I don't use a cycle, I don't believe it's really possible all things considered (resists, latency, fight dynamics, shielding, dispelling, etc.). I use a priority list very similar to those above, VT>SWP>VE>SWD>MB>MF.

My highest DPS so far is around 1050 when the planets aligned one night on Gruul a month or so ago. We have a WWS of me doing around 900 on a Mag kill, where I was a cube clicker so it probably would have been about 1000. Usually it's somewhere between I'd say 800-900 but sometimes a bit higher. There aren't any tank 'n spank encounters that I've come across yet in TBC where I can just unload and not have anything else to do.

All said and done we've been nerfed every major patch (and even some minor ones) since 2.0 and it's not really possible to put out as much DPS as a rogue, mage or lock. We hold our own though, and the utility is irreplaceable.

Learning how to play a shadow priest after playing a much simpler (rotationally-speaking) class of feral druid is making my pull my hair out. I am tempted to learn to write addons so I can make a self-sorting priority list that will tell me:

1) Is VT wearing off in under 1.5s? If yes, then recast it next.
[1b) Is VE up? If no, recast.]
2) Is SWP faded? If yes, then recast.
3) Is the SWD cooldown up? If yes, then cast.
[3b) Is the MB cooldown up? If yes, then cast.]
4) Cast Mind Flay.

VE and MB are bracketed as those are spells I would drop in fights where they are useless, or cause too much threat, or my mana consumption doesn't allow for it. Is there a mod that combines a DoT timer with a cooldown timer and allows them to be sorted in this fashion? (Ideally with a setting to display a red bar or some such when the spell has worn off or the CD is up.)

Next question is about mana efficiency. In general I know this will depend on the fight, but if I am chaining Super Manas, plus I use Shadowfiend as soon as it's profitable to do so, plus I can Consume Magic on a rank 1 Touch of Weakness every 2 minutes, (Blood Elves) should I still be prepared to cut less mana-efficient spells (MB and then SWD) on most or some fights?

Edit: Go me for asking dumb questions before realizing that the spreadsheet rules. Nevermind...

Kaz: there's no such mod currently, although I've entertained vague plans of revamping DotDotDot to be more along those lines (and saying "screw the warlocks").

In the meantime, what I do is use DotDotDot for my dot timers, with Hourglass positioned close enough that there's no real eye travel time between the two.

Such a mod would be possible, and you'd probably want a toggle for including SW:D in the cycle since its use should be limited in many circumstances (if you're already threat capped you don't need the additional VE aggro, or just killing yourself with it), but I personally don't find it to be difficult to just use a dot timer and watch cooldown timers. I could see issues arising with running dot cycles on multiple targets unless it was a very advanced and full featured mod.

Most fights chaining pots and using shadowfiend optimally will allow you to go all out the whole time, or very close to it. The exceptions are mana drains, particularly long fights, or any situation where you end up using PW:S too much (typically only happens when learning).

As many people have said: keeping a set 'cycle' is unrealistic. Your main priorities are constantly keeping your two DoTs up. After that, cast Mind Blast when it's up, Death when it's up (and prudent, i.e. don't nuke yourself when there's a ton of damage going out on the raid), and otherwise Flay.

Okay, thanks for the responses. Maybe I'll learn LUA...like I don't have enough to do. The reason I ask is because it seems like it requires a lot of focus to play a shadowpriest optimally in a raid setting (between managing DoT times, cooldowns, and mana regen abilities) and since my attention span doesn't split well between multiple things (i.e. the shadowpriest stuff...and leading the raid) that I might want to make it easier on myself somehow. Currently it's more tempting to just respec Holy because I spend 70% of my time as raidleader looking at healthbars anyway.

Because I was just referenced to these forums, and because I do not have the right to make a new thread, this is the closest thread I can see that my question might not be horribly off topic.....

If a SP is aggro capped..... what ways are there to lift that cap? Stop running VE, obviously.... - threat enchants on gloves and back..... not having the 3pc set bonus from shadoweave..... is there anything else that can be done about an aggro cap? Take MB/SWD out of your cycle and accept the SWP/VT/MF rotation?



As far as what I think for the OP....


