP procs from trinket, weapon/cloak enchant so taht it might be usefull to monitor procs + activate on use Trinket so it keeps all thoose Spellpower when beeing renewd?
Also is swp able to crit so inner focus on it is usefull?
Spell Power is changed every time you refresh with Mind Flay, but % buffs are oddly different and will stick around, thats why Shadow Weaving is so different to everything else. Inner Focus does not benefit the crit chance of Shadow Word Pain unfortunately, but it is still a decent way to spend one talent point.