Shadow Priest Survival Guide - Dragonflight Pre-Patch

Hey guys what is up publik here back with another video and today we’re talking about the dragonflight pre-patch um so this is going to be kind of a quick and dirty Survival Guide for the spec uh just for the next couple weeks here until dragonflight actually launches, when dragonflight launches I'll do more kind of in-depth stuff like I did in shadowlands with how to play this back in some more intricacies with it but I wanted to put something up that way if anyone wanted kind of a video version of what I’ve already written on Icy Veins you have this as kind of something to look at if you’re unsure where to start with your Shadow priest so let's go and get started.

Okay so there are quite a lot of changes going into dragonflight so the the one the most notable one is the talent tree, so we have a brand new talent tree for the spec that has a lot of choices in it there's quite a lot to unpack here if you are just starting out and you kind of just want something to get started with there are in my icy veins guide in the town build whatever you want to page you want to look at there are plenty of builds linked there, is like starting points for you to look at as well as pins in the discordant Etc so if you're kind of overwhelmed by this that’s okay that that's somewhat understandable there's quite a lot going on here, there's a lot of different ways you can build your Shadow priest um and what you can see right now I'm actually on the beta because servers are not up yet so you you'll see me have more points than available so yeah you'll get access to at least try things out see how the spec plays, note you are missing some points like I mentioned so which isn't as big of a deal in our in our class tree over here but in our Spec tree you'll only be able to get one point in this kind of bottom section or the Capstone section but this is where the majority of the changes are coming in for shadow priest.

They have kind of done some base changes to the spec as well but a lot of that has just been folded into the talent tree so I'll call out some of the main ones that you'll see in this video, again won't go into Super in depth of how this works but so the first one is the class tree so there's a lot of now shared utility things that all priests can get access to notably for us power infusion and twins of the sun Priestess are are massive, twist to fade this year Mind Games is now uh inside the class tree so that is the only Covenant ability coming with us inside of dragonflight.

Vampiric Embraces here we're gonna get a shadow fiend and Shadow or death quote for free, there's also a couple other things as well the other thing coming back from like a DPS perspective is divine star and Halo so you'll pick up one of these guys depending on what kind of content you’re doing, some kind of interesting points we do get Angelic feather as Shadow priest which is a very nice touch getting giving us extra movement so you can get this and Body and Soul which is what we're using primarily in shadowlands for movement and then as far as the Spec tree goes this is where the majority of changes came into play.

So the first change we’ll talk about is our cooldown so you now have a choice between dark Ascension which is a one minute cooldown or void eruption which is a two minute cooldown these cooldowns, now we don't have a whole lot of like definition or identity it's going to kind of come down to like Sims and kind of when we're gonna pick one or versus the other I will say generally speaking dark Ascension seems to be kind of the Avenue for single Target at least in pre-patch and then voider option is going to be kind of the AOE activator mostly because it's giving you master and all your targets that you’re processing for the duration of void form they did slightly change void form going into dragonflight so um now it is as you spend Insanity it extends void form so there's no longer hungering void extending our void form with our void bolts, it's now just you know spending our Insanity.

So if we kind of come into flight eruption here and you can see as I get ramping here we still have shot offline prison as you can see I'm extending that pet but as I spend Insanity you can see that void form as the buff is also going up so this is kind of a little bit of a mini game so to speak that they ‘retrying to kind of part of what we were doing in shadowlands but yeah so that's what that's what this is doings that's the kind of main change to our cooldown and note that is a there it's a one minute or a two minute cooldown, both of those now sync up with power infusion and mind Bender nicely.

Note that if you don't take mindbender in the spec tree though you still have Shadow fiend which is a three minute cooldown, otherwise our cooldowns are much more nicely synced, now the other large changes we no longer have steering nightmare as a kind of AOE spender, they've instead reworked Mindshare so Minds here is no longer a filler spell that you press in AOE it's now what you spend Insanity on during AOE, it requires 15 insanity to kind of get going and then once you're once you have that you can um you can Channel it so what that looks like here so if we kind of get our dots rolling you see I don't have 50 Insanity yet so it doesn't let me press mines here once you get 50 Insanity then you can Channel it and it consumes 25 per second, if it doesn’t have 25 Insanity to consume it stops its Channel early, so that's going to be the primary way that you're going to want to spend Insanity now especially once you get to three targets it's more break even at two Targets but that does kind of depend on talents but just note that in AOE scenarios when things are stacked that’s where you want to be spending your insanity and that's the kind of other large change.

For the most part this has you know our hay rotation is still kind of being figured out it's a little bit messy I'll be honest but yeah that's kind of that's the large change to our aoe play style it'll kind of feel a lot more like you ‘redoing the single Target rotation but in AOE except now you're replacing devouring plague with mind Theory, otherwise it kind of plays the same.