- Only when I need to heal splash dmg on myself or party since often my threat doesn't allow VE.
- Even if VT generated aggro like VE I think it would still be necessary since it is vital for longevity.
- Probably not, unless I felt the tank could hold the threat.
- Depends on the people you're competing with and who has what in their parties. Possibly first, possibly last, but not a huge gap in either direction.
- Most of my dmg comes from MF. (Typical %s are about 30%MF/24%SWP/22%VT/10%MB/10%SWD/3%Plague(w/IF)

@Kobal

Finish both mind flays, reapply pain. While pain is a much greater damage per casting timer, you still casting it anyways in both situations. To better understand it, think of it like this:

You are losing 1.5 seconds of mind flaying (your time spent doing nothing) to gain 1.5 seconds of pain (the debuff, not the cast). My pain and flay will tick for nearly the same amount, HOWEVER, mindflay ticks every second whereas pain ticks every 3 seconds. So basically you are giving up 2/3 of your dps by waiting out that 1.5 seconds instead of casting.

@ Uila
That's basically what you do. VT pain, flay. The only situation where I really hit the threat cap is on Void Reaver, and there's not much you can do besides stand around watching your spirit work. If you were extreme, you could drop VT to stop the mana regen threat, but at that point you'd have to say it would be pretty pointless to bring a shadow priest.


I follow the priority list heel gave. You don't need a speciality addon that instructs you what spells to cast. The dot bars are already telling you exactly what you should be doing.

While talking about revamping DotDotDot, a bit of a wishlist that I think will improve the addon greatly.
1) A bar for Mind Blast and one more for SW: D cooldown.
2) VT bar shows duration - 1.5sec (cast time). This way I know it's safe to recast it when the counter hits 0
3) Put in a checkbox to select if I want the bars to disappear once they hit 0 (while in combat). SW:P icon stays there empty, telling that there is no SW:P cast on that target.
4) If 2 or more bars show the same duration, make the one with the higher priority on top. This way, the top spell should be the next spell to cast in the sequence.

2) you don't want to cast at 0 even with a -1.5, you'd want to start casting around .5 left on the timer, give or take depending on lag. A lot of shadow priests lose DPS because they don't take into account lag with their DoT recasts.

4) Might as well call it SoYouCouldntPlayThisOnYourOwn..?

It's not unreasonable to get Tranquil Air totem if the mages are at or near threat cap as well-- I'm specifically thinking of Void Reaver, but it also lets you Vampiric Embrace on Morogrim, for example. I consider the subtlety enchant a must, and the next best option would be spell penetration anyway, so you're not missing much.

Another possibility is that your tanks need to get better at threat generation. Shadow priests are the first to notice slacking tanks. Compare your guilds WWS parses with others and check relative frequencies of threat generation abilities. I remember comparing two 4 minute Gruul parses for someone where one tank had something like 60 more heroic strikes than the other, and twice as many shield slams, devastates, and revenges.

I just don't use Mind Blast after the murlocs spawn and I fade 5 seconds after they arrive. I average aggro from one murloc over the entire course of the fight. The biggest benefit of using tranquility totem in this situation is that multiple shadow priests can use vampiric embrace (assuming they all have totems) and you don't have to worry about guessing which priest will have aggro. Without the totem though, you are basically playing with fire.

Actually I was thinking of this post: [Priest] Shadow Priest Damage and Spell Rotation

But there's a lot of discussion on the issue in many threads.

See I save MB for right after the earthquake and make sure I have a fresh VT, SWP and VE up. I get aggro 9/10 times.

The lag is not something that is related to the addon. It varies a lot, so it's up to the priest to compensate for it as good as it can. And it has nothing to do with being able to play or not. An addon's function is to help you do the things you are supposed to do, reduce the calculation overhead and in the end make the game more enjoyable.
After all, we don't call BigWigs/DBM - SoYouCouldntCountOnYourOwn



This is more or less same as my experience. With the healing threat splitting on 12 murlocks, one fade will always be more then enough. If it's not, then the tanks are slacking. And healing your party through VE takes a big load of your healers.

Only problems that can happen is getting water graved before you get to fade. Often enough some of the murlocks will turn around and head towards you.

1. Maybe. Requires adding some alternative logic/methods. I may rework the way everything is displayed, moving away from CandyBar (which has some problems for me) to a custom frame (and in the process making it priest-only; sorry, warlocks!)

2. No. Just recast it when the counter hits 1.5.

3. By default there's a 5 second fade period after end of bar.

4. No. CandyBar doesn't support this kind of sorting, and if I go to the custom frame, there'll be no reordering at all (see IMBA's bossmod frames for something along the lines of what I'm thinking about).

While we are at that topic, there's one question I have people here might be able to answer:

If you are refreshing SW:P, VT or MF right before they expire (let's say within .5 of a sec before) are you missing out on a tick or not?
If I am not mistaken SW:P and VT only have their first tick after 3 seconds, so I would guess they indeed have their last tick at the very end.
MF however has it's first tick right as you cast it, so am I right in assuming nothing happens in the last second you channel it?

edit: Think it didn;t come out the way I meant: I didn't actually mean "miss" a tick, since you are refreshing the dots, but rather "waste" a tick.

