Shadow Priest Rotation Guide - WOTLK Classic

hello everybody and welcome to pants's Shadow priest rotation guide this is a long video but all the rotation information is in the beginning everything else is just explaining why we're doing the things that we're doing I definitely encourage you to listen to those sections as they'll help you learn a master Shadow priest but they're not imperative to improving your play so if you just want the rotation information then skip to your desired section using the timestamps in the description below I have a beginner rotation guide followed by a more advanced rotation guide so no matter your skill level this video should help guide you down the path of Darkness as you succumb to the Shadows before we start I want to talk about some add-ons that make Shadow priest infinitely easier to play the first and my personal favorite is called plater or really you can use any nameplate add-on that's just the one that I've used for the longest what this allows you to do is see your dot duration and track debuffs on any Target by looking at their nameplates this is incredibly important once you start having multiple targets that you are multi-dotting or you know maybe you need to keep a debug you need to keep misery on another Target so just having a nameplate add-on that allows you to track these things is really important the second add-on I'd recommend is either quartz gnosis or any weak aura that allows you to see ticks of channeled spells in your cast bar when we talk about mind play clipping in the advanced section having one of these will be crucial and finally we chorus we core is allow you to track a variety things as well as being very useful on Boss encounters themselves but if you have a centralized little Shadow priest thing like I have here then you can track your cooldowns you can track your Mana you can track your debuff up times it's not entirely necessary but it does make your life a lot easier to have a centralized location for the most important information you need while playing Shadow priest all right now let's hop into the beginner rotation for the beginner rotation I'm going to assume that you're just starting out on your Shadow Journey we're not going to be sweating over details and maxing the last to the fullest this section is purely to learn how Shadow plays and be able to hold your own in any dungeon or Raid I'm going to keep this short and sweet and give you a simple cast order and priority system in your opener cast vampiric Touch first followed by devouring plague mind blast a fully channeled mind play and then Shadow word pain the priority system for the rest of the fight is maintain all of your dots so if any of them fall off recast them cast mind blast on cooldown cast mind play when dots don't need to be refreshed and your mind blasts on cooldown use Shadow fiend when below 50 Mana and if you're ever in a position where you're running and you can't cast mind player or mind Blast for example use shadow where death as you get more comfortable with Shadow you'll start to understand the best times to reapply dots but what if there are multiple targets when there are two to four targets we want to work on multi-dotting and mind searing multi-dotting means casting your dots onto multiple targets at the same time and mind Sears and AOE ability that when cast on a Target hits the surrounding Targets in a 10 yard radius note that it does not hit the target you've casted it on mind tier is only stronger than mind play when it hits at least two Targets meaning there must be at least three targets grouped together if there are only two Targets then dot both up and pick one to mind play when it comes to multi-dotting you only want to dot a Target if that Target is going to live for most of the duration of the dot so when there is a pack of small enemies you know something that has less than 20K HP and a five-man dungeon it's not worth it to use dots even if they're only two to four targets because they're going to die so quickly but if they have 50k HP it may be worth it to put a vampiric touch on each Target as it benefits from haste and will get close to full value if they live around 12 seconds since shadowward pain does not benefit from haste it's a lower priority spell when it comes to multi-dotting as it does less damage over time anytime there are five or more targets sit back relax and spam mines here as you play shadow more you'll start to understand the timings of how long a mob will live and what dots are worth casting Shadow is a very feely spec and as you play it more you'll get a sense and a feeling of when it's worth it to cast out on a Target let's hop into the advanced rotation if you feel comfortable with the basic rotation then this section is for you if you're just getting started don't feel like you need to implement all of these things at once I'll rank them in order of importance to your damage so you can prioritize adding each piece one at a time so what are the new mechanics in the advanced rotation first of all we have mind Flay clipping then minimizing downtime between casts AKA what I like to call ABC or always be casting third is precasting vampire Touch four is Shadow fiend in the opener if it's not needed for Mana and then finally recasting devouring plague during lust alright now let's take a look at what the advanced rotation looks like at half speed I will show a full speed version after this but I think at half speed it slows the video down so that we can really take in what is happening instead of trying to pause and figure out what's happening in each moment alright let's begin I have a pull timer going because I'm going to use that to pre-cast vampiric touch and pre-pot with potion of wild Magic so at one second I do both of those things so I'm going to pre-cast vampiric touch into devouring plague into a mind blast and then into Shadow feed right as Shadow theme comes out we get our lust and with that lust