In a single Target you do get some additions like we can count into psychic link for AOE and a couple other of the new idle spells but otherwise it's going to be pretty similar, now as far as how we now spread our dots since we don't have the steering nightmare they've given us you have a choice note up here between misery or Dark Void Dark Void is a fixed 30 second cooldown that puts Shadow of pain on 6 targets, generates some Insanity but again it’s a 30 second cooldown and it's only shot award pain um or you can get or in addition to that you can get Shadow crash but Shadow crash applies vampiric touch to eight targets and know that this does play with misery so if you have misery talented with Shadow crash you apply Shadow or pain and vampiric touch to 8 Targets on a fixed 30 second cooldown so in general it is harder to dot things in dragonflight.

But that being said we do have some more ways to sustain our thoughts than we would otherwise mainly mental Decay so every tick of Minds here or mind flight extends your dots on your targets that it's hitting so obviously the more you're weaving in mind fears you know the more that you can sustain the dots that shadow crash, misery Dark Void or whatever have applied that's gonna be the main play style change.

Going into AOE the other large change I want to cover is mind Spike, so Shadow has gotten a filler added back to its kit so you can now choose between do you want to press mine player or minus because you're filler and I say choose this largely depends on the talents that you've chosen, mine Psych is just mind spike is just you cast something it does damage and gives you Insanity that's it in addition to that you can Talent into two things that buff mine's bike surge of darkness which gives it a proc effect and then mind melt which causes each mind Spike gives your next mind blast uh increased chance to crit and reducing its castspeed um so this play style is kind of interesting um effectively the tldr for this is the more things you Talent into mine Spike the more you're going to use mind Spike as your filler or the more things you talent in that only buff mind play the more you're going to use mindful as your filler.

So we have a a few talents that buff mine spikes so basically I think of it as the more talents you put into that the more you're going to be putting mind Spike as your filler and vice versa so the Mind flight ones is where things get really interesting so obviously mental Decay that we already covered you know that’s helping you sustain your dots while you're waiting for shadow crash cooldowns to come back up you also have things like dark evangelism which just increases your periodic Shadow damage, you have mindful Insanity which is a kind of returning spell effectively you press devouring plague it Buffs your next mind play uh but only the next one uh and then you also have screams of the void and Idol of c'thum so as you pick the things that really buff mindfully the use cases for mind Spike somewhat diminish so in the build I have now I’m like basically talenting into almost every single mind play buffing Talent so because of that mind spike is somewhat just there for if you get a surge of Darkness proc and you can use that while moving or if you don't have mind play Insanity up but your dots aren't going to falloff that kind of thing.

It's kind of convoluted and complicated, again check out the Icy Veins guide if you want kind of more detail on when to use each filler, there should be a section at the bottom of the guide that goes over that.

Then finally the last change I want to cover is kind of the new talents that we got access to a lot of these talents are just returning stuff the things that are new that I want to point out specifically are the four idle talents, so we have four old God idle talents at the bottom of our tree like I mentioned in pre-patch you're only going to be able to get one of these at a time because you're going to run out of points.

So the first one is Idol of your charge it's basically a mind Bender buffing uh idle we're not going to use this very much in pre-patch specifically because right before it is inescapable torment which is the current shadowlands shadowflame prism legendary they do not stack uh because of that and just the strength of our legendaries in pre-patch you’re not going to be running this very often but you do have idle view charge for dragon fight launch which might come into play more.

Moving on we have Idol of c'thun, similar to your legendary this is we'll have mixed results in in pre-patch this is basically a buffed version of the Eternal call to the void legendary that we had have in shadowlands um like I said is slightly buffed and changed and reworked a little bit and this kind of flows well with mindful Insanity screams of the Void down here effectively you press mine flame mines here you get a corresponding tendril to proc off that.

Next one we have Idol of Yogsaron, this is somewhat like uh a mix of spread and stacked cleave Talent it's got a really weird um kind of place on our tree uh basically the more apparitions you summon you'll spawn a pet a thing from Beyond that blasts your main target for good chunk of damage and that damage splashes to targets around it, right now this is kind of dependent on a bit of gear and scaling I don’t think you'll see much of this in pre-patch although it'll come more into play in dragonflight for sure uh this Talent also goes much better with void eruption and void form than does with dark Ascension because obviously we want to generate more operations and void bolt is one of the few spells that does generate apparitions uh so it does it does something that you know we do want with The Arc surround.

Then finally we have Idol of n'zoth this is kind of the AOE Idol basically speaking you you spread your dots you have a chance to apply I need another debuff to that Target, every time you apply one of those debuffs you have a chance to collapse those Stacks to deal AOE damage to Target surround, it is not uncapped AOE and you can only have four of those dots active at a time but it does give us some amount of like passive AOE cleave in our kit and it's kind of targeted to be the more Mythic plus focused idle.