Mind blast and death are higher dps spells, thus the shadow priests giving them priority. Mind blast is a 1.5 second cast doing normal damage on par with a channeled 3 second spell. Death is an instacast (costing a GCD) but again doing almost equivalent damage. However, you are correct you cannot rely on them to crit, but their strength and priority in the rotation comes from the fact that you do not need to rely on them to crit because they just do more damage, and thus return more mana to the group.

Also, you don't necessarily need to stopcast as shadow, I've tried and the benefit to dps is pretty minimial, but to min/max it had to be tried. Going all in on imp mind blast will do far more to your dps. Though you may not have the gear to sustain the full rotation, if needed you can back off on mind blasting and just use more death and mindflays, as they cost far less and do far more for returning mana.

Now, to "Emanonevahi."

Your disc tree should probably have inner focus and meditation. The extra mana for someone who does dps as low as yours will need the extra mp5 for a long fight. Let me stress that high dps is not just a concern of epenis issues, but a matter of raid support. In endgame is rather difficult to break over 1100 dps to catch up with some of the other endgame raid dps classes, so its important to focus on your function as shadow. You are a mana battery, and the more mana you have, the better for the group. That extra mp5 can indeed make or break your dps, the longer you stay above zero mana, the more good you have done for the group. Many guilds on mal'ganis and even in the "Beckon" pve videos, go so far as to innervate their shadow priests, as the mana gets translated back to everyone, not just the individual getting the innervate.

Also, speccing into inner focus doesnt necessarily mean you need to mind blast with it. If the Extra 25% more crit is not a gamble you would like to take, you can inner focus + devouring plague to save another 1145 mana. Therefore, assuming the math you did in your post is correct, thats saving 1901 mana every 3 minutes (assuming you used focus+plague and another 21mp5). And in most fights, that adds up to about 6000 or so mana. Assuming you know what you're doing, the extra 6000 mana can be used pretty effectively, and I can safely say having an extra 6000 mana at your disposal can indeed make or break your dps, especially if your gear is not as solid, and you dont return as much mp5 to the entire group (yourself included) so the extra mana at your disposal is far superior. Not to mention, that threshold might be the difference for some when it comes to determining the 5/5 imp mb spec, or 0/5 imp mb.

Finally, unless you have the gear to pull it off (IE an excess amount of +hit) I do not recommend hybrid specs, as it lends itself to either sloppy raid dps, or losing some nice pvp talent points. Martyrdom doesnt have much raid utility, but in pvp it is invaluable, so generally stick with the 3/3 shield for raids, and 2/2 martyr for pvp. The only priests I've seen who went with the imp wand talent were from nihilum and coordinated the holy priest to have imp DS and Fort, so that the priests could get the extra talents moved.

Finally, any tps issue really can be solved by dropping VE for the first chunk of the fight. Generally giving the tanks a decent lead on you without ve will actually increase your dps as you save yourself GCD's, and the misdirect rotation should take effect. So you can really just go all out. Many priests just by force of habit put up VE to start, but i find that to be foolish as it yields itself to them wondering why they are producing so much tps, and have to slow down. Especially in fights like Al'ar or Gruul where there is massive damage to the group.

Also to "heel," "tedv," and "caligula"

I put VE behind mind flay, as your mp5 and dps is a larger priority in fights such as Tidewalker (as you mentioned). You generating ANY healing aggro in that fight is suicidal not only for your actual threat on tidewalker, but also on his adds. Not to mention that saving the VE gcd's will up your dps.

If you really want to try to heal the raids, just keep up your VE on tidewalker, though foolish, and when the adds come to you, assuming you are near the aoe, FADE. Get the temporary aggro dump, and then you should probably be fine. However, depending on your guilds strat, may simply just get the tranquil air totem. The way my guild used to do him would be to give a 3 mage group, 1 shaman, 1 spriest, and go with tranquil air, to save threat on all 4 casters.

To "Kobal"

I would probably recommend casting mind flay and interrupting it early, to get an extra damage tick, but only if the GCD doesnt slow down your refresh of SW:P Losing time on SW:P is pretty inexcusable as it may take some time to get started on the first tick, but its better to get that delay out sooner rather than later, as the delay is unavoidable. "Crepusculu" makes an interesting point about higher casting timers, but keeping death up will probably take priority.

Also, the proper rotation to start, is VT -> pain -> Devouring plague (innerfocused?) mb (Innerfocused?) -> death-> maybe VE or Mindflay, depending on the situation, personally, i recommend mindflay since you probably have used your trinket to start the fight and should take effective use of it.

