Originally Posted by
Khrabanas
Shadow priests are not good. It's a flawed spec that has a viability niche limited to duels against a few classes. Anywhere else, it's really bad.
The spec ekes out a marginal existence in PvE by supplying a debuff that's worthwhile if the raid has four or more warlocks, but even this has been surpassed by a modern trend of simply having one of the healing priests spec into it. Contrary to what that one content creator tried to prove with a very questionable video, shadow priest DPS is low and comes with severe mana problems. To DPS properly, the raid also needs to reserve three debuff slots for the priest, which is absurd. If no healing priests are interested in speccing into Shadow Weaving, and the raid has 4+ warlocks, it's worth taking one spriest along; but due to the debuff slot economy, it's actually mathematically impossible for the priest himself to do good DPS. If you reserve three debuff slots for the priest, you lose more DPS that way than the priest deals. Raid DPS would be higher if the priest just did nothing but maintain Shadow Weaving and the other two debuff slots were used for something better, like Nightfall and Annihilator.
PvP is supposed to be where shadow priests shine, but experienced PvPers know better. Aside from mana issues and the barely-existing itemization for spriests, the spec is just not that good. It'll win duels against certain classes because it has a few rare tools like silence and universal damage reduction, but it has huge, glaring weaknesses that skilled PvPers will exploit with ease. The first is the fact that half of the damage comes from Mind Flay, a channelled spell with a base range of 20. It's got a huge visual component that alerts everyone that this is the perfect time to interrupt you. It can be outranged with ease, and once someone is outside its underwhelming range, there's absolutely nothing whatsoever that a priest can do. When not confined to the permitted area of a duel, it's trivial to kite a spriest. If you can stay at 30-40ish yars, the only thing the priest can do to you is keep up SW:P and tickle you with the occasional Mind Blast. Half their damage comes from that channelled spell with the 20 yard range.
People really want shadow priests to be powerful because it's such a cool and interesting spec, which is why everyone's always asking about it and coming up with reasons it might be viable. We've got these cherrypicked videos of spriests with double trinket uptime and Berserker doing what looks like good damage. Nobody's going to post videos of spriests doing shit DPS because of mana issues, or getting helplessly kited by hunters, mages and warlocks who can easily outrange Mind Flay. If the class was really that good in PvP, it would be played much more. Over the years, people on private servers gradually discovered the power of elemental shamans, and it became a fairly popular spec in PvP as a result, even though it's absolutely worthless for literally everything else. The same would have happened to shadow priests if they really were competitive, but they aren't. There's just so much misinformation about them precisely because so few play the spec that many haven't experienced its weaknesses.