Shadow priest in end game PvEFollow

In the end you're always going to have to heal before doing DPS, it _is_ after all the class you choose. Of course, nothing stops you from doing this with the majority of your talent points in Shadow. If your guild can spare your healing, just go DPS. Of course if they want you to go disc/holy for whatever reason (which is just as likely as it is unlikely :)) just go with it or stick to raiding on your Hunter ;)

I've never been to MC. I have no idea what the boss fights are like in there.

I know that a lot of bosses have an AoE radius that the range attackers generally stay outside of. Mind Flay's range is too short, leaving your damage options very limited, and really quite below the damage of the good old mindflay SW: P combo.

You might be fine getting away with DPS on trash mobs, but I don't know about the bosses.

i hate the WoW boards. but i'll go have a look.

and yeah i'm going into the aggro reducing stuff. i think my end build will be 13/0/38 with 5 points in each of the aggro reducing talents. i don't know if the martyrdom thing is worthwhile. if not it will be even heavier on the shadow :) (may invest in the anti-stun/silence talent though). thing with the shadow tree is that i think that every single talent is worthwhile hehe. the one i don't have points in is improved mind blast :) although i'm re-speccing soon. (well that and affinity, but i'll put them in affinity too if i can).

Shadow priests are great end game if you can spare the heals because of the fact that they not only increase there own damage but also warlocks dmg by alot with shadow weaving(not to mention they give warlocks unlimited mana with vamp embrace via lifetap). Id have to say youd be crazy to have more then 1 shadow priest in endgame. But if your alliance and youd like to do some damage on your priest but still be effective at healing find your self a retribution paly that is crusader judgement happy. Its only a couple points to improve your smite vs healing which means you can sit there and spam smite to no end.

BTW: I have smite speced with a retribution paly and gotten smite crits for almost 1500. Then again thats with a ton of +dmg and the extra 20% holy dmg from a retribution paly.

Edited, Tue Feb 21 09:48:42 2006 by Alphahammer

In a 5-man scholo run with Me(shadow priest) a lock, a warrior, a pally, and a rogue, The lock and I did about 60% of the damage. I got a MB crit for 1200 out of shadowform. I occasionaly had to heal when it hit the fan, but we got through without any wipes.

The thing about shadow preist damage is that it ramps up, making it better for boss fights than trash. Once you have full shadow weaving, and maby a curse of shadow, you can do insane amounts of damage. And assuming you do 300 dps, you're healing 60 hps to your party(90 hps post 1.10 with imp VE). Not bad.

That being said, shadow priest DPS is fairly mana ineficient, at least in my experiance. So if you can't get spirit tap(I.e. unlucky on trash mobs or MC boss fights), you have to stop fairly soon. If you were to put points in meditation and stack some mana/5 sec gear, you would be able to go longer.

I've never been to MC myself (7 consecutive attempts at getting attuned have failed), but my experiance in UBRS, Strat and Scholo say that a shadow priest is a wonderful asset to any group, and make the perfect off healer to a resto druid.

We have a Shadow Priest who runs MC with us. However, she is a Warlord, and no-ones really gonna turn around and tell her she has to heal.

It's good to see positive feed back on them though.

I was a ShadowPriest to 60, and even for a while after 60, doing cash runs, gear quests, and lots of PvP. I finally decided to switch to disc/holy because that is what my guild needed me to do. We -might- have been ok in our raids with me as a shadowpriest, but I felt like that was being selfish.

This is oversimplifying the process, but by switching to holy, I was helping 19 other people enjoy the game, and I was allowing myself access to better gear from the raids because I can go 100% of the time. If I had stayed shadow, there may not have been as many slots for me to go raiding, and if I had gone, it would have been in a healing capacity anyway.

A shadowpriest in a healing role is a gimped healer. Ive played both sides, and while they can heal well, they just arent at the same level as a holy priest.

So, rambling done. What you need to be a shadowpriest in an end game guild is not experience, or a guild good enough to know what works. You need a guild that is big enough to have all the bases covered. Sure you can get in the raid if you know a guy who knows the GM. But for standard "this is what we need" list, a shadowpriest will almost never be on there. A SP is a novelty (a very powerful novelty) a large guild can bring on end-game instances, while they are 'playing' in the area.

