Introduction
Welcome to the Shadow Priest Guide from Method written by twitch.tv/jaervenxd.
I am Jaerv, a Shadow Priest main for Method that also dabbles in theorycrafting and SimulationCraft over at Warcraft Priests, where I help out with everything from APL work, general theory testing and just coming up with all the not so smart ideas to try and implement.
If you are coming from Dragonflight, then you can expect Shadow Priest to be very similar in War Within. We have received almost no changes to the core spec, and are still a builder-spender spec that specializes in spread cleave and big, sustained, AoE damage.
And if you are coming from an older version of Shadow Priest, such as Legion or Battle for Azeroth, then you can expect Shadow Priest to have moved away from it’s unique playstyle and minigame of fighting the insanity drain to a more cookiecutter builder-spender playstyle with two different cooldowns (Void Eruption and Dark Ascension) that are used for different scenarios.
What has changed
Patch 11.2 Shadow Priest Changes
Shadow has got a lot of changes to talents in 11.2, to view the full changes you can go to Patch Notes. Some noteworthy changes are:
New Talents:
Dark Thoughts: Increases the chance for Shadowy Insight to occur by 25%. When consuming
Shadowy Insight: Mind Blast generates 1 additional Insanity.
Death’s Torments: Shadow Word: Death deals damage 2 additional times at 15% effectiveness.
Madness Weaving: The damage bonus from your Mastery: Shadow Weaving gains 25%/50% additional benefit from Devouring Plague.
Void Volley: Void Torrent is replaced with Void Volley for 20 seconds after it is cast.
Subservient Shadows: Summoned minions last 20% longer and deal an additional 15% damage.
Phantom Menace: Increases the critical strike chance of Shadowy Apparitions by 10% and their critical strike damage by 40%
Instilled Doubt: Increases the Critical Strike chance of Vampiric Touch and Shadowy Word: Pain by 8%/15% and their critical strike damage by 20%/40%
Descending Darkness: Increases Shadow Crash damage by 300%
Other changes:
Idol of Y'Shaarj has been redesigned: Your damaging spells have a chance to grant Call of the Void, increasing your Haste by 15% for 12 seconds. When Call of the Void ends you are afflicted with Overburdened Mind, reducing your Haste by 10% for 8 seconds.
Idol of N'Zoth has been redesigned: You create Horrific Visions when casting harmful spells on enemies. At 50 stacks of Horrific Visions, your target sees a nightmare, dealing Shadow damage and granting you 4 Insanity over 3 seconds. At 100 stacks, your target witnesses a vision of N'Zoth, dealing high Shadow damage and granting you 12 Insanity over 3 seconds. Visual effects have been updated.
Psychic Link now causes direct damage to inflict 40% of their damage on all other targets afflicted by Vampiric Touch (was 35%).
Shadow Crash now has a 15 second cooldown (was 20 seconds) and has 2 charges.
Shadow Crash now applies Vampiric Touch to 6 targets baseline.
Shadowy Apparitions can now critically strike.
There are a lot more changes that you can read about in the Patch Notes in the link above.