PlaguePriest: A Shadow Priest Blog

A Haven for Shadow Priest new and old

Okay, you’ve probably though I’ve fallen off the deep end and forgot to update my blog….Well your only half right…..


Basically since the patch came out at the beginning of the month I’ve been spending quite a bit of time playing around with the new features, and playing around with some of the new SP mechanics. Here are my thoughts, ironically enough we got basically everything from the test realm.

Improved devouring plague now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%.

I really like this Buff, you know get 30% up from 15% of total damage instantly. Basically this makes this spell not only continue to deal great damage over time, but also act as a mini nuke if used at the right time along with mind blast and shadow word death. I have Danvangogh with about 17.38% haste, and I feel this impacts the spell minimally for increased DPS.


•Mind flay range has been increased to 30 yards, up from 20.


Yay, range, the glyph of mind flay now does what glyph of SW:P used to do, so if you already had that it doesn’t really change anything


•Shadowform now also causes devouring plague, and vampiric touch to benefit from haste, reducing the tick intervals and overall duration of the spells. It has also had its mana cost reduced to 13% down from 32%.

What I like about this is that it allows you to switch back and forth into healing without taking up as much mana as it did significantly. I have noticed a slight decrease in the interval rate, however I don’t think it impacts dps as much as I would have liked. Still its better than nothing.

•Vampiric embrace now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff, but only generates healing for single-target shadow damage spells

All this does is cut back the time that we normally would have spent applying to several mobs during a multi-mob pull. Helpful but the healing really is minimal at least for party members. I’ve thought about pulling these talent point and putting them into Improved Shield for survivability increase, but then I figured, the party doesn’t get ANY buff from just 1 person having a shield, improved shield only increases absorption by 10% with 2 talent points. Basically I figured what does that really do if you’re running a heroic and your dealt 3k of damage and your shield only has and increased absorption of a couple hundred points. I figure that the party would rather have a couple of hundred healing party wide than 1 person only having a couple hundred prevented 1 time.

•Glyph of mind flay now increases the damage done by Mind Flay by 10 per cent when the target is afflicted with shadow word: pain.



Same thing that glyph of SW:P used to do



•Glyph of shadow word: pain now causes the spell to restore 1% of the priest's base mana each tick.



Now this give back mana per tick. I’ve been looking and I really think that this is useless unless your in long battles. I’ve found that it helps out a lot in places like HoR or ICC, but in a normal fight that might be like 8 seconds or less your only going to be getting like 2 or 3% mana back. Still on the fence about this one as I haven’t really noticed that haste is eating up my mana beyond what shadowfiend and dispersion can take care of.



•Glyph of shadow now causes non-periodic spell critical strikes to increase spell power by 30%, up from 10%, of the priest's total spirit for 10 seconds.



Just a DPS increase