I go into a two-tick mind play and then I pop my trinket and my engineering gloves and recast devouring plague into a mind play into a mind blast and then we start channeling mind play again I do a three tick mind play into a two-tick mind play to a recast vampiric touch on the target mind play for a full channel into a mind blast and now we kind of settle into the rotation of maintaining dots casting mind blast and then casting mindful in the interim now let's take a look at this on Full Speed I'm not going to talks that you can focus on the rotation but let's see if you can pick up everything obviously I just narrated it but if your brain can process what's happening it'll make it a lot easier when you have to go do it yourself thank you five four three two one you know let's talk multi-dotting now I'm going to show you what it's like to maintain dots on two Targets but this is going to be done on Dummies obviously they don't have health like normal raid mobs so that's something to consider is the amount of time that these things are going to be alive when you're actually dotting that's not the point of this exercise though here we're just trying to mean a hundred percent uptime on our dots or as close to it as we can get so this first Target is going to be my kill Target it's the one that I'm going to put devouring plague on and maintain single Target on after all of my dots are up so that's really the goal here is to maximize one dot up time and then two single Target uptime on our main target you can see I've reapplied vampire touch because that was falling off I then cast mind flight to refresh Shadow or pain on the second Target and cast vampiric touch on the second target to refresh that as well I cast another my play and I see that devouring plague is about to fall off so I cast that and that's kind of it you just go through this cycle of single Target rotation reapply dots single Target rotation reapply dots and this is something that I would highly recommend everybody practice because in practice you know you're not going to have mobs that live for this long but if you think about ulduar if you've been in there already then you know that the two the two like Stone Guardians that there's a couple different sets of them in the circular portion of ulduar that Ari patrols around so you're going to have a few instances where you have two long living mobs that you're gonna probably want to multi-dot but one you're going to want to focus with your single Target so it's good practice you know you can practice there you can practice on Dummies um but try to get as close to 100 data time as you can what about when you want a multi-dot for targets I'm now going to show a similar video also at half speed of me multi-dotting for targets so the first thing I put up is devouring plague into vampiric touch and then I spread vampire touch to all four targets Shadow or pain is the last dot I put up because remember it has the lowest value the fact that it doesn't benefit from haste means it takes once every three seconds instead of being reduced further and then at this point I'm mine searing and the reason for that is because I'm pretending that these four targets are stacked obviously they're not because they're dummies but in practice in in a dungeon or in a raid if you had four targets like this your tank would have them all grouped together I then reapply vampiric touch as it falls off all the targets and go back to mind searing I don't worry about refreshing uh devouring plague or Shadow or pain because kind of assuming that the object close to dying soon and we're just going to finish them off with Minds here if he's not for it 30 to 40 Health you would just continue mind steering um because you're not going to get a lot of value out of reapplying dots I would highly recommend coming to your favorite capital city and practicing whether it's two Targets three targets or four targets just juggling some dots and seeing how long you can maintain close to 100 off time for mind play clubbing there's one main reason why we quit mindflight 2 ticks it is to cast another spell that has a higher damage per cast time than mind play considering mind plays or fill or spell it has the lowest damage per cast time of any spell usually I'll talk about the exception in a minute when do we flip mindfully uh the first time in our rotation it's going to be in our opener after we've reach five stacks of Shadow weaving to cast shadowward pain when you wait until we get five stacks of Shadow weaving so that we can snapshot that 10 Shadow damage onto our shadowward pain and hopefully that lasts for the entire duration of the fight assuming a single Target encounter with the NO phase changes so the next time we clip mind play is when we start a cast of Mind play and devouring plague has less than two ticks worth of Mind play on its duration on the Target or vampiric touch has less than two Ticks Plus its cast time on the duration so what that means is immediately after the second take a mind Play We would recast the vowing plague or vampiric touch to make sure it's back up on the target after the final tick occurs on that Target and for the most part we clip mind play at two ticks to cast mind blast this is not always true to maximize DPS and I'll link resources in the description to the shadow priest Discord where lanello has created beautiful chart explaining when mine play is worth clipping for blast in current gear mind blast is worth being casted the majority of the time but as we get further into Wrath of the Lich King this will change as our haste and spell power increases next is what I like to call your ABCs or always be casting this section's primary focus is on minimizing the downtime between all of your spells but more specifically is any time you cast a mind play you can't cue a spell into it you have to press the spell after MindPlay is finished or after the second tick of Mind play if you're clipping it