In the end, you have to decide who you are playing for. Is it better to go into a 4 hour raid as a SP and kill lots of stuff and do 125k+ damage. Or better to go as holy into the same raid and heal for 450k+ damage, keeping everyone else alive. This is how most people probably think. I would love to get back into my shadowform, but there's just not enough benefit to my guild to do so.

This last is the problem that my guild currently has. We are a relatively new guild (started Oct 05) on Garona server, so the number of 60's available are limited. And the one 60 Priest that we groomed, ditched us as soon as she hit 60 for another guild.

We're currently working on correcting that deficiency, but our highest priest right now is a level 51. And my level 40 priest is the next highest. There are more working their way up, but it's a slow process.

Having said all of that, the priests have been warned that they'll be strictly healers on raids whenever present.

Unless it's something like Gnomer where I was a combo of off-tank/main DPS ... :) Weird group that one.

shadowpriest always waste a place for a real caster / DPS class, sad true go Holy, to even go close in nice DPS you must be hell good geared. And 15 % more dmg from shadow is only an illusion cuz the only class which will use this is Warlock and in raid there are max 4 locks, so its a total waste of a player slot.

wow, you actually believe holy priests are only marginally better than shadow priests at healing.

Albeit the holy tree is no where near as well thought out as the shadow tree. But to think it does not have any significant thing to offer. wow.

So do you believe every holy priest out there is simply stupid? somehow unable to figure out their talents.

Fact is Holy/Disc or Disc/Holy are far better healers than shadow priests. This is no surprise.

Don't get me wrong. Shadow priests are good healers, but Holy/Disc and Disc/Holy are great healers.

This is why end game raids leaders would rather have a disp/holy or holy/Disp healing over shadow priests.

But back to the OP's question.

As far as being DPSers, I can't believe any one can say shadow priests are not solid. Shadowpriests can really lay into someone and the huge boost they give warlocks is just lovely.

But that does not change one basic problem facing priests in raids. There are generally not enough healers and too many dps'ers. Between warlocks, mages, hunters, and rogues dps is usually covered. With raid leaders so desperate for healers it can be hard to convince them to give up one of their few healers to get yet another dps'er.

If you can get in a guild that will promote your shadow skills, thats fabulous, but sadly that is not the norm.

There is plenty of evidence showing the value of the shadowpriest, especially if you have a lot of warlocks. But that will mean nothing if your Guild does not already have enough healers.

Good Luck at keeping the Shadowform. (I so miss MindFlay)

In 1.10 the difference WILL be significant. At this point, meh. But post 1.10 you can bet your *** a holy/disc priest will heal MUCH better.

Take your "noobass" and "gtho" comments to the O boards.

Get the hell out.

Becasue baseless ranting and raving is the way to prove something, I belive you, O crap, No I dont. Currently a holy spec heals about 10-15% more and has a effecenty higher than a shadow priest, so they can keep helaing, but untill the next patch, the best healers in the game are not holy or shadow, it is the mana manegment tools of a disc prist that rules as king. Can you heal in MC with no holy points? Yes, and do it well.
Untill the next patch, nothing but flash heal is used in the (Endgame), well heal wize, and beyond that, it is all about sheilds.



My outlook, No, but realsiticly it should be the end of shadowform for anybody who is seirous about helping get somethign big done. Lets assume that for a moment you could out dps a rogue with epic gear, and never run OOM, even if you did doubble his dps, you are more helpfull by healing becasue by healing one tank, 3 rogues could be pounding on the mob safely(mostly). Even in my made up world where SP out did rouges it is not advantagous to DPS, when the healing is so needed, this gets a bug in me of why choose a healer class, If your Want is to DPS, Sure we "Melt Faces" but somebody else, "Melts whole bodies.

Defence of the Shadow priest, My warlock runs ZG with a shadowpriest, our group has a hard time holding on to mana eaters(for the bosses) and found it works better when we have one of each(lock for drain mana, priest for mana burn(improved by shadow spec) and a hunter ) and on days when we use a second lock instead of a our shadow priest, my DPS suffers, yes MINE. The shadow powers of our classes just complement each other so well.