All sections for Shadow Priest PvP have been divided into corresponding sections for the most optimal hero talents, class talents, spec talents, race, stats, gear, enchants, gems, and macros. This will help you have a good understanding of Shadow Priests in PvP for The War Within, the strengths and weaknesses associated with this specialization, and help you conquer the arena. This section provides a brief overview of Shadow Priests in The War Within.
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Table of Contents
What’s New for Shadow Priests in The War Within?
Shadow Priests have experienced a hefty amount of change with talents that are allocated in both our class and spec trees, with both providing us with some benefits to our utility, as well as how we can deliver some wild burst in coordinated windows.
Focusing on our class tree, the most dramatic change comes from our new talent, Phantom Reach, granting us some increased range on all of our ranged spells. This talent assists us with avoiding enemy uptime, making it great if you pre-position yourself well enough to avoid some incoming damage. Not to mention, this can reduce the chance of our casts not landing if your target tries to position farther away, or can help land our Stun or Silence Crowd Control abilities.
Now, as for our Shadow tree, the talents we receive here have barely changed. However, we now have an easier time micro-bursting in setups, mainly from nice buffs to Surge of Insanity, making Mind Flay: Insanity way faster to channel while dealing some hefty single target damage.
As for the bread and butter of The War Within, we have our Hero talents, giving us two completely new trees inside of our talent pane that give us a more exciting playstyle. For Shadow Priests, we receive two we can choose from; Archon and Voidweaver.
Overall, both of these hero trees are viable and can be used in competitive play based on your own preference.
Hero Tree: Voidweaver
Voidweaver provides us with a toolkit that solely enhances our Shadow damage, thanks to our hallmark node, Entropic Rift. This is applied to your current target after using Void Torrent, which then follows the target that you used Void Torrent on. Having this ability engrained in our rotation makes our damage more impactful when we want to deliver some direct burst on our target while cleaving any targets nearby.
The talents we receive from this Hero tree buff our damage after using Entropic Rift without any change to our rotation. Our Mind Blast gets replaced with Void Blast for a stronger version of itself, and we receive more Shadow damage while it’s active due to Voidheart. Not to mention, we obtain Void Empowerment to make Surge of Insanity a little bit easier to obtain as our next Devouring Plague costs no Insanity when Entropic Rift is summoned.
To top it all off, we gain Collapsing Void, making our Entropic Rift have a larger radius and deal more damage after using Devouring Plague. Additionally, this makes our Entropic Rift explode on all nearby targets after it expires for some hefty damage.
Hero Tree: Archon
Archon revolves around our Halo talent due to our Hallmark talent, Power Surge, which makes Halo way more effective as it reapplies 2 additional times, and increases the radius of it. What really makes this tree worth choosing is from our endcap node, Divine Halo. This makes your Halo gravitate back to you after reaching its maximum radius, giving you some solid AoE pressure while also healing all friendly targets affected by it.
Almost all of our talents here provide us with additional modifiers and buffs that make our rotation a lot more fluid, especially with Manifested Power granting us one stack of Surge of Insanity for some massive damage after using Mind Flay: Insanity, and Perfected Form to make our damage more impactful during our burst windows.
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