So as you can tell by the title I am trying to help a friend of mine out, by seeking out advice from what other guilds and shadow priest have done to lower /control their threat generation. We recently attempted and downed the loot bag known as Void Reaver, yet throughout the fight our shadow priest had to stop dpsing altogether or back off and just wand. He was looking at Timelapse Shard (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29181) and using shrouding potions (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=22871), but with them only removing 900 threat each that doesn’t seem to be a huge of enough difference for them to be effective. From what I have seen, with no true threat reducing skills, ie: invs, soul shatter, feign death, vanish, how have you and your guilds been dealing with this ?

My only suggestion is don't use Vampiric Embrace, and always always always have Salvation on.

VE is a huge threat generator, basically canceling out Salvation if its up.

Basically: don't VE, lower your DPS if needed, and get a better tank if neither of those works. Spriest threat generation is quite definitely their weak point.

edit: Of course, there's always the soulstone vanish.

On one Tidewalker kill we had a few weeks ago, our shadow priests were finding themselves threat limited on Tidewalker, and also having issues with murloc aggro. We just used Tranquil Air Totem in the caster group instead of Wrath of Air. It's actually doubly effective, since you're taking away 100 spell damage and then adding the threat reduction on top of that. I guess it isn't a particularly creative solution, but it definitely worked on that fight. They might also consider dropping SW:Death from the rotation entirely to help lower the amount of healing they'll take from Vampiric Embrace.

"How can I improve threat in the absolute worst encounter threatwise for a class with no aggro wipes"

Uh......


Seriously man, its just a garbage for shadow, period. Either get a soulstone and dps from melee, or deal with it. Sorry to be hostile....but I can't comprehend how this needed to be explained...

The options are pretty limited unfortunately.

If agro is that much of an issue, VE is the first thing shelved. Unfortunately its really not that much threat unless you are consistantly healing all 5 party members.

If you want to go a step farther you can toss your SPs a Shaman for tranquil air, on top of salv. But that might not be worth the loss of WF, or WoA on a different group.

Beyond that. You gotta rely on your tanks to push threat, or reduce your dps.

The threat reduction trinkets are worthless.

I'm pretty sure VE was active for the most part, due to it being our first attempt (and kill) that we've had on him, so people were taking bolts left and right.

I kept trying to get him to grab a SS and go suicide but no dice

@ Lazloth I think what he was trying to get was if priests stopped using MF and relied on SWP/VT, or downranked spells etc.

Also we didn't even have a spriest in the guild until a few weeks ago when we recruited one and one of our healers respec'd. So alot of this is new to us anyway.

On farmed content, make sure your tank knows he can switch out some max avoidance/armor/stamina gear in favor of a little +hit. A little +hit goes a long way (in my experience), and I don't believe most tanks are maxed out in normal tanking gear.

If your tank is handling both thunderclap and demo shout, get an offtank to do that -- it will free up rage and global cooldowns for more sunders/devastates.

You can also stack your tank's group with things like windfury, battleshout, leader of the pack, etc.

Finally, make sure your tank has a reasonable ping... tell him to look into alternative service providers if he doesn't.