And that's the kind of new Idol that we have so that is the very high level of kind of things that have changed like I said if you want to get the full list of how Shadow plays now you definitely want to check out the Icy Veins guide um but for now let's go let's cover uh Talent builds before we move on.

All right guys so I hopped on the PTR hopefully things are stable uh starters haven’t quite launched yet but wanted to get started on actual builds that look a little bit nicer, so I have a couple builds that I’ll show you today is just kind of like starting points and again all these will be linked in the description below or you can check out the Icy Veins guides for more info and again you want to use these as just a starting point like you don’t need to follow exactly what I’m saying for everything it's just this is what I would suggest as a starting point based on really early Sims that we’ve done uh to kind of get you into the spec in a way that's you know doing some damage.

So the first one that I'll cover is our single Target dark Ascension build, so this is going to be somewhat of a nice little default to use in single Target it uses dark Ascension, mindful Insanity you do still have mine Spike with this build and then you are mainly doing Idol of c'thun um so this is kind of you know a nice little bread and butter so to speak uh thing that we can use it's not doing anything you know too crazy or anything like thatum and it kind of does a good job of getting you most of what you want from like a playstyle perspective it’s not gonna play too differently than what you're used to, you're still going to put up dots um you know, oh I guess I still have I still have twin tops Insanity bar turned on uh we probably don't want that on it’s going to be a little confusing so you're still going to put up dots you know you'll still have some new stuff like Shadow crash applying them you have you know Halo if you want it.

The main change here is we now have dark Ascension so what we'll do is if you just look at a quick little simple opener you still do the kind of typical shadowflame prism stuff you press dark Ascension pi and then you kind of go nuts with your rotation as normal and just note that mindfully Infinity is in this build so this is kind of what you're using is your new kind of activated filler so to speak uh in this build you can still fill with mind Spike if you don't have mind play available although keep in mind if your dots are falling off soon you do kind of want to prioritize that just to be able to sustain your dots with mental Decay so yeah this build is going to have a little bit going on you can see the cells have tendrils up procing it as well it's a really kind of a filler focused rotation dark Ascension is not changing too much of what we're doing in fact there's really no rotational impact to it at all and really you're just kind of doing this as a proponent for everything else so again it is a little um I’ll say it's a little into unintuitive to have mindful insanity and mind Spike having the Mind Spike procs are pretty nice in terms of places where there is some down time especially if you want a sort of Darkness proc while moving.

That being said some of you guys might be too overwhelmed with that which is totally understandable if we go for this build, oh I'm in combat so I can't because I can’t change things in combat so there's an alternative build that we can do instead that does not have um mind Spike.

So this build is very very similar except instead of having all this we give up mind Spike to instead unfortunately to do that you do have to put one point in this top section and here I just pick mines here although you really won't use that in single Target at all, you can also pick up last word or psychic or if you'd rather have that and then you also grab maddening touch as well so um oops it looks like this build I missed out on a point here so oh there's okay supposed to look like this.

So with this build this is effectively your options if you don't want to deal with mind Spike and it's going to play much much simpler you know instead of coming in here you're just going to put your dots up um and then basically You Know You're Gonna Fill with mind Flay as you normally would you kind of want to be conscious of when that's a mind play Insanity version of the spell so you don’t you know cancel it early and you can still press that during dark Ascension even though it's not buffed by dark Ascension the insanity that you’re getting from mind play Insanity does lead to more devouring plagues or other spells so it's still good so this is a really good entry level build.

It's um there's less things to press it is a bit more punishing on movement uh because you have you just don't have that sort of Darkness proc for instant cast movement but it's still I think a good build to at least get started with if you’re kind of new to Shadow or just want to try out the spec um so that's this build and like I said this will be all these will be linked uh below.

Now if we move on if you really want to try out a void form and single Target, one build that I would suggest is this is so sticking void form and one of the purposes of void form is to work really well with yogg surround you get access to void belt which means you’re generating more apparitions to get more chances of getting the yogs around pet, I'm not going to show you how to get the how the yog pet looks just it’s going to take a hot minute to get one to spawn um but this is an alternative that doesn’t use mindful Insanity that's kind of in on yogg-saron which will have a bit of a different use case than I think or or mindful Insanity so not super like as single Target Focus but definitely an option if you want to tryout void form on single Target that’ll be linked below as well and again it should play very similarly to like what you’re used to in shadowlands although with not pressing void bolt quite as often.

Okay so moving on to the AOE build, so I have two things for you guys if you want to try just as a starting point the first one is this AOE nzoth build so it uses the new idle of nzoth um and picks up mine sphere and psychic link and maddening touch and drop some of the single Target stuff that just has less use cases in AOE mainly mind Spike dark evangelism, mindful Insanity that all goes away and you can see for idle idle open this off I'll put my dots upon the target each tick of that dot has a chance to add this echoing void debuts the Target and then everyone of those applications gives you a chance for that to explode to Targets in AOE.

