PvE Shadow Priest Talents, Builds & Glyphs

Author: Passion
Date: August 6, 2022
Updated: August 6, 2022
Expansion: WotLK Classic

Shadow Priest

Talents, Builds & Glyphs

Stat Priority

Best Races

Gems, Enchants & Consumables

Rotation & Cooldowns

Best Professions

Best in Slot (BiS) & Pre-Raid Gear

Addons & Macros

Broadly speaking, Shadow Priests have one standard talent build that occasionally gets modified slightly in order to meet specific needs. In this guide, we’ll showcase a few of the possible builds and explain in detail the changes that each require.

Talent Builds

Click a build to see details!

The standard build covers all your bases as a Shadow Priest, grabbing all of the important talents for survivability, mana sustain and damage. The build gets mana regeneration from Improved Spirit Tap and Meditation, survivability from Dispersion and Shadowform, big damage boosts from talents like Twisted Faith and Shadow Weaving as well as your raid utility like Misery and Vampiric Touch.

Twisted Faith is a key talent that increases your Spell power based on your total Spirit, which when combined with Improved Spirit Tap and Glyph of Shadow makes Spirit a very valuable stat.

Misery is a raid-wide buff that increases Spell Hit Chance by 3% for everyone against the debuffed target. This is a significant increase and every raid will want this debuff, but Balance Druids also bring this in the form of Improved Faerie Fire. This talent also increases the benefit a few of your spells receive from Spell Power, meaning you always want this talent even with a Balance Druid around.

Vampiric Touch is a vital part of our rotation as well as allowing you to generate the Replenishment buff for yourself and your raid.

You will be using this build for almost the entirety of the expansion, however, feel free to experiment with some of the talents presented by the build to better suit your needs.

firefox lyjlam2f39 1 — *Click here to see the build in the Talent Calculator*

The second build can be considered a variation of the first build, as it is still providing most of the effects of the standard build. This build is only ever used when you have the 4-piece bonus from Tier 10. The main difference is the change in playstyle, forgoing a focus on Mind Blast in favor of Mind Flay, both in your talents and in your rotation.

With that in mind, we relocate the points from Improved Mind Blast into talents such as Improved Vampiric Embrace, Shadow Affinity, and Inner Focus. The rest of the build looks and functions exactly the same.

end game — *Click here to see this build in the talent Calculator*

Notable Talents

Vampiric Touch is a talent that grants us access to one of our most powerful DoT abilities as well as the ability to generate Replenishment. It is simply a mandatory talent that you will never skip as a Shadow Priest.
Dispersion is a talent that grants you one of the most powerful defensive tools in the entire game, providing 90% damage reduction and mana regeneration for 6 seconds. This ability is a fantastic new addition to our toolkit and brings us a unique ability to soak raid mechanics.
Mind Flay grants us a core ability. Most of our rotation can be defined by how well we optimize our use of Mind Flay, so do not skip this talent.
Shadowform has been greatly improved when compared to its Burning Crusade counterpart, now providing you with powerful boosts like the ability for your DoTs to Crit. Keeping this buff active has never been more important.
Misery is a talent that not only improves the damage of some of your spells but it also increases Spell Hit chance for your allies and yourself. This talent is mandatory for yourself but also valuable for your allies, as it is a vital component for most casters to reach Hit cap.
Improved Mind Blast is a mandatory talent for most of the expansion, reducing the cooldown of your main nuke. It also gives a mini-Mortal Strike debuff, but this is rarely useful in PvE.
Improved Devouring Plague is an extremely strong talent, as it increases the damage of Devouring Plague and makes it instantly damage the enemy for 30% of the total periodic damage. This talent makes spamming Devouring Plague during movement a decent idea and without it you can do almost nothing during longer movement phases.
Improved Spirit Tap is an extremely potent talent that increases your mana regeneration while in combat while also increasing your total Spirit by 10% for the duration of the effect. This is extremely powerful, as it synergizes with other talents that have similar effects, such as Meditation and Twisted Faith.
Meditation is a the main reason we go into the Discipline tree. This talent that allows us to keep 50% of our mana regeneration while casting; this talent synergizes perfectly with Improved Spirit Tap!
Pain and Suffering is one of our bread and butter talents. It allows us to refresh the duration of Shadow Word: Pain through the use of Mind Flay, while also reducing the damage penalty received by Shadow Word: Death by 30%. This talent is absolutely mandatory and an important part of your gameplay.
Twisted Faith increases the damage of our core abilities against targets afflicted by Shadow Word: Pain while also increasing our total Spell Power by 20% of our total Spirit. This talent has a lot of implications for our build, as it dramatically impacts both our gear and our gems.
Improved Shadowform is either incredibly valuable or entirely wasted. It offers up to 70% pushback reduction (at max rank) and allows us to use Fade as a defensive cooldown that removes movement-impairing effects. The pushback protection is invaluable during fights where you take constant damage, as well as for open world content.
Shadow Power is important to bring your critical damage up to the level of other classes, and is a key component in making Critical rating a valuable stat for us.
Shadow Weaving is for most of the fight a straight 10% damage increase for us, but it also has some important interactions at the start of the fight (Explained in Rotations & Cooldowns).

