Muqq's shadowpriest guide part 2

Muqq from Nihilum wrote:

A common question I get asked a lot is, which spell rotation is the best? Truth to be told, there is no one rotation that fits all encounters. On some fights you might have to move around a lot, which makes using Mind Flay harder, as its range is limited to 24 yards. Other times, you might be fighting a stationary target, which will allow you to use Mind Flay with ease. So really, it all comes down to adapting your playing style for different types of encounters.

Basic Rotation
The basic rotation that most shadowpriests probably use is the Vampiric Touch > Shadow Word: Pain > Vampiric Embrace > Mind Flay variation. This is the most mana-efficient rotation, as it really lets you DPS for a long time before you run out of mana. This is the rotation most of the newer shadowpriests will stick with until they get better gear. As your gear improves, you can manage to weave in Mind Blast, effectively making it Vampiric Touch > Shadow Word: Pain > Vampiric Embrace > Mind Blast > Mind Flay > Mind Flay. Keep using Mind Blast as soon as its cooldown is over.

Vampiric Embrace in Spell Rotations
As for Vampiric Embrace, you could skip it in your rotation if you find that you’re generating too much threat, or just choose not to take the improved talents for it, and lower your threat generation that way. As always, it’s just a personal preference that you'll have to decide upon, taking the benefits vs. the downsides into account.

Mana-intensive Rotation
Our most mana-intensive spell rotation includes adding Shadow Word: Death into it, making the rotation Vampiric Touch > Shadow Word: Pain > Vampiric Embrace > Mind Blast > Shadow Word: Death > Mind Flay. This will burn through your mana very quickly if you are not careful, and you should only be using this rotation if you are really good on mana, or have lots of consumables, innervates and mana tide at your disposal. This rotation will also generate huge amounts of threat, so if you don't have a good enough tank that is able to hold aggro against you, there's little point in using it.

Shadow Word: Death
On another note here, Shadow Word: Death, is a double-edged sword. While it will increase your DPS, it will also damage you for the same amount that it inflicts upon your target. If you're not careful, you might actually kill yourself with it by lowering your own health, and getting hit by an AoE effect during an encounter. Always consider the time and place when you use this spell, as you could end up dead instead of increasing your DPS.

Spell Prioritization
Another important thing to consider while playing a shadowpriest is prioritizing between spells. As most of you probably have experienced, the cooldowns of our abilities often come unsynced, forcing us to decide what spells to cast and in what order to cast them. A good example of this would be having Vampiric Touch expire on the target, and at the same time having Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death available to cast. In those events it's important to take the whole situation into account, and estimating if you could manage the mana-loss of not having Vampiric Touch on while casting Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death before reapplying it.

It all comes down to judging the situation and acting accordingly. On the same subject, it's also important to look at the remaining time left on your dots and reapplying them at good times. For example, having 1 second left on Vampiric Touch is a good time to start reapplying it again, as the casting time of 1.5 seconds would result in having it being applied less than half a second after it's expired. Casting it too early will only result in not getting the last tick of your previous Vampiric Touch, and will subsequently result in less DPS.

Another judgement call you might have to make is in the situations where you start channeling Mind Flay with less than 2 second left on your Mind Blast. Do you interrupt the Mind Flay after the second tick and start casting Mind Blast, or do you let it channel for the full duration? My advice on that matter is to interrupt it if you are good on mana, and think you'll be able to last the whole fight, and if not, just let it channel all the way, and then cast Mind Blast.



There are two addons that any shadowpriest should have.

Dot Tracking Addons
The first and probably the most important addon is one that tracks the timers of your dots. Not re-applying dots when they run out is a huge loss of DPS, and they can be very hard to keep track of without an addon that helps you with this. Which addon you choose is really just a personal preference, but a few examples of these kinds of addons would be Chronometer, DoTTimer and Nature Enemy Cast Bar.

Threat-monitoring Addons
The second addon you should get is one that monitors threat. There’s really only two options here, KTM and Omen. Both work pretty much the same, although KTM is a lot heavier on the resource usage than Omen. Which one you choose to use is pretty much up to personal preference, as they both perform their task equally well.

Stop-casting Macro
As for macros, there's not really much to say here. Shadowpriests don't benefit much from stopcasting macros, as we don't have long casting time on our spells. If you wanted to, you could use it in conjunction with Mind Flay, depending on your latency. If you have high latency, a stopcasting macro is great to improve the DPS you inflict with it. It will allow you to cast your next Mind Flay before the current one has finished casting as it probably already stopped channeling server-side.



An example of a stopcasting macro:

Code:

"/stopcasting"
"/cast Mind Flay"

No-channeling Macro
Another one you might want to consider is the noChanneling macro. This macro essentially allows you to spam the mindflay button without fear of interrupting the current channeling of your Mind Flay, which I guess most people do every once in a while. This macro is better suited for people with lower latency than those with high, as you might actually lose DPS if you use this macro if you tend to have a high ping. The reason for this is that you’d probably want to start casting your next spell before the current cast is complete, as your latency adds a bit of a downtime between your spell casts. This isn’t that big of an issue for shadowpriests, as we mostly have instant spells or spells with 1.5 second casting times.

An example of a noChanneling macro:

Code:

"/cast [noChanneling:Mind Flay] Mind Flay"

The most important part in improving your efficiency and DPS as a shadowpriest is to plan ahead, as well as adapting your strategy to fit the encounter. While Karazhan is rather straight forward as far as the encounters go, things pick up a bit after that. Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep will offer a few diverse encounters, and Black Temple even more. What you need to do is come up with different strategies for each encounter, which will improve your performance in them.

8.1 Learn the Encounters
The first few times you do an encounter and beat it, you will most likely stick to your basic spell rotation. This applies to almost any fight. After that, you’ll want to look into improving your performance on said encounters. A good example of this would be a fight such as Shadow of Akama in Black Temple. The first few times, as a shadowpriest you might be assigned to killing the channelers in the middle. You start DPS:ing one target and stick with single target DPS:ing for your first few kills of the boss. Later you might realize, well, why not just dot all of them? You end up trying that, and discover that your DPS goes up by quite a huge amount.

That's one example of how learning a fight will allow you to properly maximize your efficiency. Another thing you have to consider is that priorities of the spells you use sometimes differ from encounter to encounter. Supremus in Black Temple is a boss that is constantly moving around in his second phase. This doesn't fit very well into using a Mind Flay-heavy spell rotation, so you need to adapt and just keep dots on and sticking to Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death a lot.

Aggro Resets
Some fights have aggro-resets included in them, and you need to take that into account as well. Fights such as Hydross and Leotheras the Blind in Serpentshrine Cavern can be very unforgiving if you DPS a lot during transitions. Just pay attention and adapt to whatever encounter you are doing.

Multi-target DPS
Another thing many people fail to do is to properly dot up targets if you have the mana for it. Kael'Thas in Tempest Keep is an example of an encounter which has multiple targets available for DPS during one of his phases. Take that into account and keep all targets dotted up if your mana allows it, it'll increase your DPS. The same strategy can be used on many other encounters, as well as when you're clearing trashmobs, if you have several mobs being tanked at once.



In the end, playing a shadowpriest can be a very rewarding and fun experience, and while the class itself is quite strong, it also has a few weaknesses that you have to plan a strategy for in order to avoid, or at the very least, keep to a minimum. There are many ways to play a shadowpriest, but it’s really a lot up to personal preference how you choose to play the class. While some playing styles will be more efficient than others, there are many things that set shadowpriests apart from each other and if you find your own style being different from the norm, but still effective, who am I to tell you to play it the way I do?