Shadow Priest: Spell Rotations!

So, we’ve already established that even though I’m playing WoW very rarely these days (only about 4 times in the past 3 months), I still consider myself a shadow priest in good standing. So, I might as well contribute what little wisdom I have gained by playing my only main character for so long and for so often. If Warcraft is incomprehensible or boring to you, feel free to give up at this point, though I will try to make it as painless as possible.

A bit of a caveat here: I do not know any of the theory involved. Everything I know is from experience, practice, and trial and error, and most of my experience is on the PvP side of the coin. I have raided before, but not seriously. I can’t tell you what my damage per second is, and everything I do is not mana efficient.

My plan here is to tell you my spell rotation for PvP, specifically for arenas. I could also go through what I do in PvE but I would probably be embarrassed by that. We’ll see if the demand is there.

If you have notes about how to improve my arena spell rotation, let me know! Here it is:

• Mind Blast
• Shadow Word: Pain
• Mind Flay
• Vampiric Touch
• If SW:P has been dispelled: SW:P again
• Mind Blast
• Shadow Word: Death

At this point, they should have enough shadow weaving on them that dispelling them is less of an option, which is why I delay VT a little bit in the rotation. Also, I am usually one of the first ones being hit, especially in a 5v5 situation, so unless I have a great healer, this would be the best time for me to bring out my emergency reserves (especially since I am a little too comfortable using SW:D when they are very much still alive).

If you’ll note in the image above, on the right side, I have a bit of an emergency area. When I am in trouble, I hit:

• Desperate Prayer
• Battlemaster’s Audacity
• Prayer of Mending
• Healthstone
• Renew
• Shield

in that order, and that usually gives me about a 5-7000 HP buffer. Given that all of these heals are instant, I can fear, move around and PvP trinket as needed to stay alive. This usually frustrates the other team enough that they will switch to someone else, also, I can hide behind things and frustrate them even more. I find this to be a good strategy, except when they kill me, which is about half the time.

Just for good measure, I’ll throw in my PvE rotation for criticism:

• Vampiric Touch
• Shadow Word: Pain
• Vampiric Embrace
• Mind Blast
• Shadow Word: Death
• Mind Flay
• Fear
• Mind Flay
• Mind Blast
• Shield
• Shadow Word: Death

It’s something like that. This seems to work well in any situation, except for the fact that you will run out of mana in the long term, but I usually just substitute wanding for Mind Flay when that happens, and now that we have Shadowfiend, that helps too.