Shadow Priest Leveling Guide from 1 to 80 — The War Within (11.1.0)

Shadow Priest offers a sort of unique take on leveling where you have a few options on how to play, depending on your preferred pacing. As a damage-over-time specialist, you can pull lots of mobs at once and let your DoT effects tick down on them, or you can pull a group of mobs and burst them down, depending on your talents.

When it comes to gearing out your Shadow Priest, you should always take the piece with a higher Intellect value, typically referenced by the item level of that piece. Intellect is far and away our better stat and will make everything you do hit harder and kill mobs quicker.

When you get pieces of gear that have the same Intellect, you should roughly prioritize pieces with Haste, Mastery, or ideally both to be slightly more optimal.

You unlock the Talent Trees at Level 10. Further below is the recommended Leveling Talent path. If you are still leveling up to level 70 feel free to pick either of the leveling builds. The primary differences before Hero Talents is that the Archon build uses Void Eruption and Voidweaver uses Dark Ascension.

3.

Shadow Priest Leveling Talents

Archon Voidweaver

3.1.

Archon Leveling Build

This build gives you a leveling build that is centered around big damage with Mind Flay: Insanity and Halo while still relying on baseline damage from your main damage over time effects.

3.2.

Voidweaver Leveling Build

This build leans more heavily into damage over time effects with access to Inner Quietus early on in the process, as well as getting Dark Energy for cast while moving Void Torrent.

To keep things simple while leveling and learning the spec, use the slider to select your level, and watch as the leveling rotation grows with each level!

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

Use the following to switch which leveling build rotation is shown.

Build Selector
Archon	Voidweaver

The builds suggested for leveling are focused around DoTs and moving quickly through the leveling process. When leveling, particularly in a group, mobs will not live very long, so we prioritize just being able to get DoTs up on a target and then moving on to the next one. This lets you continuously pull mobs with Vampiric Touch and Shadow Crash and let your dots do the heavy lifting for you. Once you have your DoTs active on the enemies you care about, then you can use your other spells.

These builds also give you access to several instant cast procs to make casting on the move easier, namely Shadowy Insight and Deathspeaker. For higher health targets, you can use the main cooldown ( Dark Ascension or Void Eruption) and spells like Void Torrent or Halo, depending on your hero talent of choice.

The current rotation is for Archon, use the list above to switch this.

The current rotation is for Voidweaver, use the list above to switch this.

Starting at Level 1, you only have Smite, so just spam this for now.

Before combat, make sure you have the following buffs active:

• Power Word: Fortitude
• Shadowform

1. Keep up Shadow Word: Pain on as many targets as possible.
2. Keep up Vampiric Touch on as many targets as possible.
3. Use Shadow Crash to quickly apply DoTs to targets.
4. With Misery talented, use Vampiric Touch to refresh and apply both DoTs on as many targets as possible.
5. Use Halo on cooldown.
6. Use Shadowfiend as a cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
7. Use Void Eruption as your main cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
8. Use Power Infusion as a cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
9. Cast Void Bolt while Voidform is active.
10. Use Devouring Plague to spend Insanity for damaging a single target.
11. Use Mind Flay: Insanity if you have 3 or more stacks of Surge of Insanity.
12. Use Void Torrent on cooldown.
13. Use Mind Blast on cooldown.
14. Cast Vampiric Touch to consume Unfurling Darkness.
15. Cast Mind Flay: Insanity to spend all charges of Surge of Insanity.
16. Use Shadow Word: Death on any target below 20% health.
17. Use Shadow Word: Death on any target below 20% health or with a Deathspeaker proc.
18. Use Shadow Crash to do some AoE damage.
19. Use Mind Flay as your filler spell.
20. Use Smite as a filler spell.

1. Keep up Shadow Word: Pain on as many targets as possible.
2. Keep up Vampiric Touch on as many targets as possible.
3. Use Shadow Crash to quickly apply DoTs to targets.
4. With Misery talented, use Vampiric Touch to refresh and apply both DoTs on as many targets as possible.
5. Use Shadowfiend as a cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
6. Use Dark Ascension as your main cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
7. Use Power Infusion as a cooldown when fighting harder enemies.
8. Use Shadow Word: Death if the target has an absorb shield active.
9. Use Void Blast during Entropic Rift.
10. Use Devouring Plague to spend Insanity for damaging a single target.
11. Use Void Torrent on cooldown.
12. Use Mind Blast on cooldown.
13. Cast Vampiric Touch to consume Unfurling Darkness.
14. Cast Mind Flay: Insanity to spend all charges of Surge of Insanity.
15. Use Shadow Word: Death on any target below 20% health.
16. Use Shadow Word: Death on any target below 20% health or with a Deathspeaker proc.
17. Use Shadow Crash to do some AoE damage.
18. Use Halo as a sort of AoE filler spell when facing multiple enemies. Generally not used in pure single target.
19. Use Mind Flay as your filler spell.
20. Use Smite as a filler spell.

You also have the following spells you can use:

• Power Word: Shield for an extra defensive shield.
• Psychic Scream as an AoE Crowd Control ability.
• Desperate Prayer as a defensive ability.
• Mind Soothe to help skip past enemies.
• Dispel Magic to remove buffs off enemies.
• Fade to help skip past mobs with the reduced aggro radius.
• Fade to help skip past mobs with the reduced aggro radius or as a defensive.
• Silence to interrupt enemies casting.
• Dispersion as your most powerful defensive ability.
• Flash Heal if you are running low on health.
• Flash Heal if you are running low on health or for the defensive buff of Protective Light.
• Angelic Feather for movement.
• Vampiric Embrace for powerful healing during large damage windows.
• Angelic Feather or Power Word: Shield for movement.
• Dominate Mind can control certain enemies to get a temporary pet to help you level.

Check out the link below to learn more.

In addition to these active abilities, you will also gain some passive abilities that will impact how you play as you level up:

• At level 10, you also gain our baseline Mastery ability, Mastery: Shadow Weaving. This does not change your playstyle much; just know that you will deal more damage to targets if they have your DoTs are active on them.
• Shadowy Apparitions spawns out a ghostly version of yourself every time you cast Mind Blast, Devouring Plague, or Void Bolt if that target has Vampiric Touch active. This drastically increases the value of Vampiric Touch, so make sure you DoT up most mobs with it unless they will only live a few short seconds.
• Misery makes DoTing easier and allows you to almost never need to press Shadow Word: Pain except for movement scenarios.
• Psychic Link unlocks your AoE potential, giving most of your spells cleave to targets with Vampiric Touch active.
• Shadowy Insight causes your main DoT spell to occasionally give you a free cast of Mind Blast.
• Deathspeaker adds another proc into your kit to help with on-the-move gameplay.

In this section, we will go over each of the War Mode/PvP talents you should consider using while leveling up.

1. Catharsis is your most powerful open world PvP talent. Be sure to track this buff to know when you are capped on Shadow Word: Pain damage.
2. Psyfiend will do a sizable chunk of damage on a relatively low cooldown.
3. Driven to Madness allows you to use your main cooldown more often. Feel free to start using this on cooldown instead of just saving it for big packs or important enemies.
4. Use Mind Trauma and make sure you try to full channel Mind Flay: Insanity.
5. Use Phase Shift until you unlock more talents.

Congratulations on reaching Level 80! Now that you have hit Level 80, we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level.