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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsSpiritual Guidance: Shadow as a secondary spec in 3.1
by Alex Ziebart 
Apr 13th 2009 at 4:00PM
Every week, Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host today is Alex Ziebart who doesn't have as many cool links to plug up here as Matticus does but will try anyway. This week we get our Shadowform on..
PvE Shadow - Raiding
MMO-Champion has a great tool for setting up talent specs, because you can include your glyphs as well, so we're going to be using that. This spec (14/0/57) will be a fairly cookie-cutter raiding build in patch 3.1, with only very minor variations from person to person. The Shadow tree isn't a very complicated one. Either a talent boosts your DPS, or it does something else. For a raiding spec, you want all of the DPS talents and you can skip all of the 'something else' talents unless they're mandatory for a DPS talent. It's pretty straightforward. Even in the Discipline tree the ultimate goal is to pick up the DPS talents, Twin Disciplines and Improved Inner Fire. Meditation isn't a direct DPS talent, but having no mana is certainly a DPS hit.
Shadow Affinity is one talent that tends to grab people's eyes and seduce them into speccing it, but don't do it! Shadowform already comes packaged with 30% threat reduction, so there are almost no situations in which you'll need Shadow Affinity in PvE as well. None of the Ulduar bosses we've seen so far will cause a Shadow Priest threat problems unless your tank isn't sure how to push his buttons. You definitely do not need two threat reduction talents, and the new dispel component of Shadow Affinity is a PvP thing, not a raiding thing.
Glyphs, too, are pretty straightforward for Shadow. As a raider, your Major Glyphs should be Glyph of Shadow, Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain, and Glyph of Mind Flay. Your minors aren't very important, but I'm personally going to try to keep Glyph of Shadowfiend in there no matter what spec I am. Having a little insurance is pretty nice.
PvE Shadow - Non-Raiding
A non-raiding spec for PvE is going to vary a lot from person to person. The Shadow tree is what you could call bloated, but it's the good kind of bloated, not the bad kind of bloated. Almost every single talent in the tree has a use, so you get stuck deciding which ones work best for you personally. I would use a build like this one (9/0/62) if I'm just questing and doing 5-mans, but don't worry about copying it exactly. You don't need to do thatm, and probably shouldn't do that. Tailor it to what works for you. As long as most of your talent points are in the Shadow tree, you can probably end up with a passable spec.
Glyphs aren't quite as varied, there are still only a few that you would really want to use. Avoid the Glyph of Mind Flay this time around, because you don't wan't to give up the snare if you're just questing around. I replaced it with a Glyph of Dispersion, because a lower cooldown on it will reduce downtime (especially with the loss of Meditation to get all I want in the Shadow tree) and let me solo ridiculous, absurd things I shouldn't be able to solo more often! Glyph of Shadow and Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain still take up my other two slots. The other options simply aren't worthwhile in PvE.
Conclusion
Shadow is a very easy talent tree to pick apart. There aren't many useless talents. As I said, spending talent points is largely going to come down to what is best for you. A raiding spec is a little more cookie cutter, but you still have some freedom with it. Try things out, experiment, do some reading, find what you like. Use what I've given you as a framework. Don't take it as an absolute.
Want to find more great tips for carrying out your Priestly duties? Spiritual Guidance has you covered with all there is to know! And don't forget to check out our other Leveling Guides as well as our Wrath Guides and Galleries!Filed under: Priest, Analysis / Opinion, (Priest) Spiritual Guidance
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 3)
Eisengel Apr 14th 2009 6:53AM
Advice for the new Spriest:
- The talent spec here isn't bad, in fact, it's pretty decent.
- Hit, hit, hit, hit, hit. Yes, and hit. You need 290 +hit with the spec linked in the article if you intend to raid with Shadow.
- Currently hit (until 290) > spellpower > crit/haste stat-wise. Crit and Haste are currently nearly equivalent, with crit performing just a tiny bit better than haste. 3.1 may tip the balance a bit.
- You want to keep everything up in basically this priority; VT, (sw:p), DvP, MB, MF.
- VT (Vampiric Touch) is your single strongest and most mana-efficient DoT. Make sure you keep it up.
- Try not to clip ticks, in other words, try to recast VT so it hits the target the moment the previous one's last tick does damage... same with DvP and refreshing sw:p.
- If you have a fraction of a second to fill in between cooldowns, DoT ticks and cast timers, throw a sw:d
- Read Shadowpriest.com. Immensely useful resource for all things Shadow.
smiley Apr 14th 2009 7:55AM
oh ... ever hear of the R/M/P combo for pvp.. and they are onyl the second most represented healers in 1800+ arena
Disc may be pve viable, but it owns pvp healing. only thing pallies have on you is a 12 second immunity but then thats over (or dispelled BY you) they are basicallly out of tricks if not repentance holy spec
smiley Apr 14th 2009 7:56AM
this is @ justsomeguy >_< damn it WI fix your buggy comment system, i clicked reply waited for the load and dropdown it even said "replying to justsomeguy"
greatwhiteyetti Apr 14th 2009 3:09PM
What stats I should try to pick up for my shadow spec. Is it basically the same with eye towards +hit and +crit? Can I get away with just having one set if all I care about is being able to dps in guild 5-mans or am I gonna feel like Donald from Dark Legacy?
Eisengel Apr 15th 2009 2:48PM
You could hit that 'previous 20 comments' link and see the post I left about 5 above yours... where I have most of the info you want. :^)
Hit is really important... if you want to raid. If all you want is 5-man DPS, you should be able to largely ignore hit. It isn't a great idea, and you will get occasional resists, but in the large part as long as the bosses are under level 83, you're fine without hit. If you want to really do some decent DPS as Shadow though, and have some badges of heroism to spare, I'd recommend picking up the Shadow T7 shoulders. They are great shoulders and have a nice little dab of hit on them. If you have more badges, the badge of heroism offhand gives another nice bit of hit. If you never intend to ever DPS a boss, that little bit of hit should be pretty close to all you'll ever need in 5-mans, and even besides the hit they are pretty solid DPS caster pieces.
Arin Apr 19th 2009 3:37PM
Though I do agree with most of the things that you said, I disagree with choosing the Mind Flay glyph. I say this because, while I am no longer main specced as Shadow, (though I was an end-game shadow priest in tbc), the 50% movement speed can be useful on mobs that NEEDS to be slowed down, (I'm gonna take a TBC example, which is Lady Vashj). And when I tried raiding Naxx as Shadow, I was having no problem with the range of Mind Flay.
However, that depends what your style is. I would rather head for the new Glyph of Dispersion, as Dispersion gives a nice amount of mana back, and -45 seconds can be quite good, especially after the spirit nerfs.
I fully agree with your comment on Shadow Affinity though, as even bad tanks has a hard time letting the DPS over-aggro them, (provided they have 2 seconds to build the aggro of course).
When I finally get enough money, I will be one of the few people who will specc pve Disc/pve Holy. This is mainly because of the Discipline talent tree revamp, which allows you to pick up a lot of essential talents, (which was morphed with pvp talents). This will allow me to tank heal and raid heal whenever I feel like it! What a joy!
Also, I appreciate that you made this article. Making an article about possible shadow speccs can be a bit tricky, as there is basically only one viable specc, (which is the first one that you provided). Very well done!