Shadow Affinity is a talent that reduces your threat generated and gives Mana back when Shadow Word: Pain or Vampiric Touch are dispelled. This talent is almost entirely wasted in PvE content and you should never really have to worry about threat even without it.
Improved Vampiric Embrace is a talent that enhances the effectiveness of Vampiric Embrace by 67%. This talent is generally pretty weak, but it does have its niches in Wrath of the Lich King, as Vampiric Embrace is now only 3% healing and only effects your party, not your raid.
Improved Psychic Scream is a filler talent that reduces the cooldown of Psychic Scream by 4 seconds. The talent is useless for PvE, however, it is a prerequisite for Silence.
Silence is a talent that provides you with an interrupt that can be help your raid out of a sticky situation, but because it has a 45-second cooldown it is generally not a reliable interrupt.
Inner Focus is a somewhat weak talent, mainly due it its 3-minute cooldown. It allows you to reduce the mana cost of your next ability by up to 100% while also increasing its critical strike chance by 25%. This only takes 1 talent point so most builds grab it and use it with either Mind Blast or Mind Flay.
Psychic Horror is a talent that grants you an ability that horrifies the target for 3 seconds and disarms it for 10 seconds. This ability can be quite useful for PvP and dungeons, but most enemies in raids are immune.

Glyphs

Major Glyphs

These are some recommended combinations of glyphs, suited for specific types of PvE content:

Raids: Glyph of Shadow/ Glyph of Mind Flay / Glyph of Dispersion
Dungeons: Glyph of Shadow/ Glyph of Mind Flay / Glyph of Mind Sear

Click a Glyph’s bar to read more about them

Glyph of Shadow is the most important Glyph you can have. It allows you to further increase your Spell Power based on your Spirit, further improving the effects granted by Twisted Faith.

Glyph of Mind Flay can be considered as another mandatory glyph alongside Glyph of Shadow. It increases your overall Mind Flay damage by 10% when your target is afflicted by Shadow Word: Pain. This can be considered a permanent buff, as you will always afflict your target with Shadow Word: Pain.

Glyph of Dispersion is a solid choice for your third glyph option, as you will receive a massive 45 seconds reduction to Dispersion‘s cooldown, bringing the total cooldown to 1-minute 15-seconds. Dispersion is one of the most powerful defensive tools in the entire game as well as your strongest tool for mana recovery, and having it available more often can prove to be a lifesaver.

This is the most common option for your third Glyph, even though it does not provide any direct damage boost.

Glyph of Shadow Word: Death increases the damage dealt with Shadow Word: Death against low health enemies. Unfortunately we rarely use Shadow Word: Death at the best of times and this increase is a small 10% damage. Because of this it is generally not recommended that you use this, but it is also the highest damage option on paper.

This is not often chosen as a third Glyph.

Glyph of Mind Sear is an alternative choice for the third glyph, increasing your overall Mind Sear range by 5 yards. There’s not much more to it than that — this is a simple Glyph that allows you to potentially hit more enemies with Mind Sear. Generally this won’t be useful as your Tank should be trying to stack the mobs anyway.

This is not often chosen as a third Glyph.

Minor Glyphs

This glyph restores 5% of your maximum mana back to you if your Shadowfiend is killed during a fight. This can be very important to mitigate a wasted Shadowfiend, guaranteeing that you will get some mana back either way.

This glyph allows you to cast Levitate without the need for a reagent. Never jump off a tall building and fall to a quick death again because you forgot to fill your pockets with feathers. I recommend always having this, if nothing else to save inventory space.

This glyph reduces the mana cost of your Power Word: Fortitude and Prayer of Fortitude by 50%, meaning that a simple rebuff won’t require you to drink afterwards. I recommend always running this for convenience.

This glyph increases the duration of Shadow Protection and Prayer of Shadow Protection by 10 minutes. These buffs have low durations by default and this helps bring them more in line with your other buff timers. This is good for convenience reasons.

This glyph allows you to increase the range at which you can cast Shackle Undead by 5 yards. A rarely useful glyph that does not come in handy very often.

About the Author

Passion

I love MMOs of all shades, especially the nitty gritty numbers parts of them. You might recognize me from the Shadow Priest discord, otherwise I play a little bit of everything, especially games with support roles available.