How awesome is Shadow (for your average player)

[cybertier]

Hello Priest,

since our guild secondary raid got canceled i am standing before a decision.

Recently i leveled my rogue and geared her and now i got good gear and feel good about my dps (~25k-ish at baloroc with not full 378 gear)
But there is only small chance for me to get a place in our mainraid since it got no free melee slots.
But i would have a 100% chance with my priest as Shadow. But this Priest is 72 and i haaaaaate leveling.

So my question:
How awesome is Shadow for you? How competitive is it's DPS, for an average player. (I know i ranks high on SimCraft and stuff, but thats for high-end players)
I know it's quite a complex rotation, but that's stuff i like. How rewarding is it for good performance?

[myhv]

It's really nice. Being a healer main spec my shadow gear is kinda lame, only 2p, no optimized stats (since half of the gear is used for my healing I can't just reforge it around) and my 2p tier items are of 378 since we g have a shortage of this type of tier but I still can keep up with most of the people, sometimes even being very close to top. Though experience means a lot, I'm usually a lot less effective on more complex fights that I don't really know from a DPS'er perspective.

[nycnyc88]

Shadow priest is awesome. I used to play my mage for almost 4 years before i switched to SP main. If played correctly, you will be top or second best DPS (in equivalent gear).

[myhv]

Also, shadow seems to be on of few DPS specs I really enjoy playing as opposed to, for example, DPS warriors(both) or boomkin.

[studkaw]

you will be top or second best DPS (in equivalent gear).

What if there are 10 SP and all of them know how to play?

[Callypso]

Shadow is very rewarding for good performance. As it's one of the hardest specs to play ingame at the moment, there will be a huge difference between priests depending on their skills.

At the same time that also means you can't slack. If you don't play properly you'll notice a huge loss of dps.

If you are both able and willing to focus 100% all the time, shadow is extremely fun to play as you can bring some very competitive dps to the table compared to some other classes.

[Davoo2080]

Shadow priest is awesome. I used to play my mage for almost 4 years before i switched to SP main. If played correctly, you will be top or second best DPS (in equivalent gear).

No you wont. Not if you dont have legendary and the other classes in "equivalent gear" knows how to play thier spec as well.

[fizzbob]

without dark intent it's an average dps spec with solid single, multi and aoe targeting

it's op with dark intent and 10% sp. dark intent on an spriest is like every single melee buff on a melee class. it's worth that much

average player isn't a good spriest

[Scathbais]

Seems like it is rather irrelevant how good SPriests are (they can be very good btw), but you need to invest time in a good dot timer/cd tracker).
The question is how badly you want to raid with your guild.
Stay a rogue and don't raid, or put in a few weeks to gear up your SPriest and raid.

It is a fun and rewarding spec when played well.

[Dyra]

What if there are 10 SP and all of them know how to play?

There would be so much purple awesome going around, bosses would fall to their knees before us begging us to destroy them and take their loot, servers would crash from the amount of people just wanting to be near them, world 1st guilds would disband from despair and all Azeroth would look as though viewed from behind a pair of sunglasses.

On - Topic: It all comes down to how desperate you are to raid tbh. We put out good damage, that only gets better if you put a bit of investment in getting a buff and DoT tracker and getting used to re-applying DoTs on demand. We are the class most affected by caster raid buffs since we have none of our own (save 5% haste ofc) and we're far and away the superior spec to have DI on. So if they're available to you your DPS should shoot up a bit more. SPriests are also reasonably easy to gear since we can use every piece of cloth gear with no detrimental effects, though expect to see some QQing from healers should you (rightfully) roll on spirit gear.

[Hesp]

Single target is pretty easy, but topping parses on complex fights requires a good bit of class know-how and execution (not to mention dark intent/dtr), which makes playing it well extremely satisfying. In my personal experience the dps gap between an average shadowpriest and an excellent shadowpriest is rather extreme compared to other classes. With time anyone can learn to play proficiently, but it's a far cry from a rogue and you might find yourself spending longer learning to optimize your dps than you may expect. That said, shadowpriests are extremely powerful in today's raiding environment due to their well-rounded spell toolkit, so you will excel in nearly every dps situation. You won't learn multi-dotting in a day though, so be prepared to hit those training dummies.

I would continue trying to get a raid slot with your rogue but keep the priest as a work in progress if it doesn't work out.

[Lucapa]

I agree with Fizzbob. Shadow Priest without Dark Intent is not better than the other dps classes, with dark intent it is possible to dominate the damage meters, excluding patchwerk type fights.

[madrox]

I also played a rogue for years before switching to a priest last year and to be honest I now wonder what took me so long. Not only is Shadow great fun to play, but you can re-spec and fill a different role-something that as a raiding rogue should strike a chord with you. Last october I was ready to quit this game, rolling a priest has given me a whole new lease of life in Azeroth.

[kombucha]

average player isn't a good spriest

I agreed with this statement. Being effective with Shadow means having a good understanding of when to use what, and most importantly, knowing how to keep DoTs rolling continuously without clipping, which is a concept some people struggle with.

[Healarious]

Depends on the raid comp really. My spriest raids with 2 hunters, a combat rogue, a fury warrior, 2 blood dks, a resto druid and a resto shaman (sometimes there's a holy paladin as well, and one of the blood dks go frost for single tank fights). Pretty shitty buffs for me right there lol.

