Shadow Priest PvP Guide for TBC Classic

Strengths

• Has both offensive and defensive dispels.
• Offers Mana return to party.
• Can pressure multiple people at a time.

Weaknesses

• Has no personal defensive cooldowns.
• Runs out of Mana quickly, cannot sustain long games.
• Cannot do much if focused.

Shadow Priest brings a few desirable things to most PvP situations: having a high amount of damage-over-time abilities, restoring Mana and health to the entire party, and having very nice utility

This is the main talent build for PvP Shadow Priests, grabbing many core abilities and talents. The talent choices focus on increasing your ability to dispel as much as possible with Absolution and Mental Agility reducing the Mana cost of Dispel Magic.

In PvP there is no real set rotation you should be focusing on. The usage of your abilities depends on many factors but the most important thing as a Shadow Priest is to stay on your targets as much as you possibly can and DoTing as many people as possible that you are not crowd controlling.

• Shadow Word: Pain
• Vampiric Touch
• Shadow Word: Death
• Mind Flay

Priests have a decent number of utility spells; taking full advantage of your utility is what really separates a good Priest from a great one. When used correctly, Priest has a response to almost every situation.

Dispel Magic is one of your most-used abilities. Use it both offensively and defensively to dispel almost all magical buffs and debuffs you can.

Mass Dispel is an AoE version of Dispel Magic, affecting 10 enemies and 10 friendly targets at once. It can also be used to remove immunity spells, such as Divine Shield and Ice Block.

Psychic Scream is your peel and crowd control. Use this on anyone out of position, or if you need a few seconds of breathing room.

Shadowfiend — Use this to restore your Mana quickly, or when your party is pushing for a kill.

Power Word: Shield — Use this often to put a high absorb on a friendly target. The absorb is not effected by healing reduction, so you will always get a full absorb, even if the target has a Mortal Strike debuff reducing their healing received.

As a Shadow Priest your largest focus stats-wise will be Resilience, Stamina, and Spell Damage. Shadow Priest in PvP is a high-priority kill target as we have no defensive cooldowns and cannot push out nearly as much damage when we are being attacked. Focus on getting high Resilience and Stamina to increase our survivability, then get some Spell Damage to make us a huge threat if left alone.

Resilience is the largest source of damage mitigation you can get from stats. Resilience is a flat damage reduction from crits and DoT sources and getting as much of this as possible especially early on can help you in most PvP situations.

Spell Damage is your largest damage increase, directly increasing the amount of damage dealt by each of your spells. You will want to get as much of this as possible to push your damage up after defensive stats.

Stamina increases your health pool and especially early on there are times where the raw health added by certain pieces can make a major difference in your survivability.

These stats aim to increase your Mana regeneration. You will need some of these stats to sustain your Mana, or you will simply run out of Mana and have no way of continuing the fight.

Intellect increases your Mana pool, helping you sustain your healing output for a longer period of time before needing to drink.

The list linked below includes the best possible gear setup for a Shadow Priest in PvP.

When it comes to evaluating Shadow Priest's place within the Arena, we have created a number of guides devoted to listing a variety of popular team compositions which you can find below.