We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Shadow Priest in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Shadow Priest!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Feral Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Priest Tier Set
Why You Should Play Shadow Priest in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
It’s fair to say that Shadow Priest had a bit of a rocky start coming into Dragonflight, suffering from poor initial tuning and a mobility and damage toolkit that did not match up well against the premier raid encounters of the tier. After some buffs in both 10.0.5 and 10.0.7 the spec began to see significantly more representation in Mythic+ and raiding, but still had concerns with button bloat and rotational confusion many players were hoping would be addressed. Shadow has now received a rework to its talent tree in 10.1, building upon the work that had already been done for Dragonflight.
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Shadow Priest in Dragonflight Season 2
Shadow Priest Utility for Dragonflight
Shadow has a vast suite of niche utility spells. While they don’t all see consistent use every season, shadow has tonnes of little tricks to help out in dungeons and raids.
- Mass Dispel: Removes large numbers of dispellable buffs and debuffs at once, notably Bursting stacks.
- Leap of Faith: Can save your teammate’s life or help your tank kite particularly dangerous mobs.
- Power Word: Fortitude: Standard Stamina buff, every raid should have one and it’s not too bad for dungeons either.
- Dispel Magic: Dispel dangerous offensive buffs from enemies.
- Purify Disease: Remove diseases from yourself or your teammates. This will be especially useful for Afflicted.
- Shackle Undead: CC for any potential undead enemies in dungeons and raid encounters. This will also work on the mobs spawned by the Incorporeal affix
- Psychic Scream, Silence, and Psychic Horror as control tools.
- Dominate Mind can be used to control humanoids, elementals, beasts and dragons without the risk of breaking on damage during combat, as well as potentially allow your teammates to benefit from damage auras or buffs cast by those NPCS.
- Offhealing from Vampiric Embrace and other holy school spells can help keep you and your team alive, through dangerous mechanics, especially when paired with strong dps cooldowns.
Twins of the Sun Priestess continues to be a massive part of Shadow’s utility toolkit going into Season 2 of Dragonflight. The ability to provide another dps with a whole extra damage cooldown at no cost to yourself is a massive power boost that massively improves the spec’s chances of being brought to content. There is however the concern that providing this much external dps may affect the spec’s baseline tuning, making it weaker in solo situations where you can’t make use of the extra Power Infusion, though it’s unclear if this happened throughout season 1. Shadow’s utility, given power infusion remains as strong as it has been, looks to be in a good place going forward.
Improved Capstones and new Talent Tree
The biggest change Shadow has received in 10.1 and one of the biggest reasons to try it out is the rework it received to its talent tree. Feedback that the original Dragonflight Shadow rotation felt bloated and unintuitive has been taken on board with Mind Flay and Mind Spike becoming a choice of one or the other, reducing confusion with multiple filler spells. There have also been many new additions to the tree such as Voidtouched and Distorted Reality. These talent changes have been made with the aim of increasing the spec’s build diversity and making it more intuitive for players to understand.
Another part of the talent tree rework has been improving the design and output of some of Shadow’s capstone talents 10.1. Namely Idol of C’Thun and Idol of Yogg-Saron
Shiny new AoE Toolkit….Again
Shadow has once again received a revamp to the way in which it deals AoE damage in Dragonflight season 2. Mind Sear has been removed and AoE damage now revolves entirely around Psychic Link and applying Vampiric Touch with Shadow Crash. This style is one some players find enjoyable and have been using to some success in Mythic+ already. If you weren’t a fan of how Shadow did AoE damage in Dragonflight and want something more focused on multi dotting, the new changes might be for you.
Multi Dotting Niche
As mentioned, Shadow is one of the few specs that can reliably and consistently deal spread cleave damage by Multi Dotting. It is also capable of dealing large amounts of cleave damage without losing any Single Target at all thanks to Psychic Link. This has a lot of use cases in dungeons where packs are often kited and end up spread out or difficult for players to AoE down evenly, in Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible this damage style seems to be valuable on fights like Warlord Kagni and Neltharion.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Shadow Priest in Dragonflight Season 2
Shadow went through a lot of work during Dragonflight’s development period and once again in Season 2, and while most of the iteration and design ideas have been positive there are areas that feel neglected and major concerns from players that have been ignored.
Loss of Mobility
As part of the talent changes, Shadow has lost it’s most potent tool for dealing damage whilst moving, as well as received hefty nerfs to two of its others. Surge of Darkness has been removed, meaning you will no longer be getting a constant stream of instant cast Mind Spike procs to use for movement, Shadowy Insight has received the rather baffling change of having its additional charge removed, meaning the proc is significantly less flexible and harder to get full value out of, and Mind Devourer has been nerfed significantly. This crackdown on the number of instant casts Shadow has might prove to hurt its viability in encounters that require significant amounts of movement, as well as reduce the responsiveness of the spec as a whole.
Weak Tier Set
Shadow’s new tier set is as follows, it focuses on buffing our instant procs and increasing the damage of Shadowy Apparitions:
- Priest Shadow 10.1 Class Set 2pc: Increases the chance for Shadowy Insight to trigger by 25%. When consuming Shadowy Insight, Mind Blast deals 30% increased damage and generates 4 additional Insanity.
- Priest Shadow 10.1 Class Set 4pc: Devouring Plague damage increased by 15%. Every 4 casts of Devouring Plague increases the damage of Shadowy Apparitions conjured within the next 10 sec by 80%.
Currently the numbers look to be roughly 7-8% on Single Target and nearer 5% in dungeons. This makes the set significantly weaker than the majority of tier sets revealed in 10.1.
Problems with Utility in the Spec Tree
Shadow still has problems with utility in its spec tree costing large amounts of damage to acquire, because the top of the tree has 9 nodes, 5 of which are mandatory damage talents and vastly restrict pathing towards key utility pieces such as Psychic Horror which have seen zero play throughout the expansion in PvE.
Reliance on Shadow Crash, Target Caps, and a Punishing Rotation in AoE
With all of Shadow’s damage in AoE now hinging on Shadow Crash and Psychic Link, it is more important than ever to land every Shadow Crash and not lose dot uptime in large trash pulls. The talent Mental Decay, which Shadow Priests have been using throughout Dragonflight to extend the duration of their DoTs on AoE will be purely for Single Target moving forward, meaning in order to do sustained AoE you will have to repeatedly reapply DoTs with Shadow Crash. This can become especially awkward towards the end of a pull when dots are fading as you will have to weigh up if it’s more important to keep doing damage to the current pull or save Shadow Crash to start dealing damage to the next.
Shadow Crash retains its target cap of 8, which means that after losing Mind Sear Shadow once again has no way to deal mass AoE damage without manually casting Vampiric Touch for each target beyond 8 that Shadow Crash missed. This makes Shadow feel a lot like a ranged Outlaw Rogue in Dragonflight season 2, which could be a huge problem if we see any pulls similar to the tree area of Algeth’ar Academy.
About the Author
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Hello! I am Ellipsis, moderator for WarCraftPriests, the Priest Discord. I work on Shadow Priest theorycraft alongside the Shadow Team, you can check out our work here! I am often active on the WarCraftPriests discord server and free to answer any questions or queries related to Shadow Priest or any content in any of my guides. I raid in The Misty Moon on EU Tarren-Mill (Formerly The Misty Moon Massive) and have raided between top 50 and 300 since Legion but I’ve been playing Shadow Priest in some capacity for going on 14 years. Outside of WoW, I spend most of my time listening to music, especially seeking out interesting new things I haven’t heard before! Ice Bear. |
For more information on playing Shadow Priest, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Shadow Priest Guide
