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. Healing 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.

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.

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.

There are five races that can be a Priest in WoW Classic: Human, Dwarf and Night Elf if you are Alliance, Undead and Troll if you are Horde. In addition to the standard racials, Priests also get two abilities that are unique to the race you are playing. You get the first at Level 10 and the second at Level 20. The only thing you need to do is complete short quests each time that involve you having to talk to certain NPCs. In the table below, you will find an overview of the benefits each Priest race gets, including the aforementioned abilities unique to each race.

Race	Racial	Level 10	Level 20
Human	Perception	Desperate Prayer	Feedback
Dwarf	Stoneform	Desperate Prayer	Fear Ward
Night Elf	Shadowmeld	Starshards	Elune's Grace
Undead	Will of the Forsaken	Touch of Weakness	Devouring Plague
Troll	Berserking	Hex of Weakness	Shadowguard

Dwarf is considered to be the best PvE and PvP race for Alliance. This is primarily due to the strength of Fear Ward, but Desperate Prayer and Stoneform are also very useful in their own right. The Human and Night Elf racials do not match up to this, though this certainly does not mean that you have to be a Dwarf for groups or raids to take you.

Neither Troll nor Undead has particularly amazing racials for PvE, but Undead has a great racial for PvP in the form of Will of the Forsaken. The self-healing that Devouring Plague provides every 3 minutes is also not bad, and it gives you a little extra damage. As a Troll, you get Berserking, which is decent in its own right, but the output increase overall is not that big of a deal. The utility and superior PvP racial that Undead offers is, therefore, more highly valued most of the time.

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.

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.