Classic Shadow Priest DPS Stat Priority

The below stat priorities are mainly intended to be used for PvE content. For PvP, you may want to balance your stats differently depending on your playstyle. However, the stat priorities are still suitable to follow as a guideline for all situations.

1. 6% Spell Hit Rating**
2. Spell Damage / Shadow Damage
3. Mana per 5 seconds (Mp5)
4. Intellect
5. Spell Crit
6. Spirit
7. Stamina

** Note: to cap your chance to successfully hit and damage your target, you require 16% Spell Hit against bosses. As you will be taking Shadow Focus you only require an additional 6% from gear. Without it you need the full 16% from gear.

To cap your chance to successfully hit and damage your target, you require 16% Spell Hit against bosses. As you will be taking Shadow Focus you only require an additional 6% from gear. Without it you need the full 16% from gear.

It is important to be hit capped to prevent your Mana being wasted on spells that miss their targets, or even worse causing Shadow Weaving to drop from your target.

Spell Damage increases the damage of your spells by an amount depending on the coefficient of the spell. This is usually indicated on gear in the following way: "Increases the damage [and healing] done by magical spells by X".

To better understand how spell coefficients and Spell Damage interact with one another, let us look at the actual spell coefficients of our most important damage spells first:

• Shadow Word: Pain - 1
• Mind Flay - 0.45
• Mind Blast - 0.43
• Devouring Plague - 0.48 (talent)

Every spell benefits differently from Spell Damage because of these coefficients. The coefficient is calculated by dividing the cast time of a spell by 3.5; this is because a 3.5-second cast benefits 100% from any added Spell Damage. For example, if you have 20 additional Spell Damage from gear, then this will simply affect your damage spells as follows:

• damage increase = n * 20
• n = spell coefficient

Mana per 5 seconds is particularly useful because it continues to work while you are casting, making it useful to prevent you from running out of Mana — something Shadow Priest can struggle with especially with poor gear.

Spirit increases your Mana regeneration while not casting.

Whenever Mana is spent for any reason at all, your Mana regeneration gets halted for 5 seconds. During these 5 seconds, any regeneration based on Spirit does not happen, unless you have certain talents to partially counteract this. As a Priest, you can spec into Meditation, as an example of this. Note that the rule of needing to have Mana spent means that you can safely cancel casts before they finish, as that will not incur the 5-second rule.

Intellect increases your maximum Mana and improves your chance to critically strike with spells. As a Priest, every 59.2 points of Intellect increases your chance to critically strike by 1%.

Spell Crit increases the chance of your spells to deal a critical strike. Note that Shadow Word: Pain and Mind Flay can not deal critical strikes.

Stamina is the only stat that will help you survive all types of attacks, and as such, should always be highly valued.

Resistance, while inherently niche due to different bosses dealing different magical damage types, can be very useful while progressing specific bosses. Wearing resistance gear of a type makes you take less damage or even completely avoid damage when hit by that type of magical damage.