[evn]

Shadow priests remind me of DK tanking or feral druid DPS: it's easy to play badly, somewhat challenging (so far as wow goes) to play well.

You could rank classes from 1-100 of maximum theoretical damage: priests are near the top of that list: lets say 93. An equally important question is "how cloase can you get to maximum theoretical DPS if you follow a few simple rules to play?", "how much more involved is it to hit the theoretical maximum DPS?"

Some classes have high theoretical damage and don't take a lot of effort to get reasonably close to that (I feel that way about my arcane mage). The reward for playing extremely well is not a huge gain in DPS over somebody just going through the motions with a basic understanding of the class. Some classes are more involved (feral druid DPS or DK tanking feel this way to me). If you have a basic understanding of the class you'll hit maybe 60% of the theoretical maximum, a skilled player can get much closer - there's a room for good players to stand out from bad ones even in identical gear.

Priests seem to fall somewhere in the middle but closer to feral druid/dk tank than arcane mage: if you just keep dots up, spam mind flay, and use mindblast / wings /shadow fiend on cooldown you'll get about 85% of your maximum possible damage. The extra 15% comes from learning to coordinate cooldowns, paying careful attention to buffs and procs and knowing when to update DOTs vs letting them go, minimizing the DPS penalty for movement, etc. A skilled player will stand out from a merely competent player but a bad player isn't completely useless either. I find classes where my personal ability is largely unimportant to be somewhat boring to play.

In terms of what it's like to play: you're juggling 5 balls while using 2/3 abilities (compared to an arcane mage that juggles 1 ball while using 2 abilities). You've got 2 dots that require a fair bit of attention, 1 dot that almost maintains itself, 1 buff that requires a moderate amount of attention and one that basically takes care of itself. You want to maintain 100% uptime on all of those while spending as few GCDs as possible on it.

In your spare time you're weaving mindblast/mind flays and later shadow word: deaths. SW has some risks, some fights it'll kill you outright for pushing it even at full health (heroic baleroc with tormented, heroic domo at 100% concentration) and others it becomes a risk only due to burn phase AOE (beth'tilac, ultraxion) so your health becomes more important to you than some other classes.

The class is pretty durable compared to others (passive -20% magic damage + dispersion) has some pretty solid utility options (hymn x2) strong single target and multi-target damage and pretty good AOE dps too. Compared to other classes: you pay a pretty big DPS penalty for "small moves" like world-in-flames but a pretty small one for "big moves" like running between ice patches. A priest has fairly limited burst damage but if you plan ahead you can squeeze out 200k in < 5 seconds once every couple of minutes. Ramp up time is brutally bad (it'll take you about 10 seconds to hit your max DPS) but once your damage starts rolling it stays reasonably consistent. RNG plays some role in maintaining your damage because you're dependent on shadow orbs but that's usually only an issue while you're ramping up. In combat you usually have enough orbs to keep up empowered shadow with too much fuss. Priests are very dependent on raid buffs - missing DI or CoE is a pretty big hit - that makes them somewhat less desirable in a poorly balanced raid group.

[buckuoff]

Spriests are actually really easy to play, its not hard at all. Its my alt and im maybe 367ish Ilvl and im doing like 23k. full 378's u just do a shit ton more. i think there one of the most easist classes to play

[smelltheglove]

there are no average players in wow. everybody is leet (while every other player is bad. just like driving)

[Vorend]

it's op with dark intent and 10% sp

In a single-target fight and with 100% DI uptime (unrealistic) for my gear, it's worth ~1400 dps.

This is with 100000 iterations. A lot of people are overestimating this buff. It is a little bit better on multi-target fights (but so are other buffs).

Edit: Poster under here doesn't seem to know how to sim

[fizzbob]

In a single-target fight and with 100% DI uptime for my gear, it's worth ~1400 dps.

on ragnaros in my gear it's worth 2207dps. from all simmed data since launch, raiding gear and dark intent should be 2k dps. you're getting more than 1400 i promise you. it's the most op buff in the game for any class.

the other lock buffs (4% more sp, 8% magic debuff) end up being worth nearly 1800dps

---------- Post added 2011-11-19 at 12:05 PM ----------

Spriests are actually really easy to play, its not hard at all. Its my alt and im maybe 367ish Ilvl and im doing like 23k. full 378's u just do a shit ton more. i think there one of the most easist classes to play

since the dot changes, the difficulty level dropped a ton. when clipping a dot meant a dps loss, when clipping mind flay was nearly an art form, it was tougher

now it's like everything else. spam something a lot and reapply dots somewhere in that 2-3 second window

---------- Post added 2011-11-19 at 12:06 PM ----------

I agreed with this statement. Being effective with Shadow means having a good understanding of when to use what, and most importantly, knowing how to keep DoTs rolling continuously without clipping, which is a concept some people struggle with.

you don't even know how to play an spriest. you CAN CLIP DOTS nowadays. they made that change in 4.0, you're just not supposed to let them fall off is all. even if you overwrite your old VT with a new one that doesn't have your trink buff, it doesn't matter, the last BUFFED tick will tick THEN will go to the new unbuffed VT