the sooner we press that spell then the sooner our next spell is cast and we start dealing damage after that mind play has ended the problem is though if you try to cast it too early you could end up actually interrupting the Mind play cast before that final tick occurs and if this happens a lot throughout a fight will lead to a lot of lost damage now there's actually a great tool in the shatterproof's Discord where you can upload logs and select a fight and it will evaluate the time between your cast it'll let you know if you interrupted mind play and missed a tick or if you're taking too long between your mind play cast or your mind play and then whatever spell comes after it'll tell you the DPS loss attributed to all of these things which is really helpful for improving your play once you begin to really notice these things this can add up if you're consistently missing a spell or if you're taking too much time between your spells so I'll include a link to this tool in the description so really the Crux of this is that although minimizing the downtime between all of your cast is important for maximizing your DPS if you're a little too trigger happy and hitting that next spell too early that can also lead to a DPS loss next on our list is precasting vampiric touch this is pretty straightforward and unfortunately an ulduar can't be done on most of the fights but essentially if you can be in casting range of a boss before the fight begins then what you want to do is you you cast vampiric touch when there's one second left on your raids pull timer why because this gives you a free Global before the fight starts to maximize misery and Dot up time this is important because it sets the foundation for your opening rotation now if you're unable to get a pre-vamp here touch up on the boss you still want vampire touch to be your first cast on that fight but you're going to move everything back one Global and what I mean by that your Shadow fiend which you're trying to get out before lust is just going to move one spot up in your rotation and that's because your Shadow feed needs to be cast before bloodlust which brings me to my next point so Shadow fiend does not benefit from Haze the same way uh DK's gargoyle does even after the Nerf it doesn't snapshot or haste or get any benefit from our haste whatsoever it has its standard attack speed and you can buff it when it's out but that's only during that 15 second window there's nothing you can do precasting you can oh I lied you can use us any spell power Buffs if you have an on-use trinket that gives you spell power buff or if you have a potion that you're using that increases your spell power that will increase the power of Shadow fiend as it does get buffed through your own spell power but that's it it doesn't snapshot hasten the way that a gargoyle does so in order from it to benefit from flood lust Your Shadow fiend must be cast before the bloodlust itself is cast that way floodbust is directly applied to the shadow feed and it benefits from the haste so bringing this back to precasting vampire touch um if you're not able to Precast vampiric touch again that's still your first cast but now your Shadow fiend will be third in your cast sequence instead of fourth after mind blast and again this kind of ties to the assumption that bloodlust is being cast three seconds into the fight and the final tip that is being added to the section is recasting devouring plague during lust so once lust is cast and we've casted Shadow or pain in our opening rotation we want to reapply to power and plague this is because a lusted devouring plague does damage much faster than a non-lusted devouring plague and we should probably have some trinket procs rolling into this second cast this is higher DPS than waiting until your first non-lusted devouring plague falls off the target depending on your haste your fourth cast of devouring plague should be falling off around the time lust is ending this allows you to snapshot lust onto your fifth devouring plague as it'll be casted near the end of the lust window if your fourth devouring plague isn't near the end of its timer when lust is ending I'm not sure if it's worth it to recast of iron plague to extend the duration of the dot with lust it's possible with the tier 8 2 set bonus that this has higher value but it's not something I personally do but remaining devouring plague timer has more than half its duration left but this is really just a guess on my part I'm sure if you ask around the shadow priest Discord they can give you a better answer but this is just a little bit of feely crafting that I've done on my own overall Shadow is a lot to think about in order to maximize your DPS but the more you play the more it will feel like second nature it's almost like a dance as you find the Rhythm and create the muscle memory in your fingertips if you're someone who is just starting to get into parsing or even moving up from the beginner side of things take these steps one at a time and don't try to learn too many optimizations at once I'll be creating more Shadow priest content in the near future so make sure you like And subscribe to stay up to date when those videos are published you can feel free to drop by my twitch or message me on Discord or I'm happy to answer any Shadow priest questions you have or just enjoy a friendly chat anyway my name is pants face and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Pants Gaming

Views: 85,066

Keywords: shadow priest rotation wotlk, shadow priest wotlk, shadow priest wotlk pve, wow shadow priest, world of warcraft, wrath of the lich king, shadow priest, priest, wotlk, wrath of the lich king classic, wotlk classic, wow classic wotlk, wrath, shadow, dps, rank 1, spriest, wrath of the lich king shadow priest pve dps gameplay, warcraft, guide, shadow priest rotation, spriest rotation, parsing, dps guide

Id: Q52Hg6LTNxY

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 05 2023