To "Faytte"

Many endgame shadowpriest assuming they have the right gear, or are tailors/in tier 6, can probably pump out close to 950 dps on a fight like gruul without a shaman or a flask. Flasked, and given a nuke fight can probably come close to 1100 or so dps, but have to know what they are doing. Really, we do decently on dps meters, but arent comming close to good mages who can touch nearly 1300.

For those of you who dont know if you are doing a proper job refreshing dots, or are hitting CD's correctly, or havent seen a priest dps raid video. This video inspired me just when the 41 point talents hit. YouTube - NAXX beckon

Also, I probably shouldnt have waited a week after making my first post here.

Edit: forgot to add innerfocus to the rotation mid post.

Edited one and a half months later because I did some rather gross estimations - changed 2000 mana/3mins to the exact 1901, and changed 6000-7000 mana per fight to about 6k.

The entire point of this is to play the lag game, much like /stopcasting macros do. There are various sources of lag so giving the mental command to refresh a dot ~.5s before you "should" (VT@1.5s, SW: P@0s) as between the lag of your own reaction, hardware lag, and internet lag, the server doesn't get the message until after the last tick has actually happened. The same is true for MF though you may need to cut it a little closer than .5s beforehand. MF has a builtin stopcasting since it can interrupt itself via being a channeled spell. Also, MF does not tick instantly, if you start the cast at t=0, the ticks happen at t=1,2,3

What do you mean? Mind Flay has the lowest priority of any other spell and is spammable. If VE had lower priority you would never cast it. Do you mean just to wait until you can cleanly fit a 1.5s piece of time and Mind Flay, other stuff, until that point?

There are a few fights where VE is generally more trouble than it's worth. Complete aggro sensitive fights like Void Reaver or momentary aggro sensitivity that you burn through the whole time like Morogrim. Other periodically sensitive fights like Hydross or Leotheras aren't a problem to have VE up since you'll most likely be stopping all damage dealing anyway.

A small point, but at the beginning of a fight (not just switching to a new target) it's best to put VE in the time you're positioning, waiting for aggro etc. No matter what you need to wait a couple of seconds and that's the perfect time for VE, then you can go pure dps rotaion and it doesn't cut into trinket time and such.

Do you guys really have trouble with murloc VE aggro on morogrim? We have a paladin consecrating a little behind morogrim that spam heals someone with righteous fury when murlocs come out. I top off my group immediately after every quake with MB + flayx2 and fade when the murlocs are about 20 yards out from the raid and I've never been hit by a single murloc without ever having TA totem on this fight (with the exception of the time I got graved after topping everyone off right before I faded). I've also gotten close to tank threat, but never actually been able to catch him even with potting and a full MB/death cycle. I believe he does use an autoblocker for TPS and possibly 1-2 other threat increasing items since mitigation isn't paramount on that fight with our current gear level.

Fade works fine on Murloc VE aggro, the only problem I have is when I am placed in a watery grave just at the second the murlocs come. I obviously try to watch the timers, to be able to fade on the graves when they happen close to a murloc spawn, but I sometimes fail and get ganked in the grave.

To "woobsauce"

Tranq Air is not "a must" for Tidewalker. Fade is more then enough for the murlocks. Getting a water grave once or twice during the fight should mean you are safe from pulling aggro from the boss.
Mana is not an issue with the boss as well. Just remember to lend a SW: D - Killing Blow on each murloc round. The mana regeneration you get from Spirit Tap is superb and you get a nice little damage bonus from Imp DS.

If you are scared of loosing a GCD on casting VE, do it when you are positioning your self at start, or when running back from the water grave. VE as a debuff creates little or no threat and at the start of a fight, you will probably have to wait for the tank to build some aggro.
There are also plenty of opportunities to VE when you have 1.5-2 sec left on a dot, but MB or SW: D are on cooldown.

A guildmate of mine had a question regarding the 2 piece T5 (Avatar) set bonus. The bonus reads:

(2) Set: Each time you cast an offensive spell, there is a chance your next spell will cost 150 less mana.

It looks straightforward at first, but being an Elemental Shaman, I know that set bonuses aren't generally as straightforward as they first seem (or maybe they're just bugged?). For example, my T4 4 piece bonus reads:

(4) Set: Your offensive spell critical strikes have a chance to reduce the mana cost of your next spell by 270.

This looks identical to the 2 piece Priest T4 bonus except I know for a fact that the mana cost reduction proc is a persistent 15 second buff that reduces all casts made during that duration for the Shaman T4 set bonus. My guildmate's question is whether or not the 2 pc Avatar bonus works the same way. If it does, then hot damn...