World of Warcraft: Shadow Priest Post 3.1

The Shadow Priest has always been a strange bird of a class. Only recently have they been accepted as a "real" class for raiding by the other classes in World of Warcraft. WoW players up until now have largely ignored the fact that a good Shadow Priest can do the same amount of damage a mage or a warlock can. People just didn't want to believe it, but with the recent boosts of Shadow Priest talents, they're being forced to accept the fact that Shadow Priests can hold their own - often better than others that were specifically designed for DPS. Today I'll take a look at Shadow Priests in the post Patch 3.1 World of Warcraft, and see if they're still up to snuff.

Spec 14/0/57

This is your cookie cutter spec for the regular, traditional Shadow Priest in the post Patch 3.1 World of Warcraft. If you're going to play as Shadow PVE, you're going to want to take Shadow Affinity. This was one of the big complaints that Shadow Priests originally took flak for. For some reason, Blizzard made Shadow Priests take a lot more threat than traditional DPS classes, so you're going to need this talent to keep the baddies off of your back. That being said, if you're looking at solely PvP, there is absolutely no need for this talent. It's situational, but worth mentioning because often S.Priests overlook this talent as they're speccing PvE.

The great thing about the Shadow tree is that nearly every single talent is useful. You're not going to find placeholder talents like you would with say, rogue or paladin. One possesses a lot of versatility as they're speccing, because let's face it, we only have one tree for dps. This, out of necessity, forces it to be at least somewhat good or else the class would be horrible.

There are a few talents that you'll want to pick up no matter what. I don't care if you're building up for PvE or PvP, but you'll definitely want these.

Spirit Tap - Having the ability to recharge your mana after you kill something is insane. This is one of the greatest talents the game has to offer just because it makes you so damn efficient. If you have a lot of spirit (which is very easy to come by even when not optimizing for it) it's very possible to kill something and regenerate 50% or so of that many you used to battle. Very, very efficient.

Darkness - It's +10% damage to all of your shadow spells, and since all you'll be using for damage are in fact...shadow spells...it might as well say +10% damage. When you put this into perspective as if it were a mage or warlock talent, everybody would have this. Blizzard has done us a favor here and we'd be in a bad place not to take this talent, especially since it's been lifted to Tier 1.

Silence - This is great for PvP because it just shuts down casters. This spell works so well it's funny. Mages, Warlocks, Elemental Shaman, Balance Druids, Holy Paladins, etc are all shut down by this one spell. It also has it's PvE uses. It can be used to pull casters to you, or shut down extra damage to your tank. This is of the most versatile spells in the game.

Check out more of my articles for more on World of Warcraft!