In order to preserve mana, you can cancel your heals just before they land, if the tank doesn’t need healing. Simply move a bit forward, or strafe and the heal will get cancelled. Use your Fade as often as possible, even if you’re not (yet) risking agro gain.

 If you’re running low on mana, tell the other healers in the raid chat or your healer channel that you need to regenerate a bit. This way they’ll know not to regenerate themselves as well, risking the life of the tanks.

 If you have a paladin in the group and the fight allows it, ask him to place Judgment of Wisdom on the boss and start hitting it with your wand. Combined with your mana regeneration rate, the mana gained from wanding a target with Judgment of Wisdom will prove invaluable.

 Overview

As a raiding shadow priest in World of Warcraft, you have a very versatile role.

 Besides having to damage your target, you’ll also need to use your shadow abilities to restore life and mana to your party, increase your fellow warlock or mage raiders’ damage and if needed, help out the healers if they run out of mana, they die or they are overwhelmed.

Obviously, for restoring life and mana as a shadow priest, you’ll need the Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch talents respectively. Since you will give out life/mana in accordance to the amount of damage you deal, the better your gear the better the regeneration. It’s a bit of a paradox, since a shadow priest does not have to trade anything when leveling up in what regards his gear. You can only get better and better in both the damage and the healing / mana regeneration departments. But that’s why we love em to be honest <3

 With the help of the Shadow Weaving and Misery talents found in the shadow tree, a priest can boost the damage of locks and mages quite a bit as well as boosting your own DPS. If the group setup is right, a shadow priest’s presence in the raid can often mean a huge difference so don’t underestimate their importance, especially at damage-based fights where you need to take down the boss before he takes you down (Gruul for example – if you don’t take him down before his debuffs stack to much on the tank, it’s almost a certain wipe).

Talent Discussion

You can find some PVE shadow priest talent builds in our Priest Builds Section but regardless of which one you choose, there are a couple of talents that simply cannot miss from a shadow priest’s arsenal:

Shadow Affinity – it reduces your shadow threat by 25% and it just takes 3 points to max out. Definitely get this one.

Improved Shadow Word: Pain – your Shadow Word: Pain is one of your most important damage dealers in long fights and the 2 extra ticks that you get from spending points in this talent will stack up nicely over time.

Shadow Focus – reduces the enemy’s chance to resist your shadow spell, saving you mana from not having to recast again and increasing your shadow damage at the same time. Combined with some hit gear, this talent will assure the fact that you won’t have to worry about resists in raids.

Mind Flay – one of the base shadow spells, Mind Flay will allow you to deal damage with great efficiency and low threat.

Shadow Weaving – A very useful stackable debuff to your enemy that increases your own damage as well as your party members that deal shadow damage to the target. Since putting more points in shadow weaving does not increase the intensity of the debuff, but rather the chance it will stack it’s almost useless to spend 5 points here for a raiding spec. 3/5 or 4/5 Shadow Weaving should be enough to get that debuff stacking nicely by the time you and the other shadow damage dealers in the party start dishing out damage.

Vampiric Embrace and Vampiric Touch – essential raiding talents, your mana regeneration and healing are based on these and you need to make sure you’ll keep them on at all times. Improved Vampiric Embrace is nice if you have the points to spend in it, but feel free to skip it if you think your healing will go out in vain anyway (overhealing).

Darkness and Shadowform – a shadow priest would not be a shadow priest without these two and the combined 25% extra shadow damage you get is kind of awesome.

Misery – max this out and your raid members will love you. The 5% boost in damage will go a long way in dps-based fights.

One of the biggest “mysteries” regarding shadow priest builds is where to spend your 5 points in the tier 1 talents. Blackout or Spirit Tap…tough choice, since none of them are really useful in raids, but both have situational utility which can prove as an argument towards one or another. Most shadow priests agree that it’s a matter of what you do outside the raid actually. If you PVP, Blackout is more useful, but if you grind or quest a lot by yourself, Spirit Tap is the way to go to reduce downtime.