Classic Shadow Priest DPS Guide

As a Priest, you have the ability to heal yourself and group members as a Holy or Discipline Priest, or do damage as a Shadow Priest. Healer Priests are the typical RPG style reactive healer with many tools to keep your allies healthy. Damage dealers focus on the Shadow Priest tree to supplement their own damage as well as the damage of their allies.

Shadow Priests main role in PvE content is providing the Shadow Weaving debuff. Unfortunately, only one debuff can be applied at a time, so there is only a need for a single Shadow Priest in the entire raid; multiple Shadow Priests with their low damage are often asked to instead swap to healing.

For PvP, Shadow Priest is a particularly strong dueling and world PvP class due to self healing, shields and great utility with many iconic spells like Vampiric Embrace and Shadowform.

Strengths

• Not gear dependant.
• Brings the sought after debuff Shadow Weaving.
• Fantastic dueling and world PvP capability.

Weaknesses

• Healing Priest are typically more desired.
• Utilises large amounts of Mana to sustain DPS, requiring significant Mana consumables to try and remain competitive.
• Only one Shadow Priest desired per raid group.

While Priests are very sought after in all content, this is usually as a healing Priest. As a healing Priest, you are very useful for both PvE and PvP content, while a Shadow Priest is very good for PvP, but not as good for PvE. Shadow Priests are mostly brought to raids to buff the damage of your shadow-damage dealing allies through Shadow Weaving, so you never need more than one Shadow Priest in your raid. Your raw damage will not match what a Warlock is capable of, even when we take away the inhibitions of threat and Mana, on top of taking up too many debuff slots in the process.

Your racial choice matters much more as a Priest than it does for other classes, as you can only get certain Priest spells by being a specific race. Below you will find a list of all of the Priest-specific racial abilities to keep in-mind while deciding which race to choose.

• Level 10 ‒ Desperate Prayer
• Level 20 ‒ Fear Ward
• Level 10 ‒ Desperate Prayer
• Level 20 ‒ Feedback
• Level 10 ‒ Starshards
• Level 20 ‒ Elune's Grace
• Level 10 ‒ Hex of Weakness
• Level 20 ‒ Shadowguard
• Level 10 ‒ Touch of Weakness
• Level 20 ‒ Devouring Plague

A really popular combination, especially for first-time characters, is Alchemy and Herbalism. This combination allows you to level Alchemy, and both use and sell the consumables you create to fund the other aspects of your gameplay.

Engineering has many perks that are useful in Dungeons, Raids, and PvP. It can be expensive to level, so taking Mining with it initially is advised to be a bit more self-sufficient. It is particularly valuable for PvP as there are multiple items that provide additional crowd control and stuns.

Tailoring is a very popular profession, due to the gear that can be crafted. Tailoring pairs up well with Enchanting as you can Disenchant your crafted items, and create enchants which can be sold to other players.

Find our new guides for Priest in WoW Classic Season of Discovery below! The new game mode will have players find and utilize Runes that can then be engraved onto their gear to provide them special bonuses that augment already existing abilities or allow the class to use entirely new spells.

Priest can function as both a DPS and a Healer, and while that isn't changing, the Season of Discovery will make new builds possible, and increase the power of already existing builds.