So long story short keep your dots up and you see that's it exploding out for AOE damage it's outside of nzoth it's going to be pretty straightforward in the sense of in Mythic plus you basically just you’re trying to spread your dots as much as possible and then you're kind of just relying on Psychic link and Minds here.

For that other AOE damage, now the other option to try on AOE is the we're just going to call this the no idle build since n'zoth has some downsides in AOE another option is to run a build without using any idle spell and this is very similar except now instead of picking up Insidious ire which isn't really helpful in AOE we’re instead using those points on these three points elsewhere you pick up a point of Mind devour you get screams of the Void just to get your dots to tick more it's just an option if you if you want to try it out it's not substantially different but it is something to try.

Again those are just kind of starter builds like I said you can feel free to experiment with other parts this is just kind of the Avenues and lanes that we’ve found that they perform generally generally well so try these out let me know what you guys think.

All right so quickly going to talk about your Covenant choice for pre-patch so uh long story short we get Mind Games inside of our class tree we don't get value out of getting mind games again by being venthyr and generally you know we've already known that venthyr is kind of already a worse version like not a great Covenant on single Target especially there are some options you can still run theater if you want to try it out you just don't get that extra Covenant ability this doesn't work right.

Unity is kind of nice especially now that manipulation is reducing the cast or the seat you're getting more Mind Games out effectively but just generally kind inferior, kirian is definitely um an option to use although we really spent no time optimizing Sim C for kyrian it will not work inside SMC we just don't have it in there we just haven't had time to figure out how it plays theoretically though kyrian playing with dark Ascension should feel better especially with access to mind Spike.

So there's an option although generally speaking for most people I suggest you just stick with necro Lord and using the maroleth uh solving specifically with the change in dragon flight we don't have as much crit scaling so I don't think High mirror is as valuable or useful in Mythic plus so just join necro Lord maroleth is going to be good for most people.

I could certainly try out night fae if you want they did make fake Guardians work with dark Ascension and void eruption which is pretty sweet you get basically two back-to-back uses of dark Ascension with every time you use it which is a pretty-pretty solid cooldown and again you can still use Dreamweaver with dark Ascension although I might be good as well if you want to try that out with dark Ascension.

So those are options as well that's kind of what I would suggest for your Covenant, now the other thing is going to be conduit so I don't really have a whole lot to show you here but your basic conduit setup ignore this event there is just what my PTR character is you wanton use haunting apparitions and Rapid Shadows all the time in terms of your potency conduit sum and then mind Devourer is going to be the kind of default slotted in third choice so use those three for most things.

Now if you're taking one of the builds that I've talked about earlier specifically the yogg Saran one that took a point into mind Devourer or Justin general if you're using the talent version of Mind Devourer you don't want to also use the conduit they don't stack up because of that if you're using that drop mind Devourer for dissonant Echoes instead that's kind of how that will work you know with the endurance at finesse pick with it pick whatever you want a lot of stuff is going to be weird or not stacking you know welcome to uh welcome to pre-patch um and then on to kind of other things to keep in mind with pre-patch.

We’ll talk about stats briefly so like I already kind of mentioned uh Critical Strike is kind of down in the drain a little bit they removed quite a lot of our crit scaling you know hungering void is gone the way that Apparition crit scaling is significantly different and just in general crit is just a less valuable stat for us some other things that are contributing to this is we get more than we usually had with ancient Madness being kind of Baseline now so you can easily get it in the talent tree as well as if you are playing mind melt for anything you know the need to have a lot of crit on mind blast is also significantly reduced so basically crit just kind of is getting lower in value, haste Mastery are still going to be your top two stats although I will say depending on the talent choices that you’re using you might find yourself indexing more into haste than you have been previously.

It seems where some builds or haste is clearly better than Mastery and some are haste is equal to Mastery but in general that's the priority that you want to follow four steps and in general you can kind of follow the rest of this, keep in mind though with that change to crit value trinkets like cabalist Hymnal or others that you know are basically just buffing your crit chance are going to be less valuable and potentially will seem worse that is expected haven't done a whole lot of like deep testing or looking at you know trinkets for pre-patch specifically but just note that your Sims will probably reflect that change that is expected.

so hope this helps if you have questions you can leave comments here or down below or message me wherever um but that's it for this video guys, big thanks to everyone that’s supporting me on Twitch YouTube patreon, I appreciate all the support really means a lot to me, I'm going to be very a lot of stuff is coming in in the works soon so you'll see a lot of things get posted uh so it'll be a little busy but I'll try to get things out as soon as I can so hope this has been helpful, enjoy pre-patch, we'll see you in dragonflight!