WotLK Classic Shadow Priest Guide

Shadow Priest receives many, vast improvements in Wrath of the Lich King, going from being a bottom-of-the-meters support DPS to a full fledged damage dealer. Shadow Priest excels in fights with multiple targets, allowing them to keep their DoTs up on as many targets as possible.

If you would like to see where Shadow Priest fall in the overall rankings among DPS specs for both PvE and PvP in WotLK Classic, we have created pages dedicated to explaining what classes and specializations are the best of the best through multiple factors. However, ultimately, you should not let these lists dissuade you from playing what you enjoy.

Strengths

• Received many quality of life improves in WotLK, greatly improving their gameplay.
• Provides powerful utility with both Replenishment and Misery.
• Many possibilities with Dispersion to solo raid mechanics that usually require multiple players.

Weaknesses

• High ramp-up damage, doing poorly in shorter fights.
• Mid-level AoE, not really scaling all that well.
• High competition on caster loot.

Here you can see the benefits of the different races for Shadow Priest in WotLK. Some racials are much stronger for you than others, helping you deal more damage. However, you should not let this decide what race you choose; play what you want to play.

Draenei is one of the strongest races in PvE content for Alliance, as Heroic Presence is a great stat boost to your entire party. It still remains a party-wide buff, not raid-wide, meaning the group you are in still matters. This buff helps you with your Hit Rating needs greatly, as well as the rest of the players in your party, making Draenei an extremely powerful choice.

Humans remain a solid choice for Priest, but for different reasons than previously. The Human Spirit is a decent benefit, but not all that game changing. Humans are also arguably the strongest race in the game for PvP. Having both Will to Survive, essentially a free PvP trinket, and Perception, Human is a solid choice if you will be doing PvP on your Priest.

Troll is your best Horde Shadow Priest choice for the powerful Berserking cooldown. This gives you a great DPS cooldown that you can use to quickly get all of your DoTs up. You also get Beast Slaying, further increasing your damage against any beast you encounter.

Blood Elves have become a powerful race choice in WotLK, having the new and improved Arcane Torrent. This is a great source of Mana regeneration as well as a powerful silence on nearby enemies, which has some uses in both PvE and PvP.

Undead remain a decent choice for their strength in PvP. Will of the Forsaken is still a great tool for PvP, especially arenas, and even has some uses in PvE content.

Jewelcrafting is an extremely powerful profession in Wrath of the Lich King, being used by almost all classes and specializations. For a Shadow Priest, it provides you with Runed Dragon's Eye, which is a huge boost to your main stat. Jewelcrafting provides the highest personal stat gain out of any profession.

In addition to having the strongest gems in the game, Jewelcrafters also have access to some powerful trinkets early on, making pre-raid gearing much quicker. Figurine - Twilight Serpent is a good trinket early on to help with Hit Rating needs.

Tailoring goes hand in hand with casters in WotLK, remaining one of the best professions they can use. First you have powerful cloak enchants at your disposal. Lightweave Embroidery is a strong cloak enchant, giving you an additional 295 Spell Power every 60 seconds, making this much stronger than any other cloak enchant available. Darkglow Embroidery is your other cloak enchant choice, giving us mana instead of increased stats. Averaging out to 44 Mana per 5, this one is a good choice early on.

Tailoring also has the benefit of offering cheap leg enchants. Sanctified Spellthread is your Tailoring-specific leg enchant, and while it does not have higher stats than other leg enchant choices, it is much cheaper, helping you save some gold.

Engineering on paper is not a great profession, but it provides a high amount of utility and added damage that make it arguably the strongest profession in Wrath of the Lich King.

Visage Liquification Goggles is your pre-raid best in slot helm option, giving you another easy piece of gear to craft early on. Nitro Boosts is a powerful boot enchant choice, allowing you to cover a large amount of ground quickly. This can greatly increase your uptime on certain bosses that have high movement mechanics.

Another unique Engineering enchant is Hyperspeed Accelerators, a glove enchant. This gives you another damage cooldown, greatly increasing your Haste every minute. This glove enchant is almost worth taking Engineering alone even before looking at all of the additional benefits of the profession.

Springy Arachnoweave is a great cloak enchant, only being second best behind the Tailoring cloak enchants. The active slowfall is rather low value for you as you have Glyph of Levitate, making your Levitate free to use. You can however still use this and change your minor glyph. You can also use this slowfall cloak without fear of it breaking upon taking damage, unlike Levitate.

Engineering explosives continue on through WotLK with both Global Thermal Sapper Charge and Saronite Bomb giving you extra damage, especially during large AoE pulls. You also get to use Runic Mana Injector which give Engineers an additional 25% Mana compared to the normal Mana potions.

Overall, Engineering remains a powerful option for everyone as it brings a huge amount of utility and extra damage. If your raid requires you to have Engineering, do not feel bad about losing out on a few passive stats as the utility you gain far outweighs them.

Using macros and addons makes your life significantly easier when playing Wrath Classic, and they can improve your experience a lot, depending on how skilled you are at customizing them. If you are interested in learning more about addons and macros suited to Shadow Priest, check out our guides below: