Welcome to Skill Capped’s Shadow Priest PvP Guide for Dragonflight 10.2.6
To make it easier to navigate, we’ve divided the guide into the corresponding sections, covering everything from race and talents to gear and macros. These will give you a good idea about what to expect from Shadow Priest in PvP in Dragonflight, its strengths and weaknesses, and how to get your character ready to conquer the arena.
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Table of Contents
In this section, we will cover the biggest changes to the design of Shadow Priest in Dragonflight and some of their playstyle implications. Obviously, the main driving force for all adjustments this expansion comes from talents, and we will dive deeper into them a bit later. For now, let’s focus on the bigger picture.
What’s New for Shadow Priest in Dragonflight?
In Dragonflight, Shadow Priests have a very similar toolkit to the one they had in Shadowlands. They kept all of the same utility and flavor that draws players to the spec. Most of the changes and the majority of what’s new comes with how they now deal damage.
Previously, it’s fair to say Shadow was heavily lacking any real impactful damage with the only real form of burst coming from Mindgames. But now, thanks to new additions like Mind Spike, we get a lot more instant damage with consistent procs from both Mind Spike, Mind Blast and even Shadow Word: Death with new talents.
Furthermore, our defensive toolkit and how we aim to survive has also been adjusted. Greater Fade has been removed. In its wake, we’ve been given Phantasm. This means, despite losing a major defensive, we instead gain a much needed snare removal tied into our Fade. Even more so when you consider that we now have access to Angelic Feather for a consistent and reliable movement speed increase.
Shadow Priest Playstyle in Dragonflight
Overall, Shadow Priest is setting up to be one of the most well-rounded and powerful specs in the entire game, being one of the predominant casters at the time of writing this.
On the damage front, you can now adjust the new talent tree to fit any type of playstyle that you think fits you or the composition you’re playing. You have the option to swap between builds with an emphasis on rot and sustained pressure or builds that are primarily focused around burst damage or setup.
Players who are familiar with Shadow or even newer players that picked up Shadow for its supporting capabilities can still expect a lot of focus on both support and utility, since the spec keeps all of its strong utility tools in the form of Mass Dispel, Void Shift and Leap of Faith.
On top of that, we still have access to all of our very potent instant CC like Psychic Scream, Psychic Horror and Silence.
So, in theory, we kept all of the best parts of what made Shadow Priest what it is. Only now we’ve cranked our damage up to the same levels as the rest of our kit.