A Shadow Priest blog

In the two first fights there are two abilities which can lock your spell school. In Northrend Beasts you have the Snobold Vassal and at Lord Jaraxxus there is Mistress of Pain. Keep in mind that Snobolds will also spell-lock people close to it and not necessarily only the person the Snobold is following.
However, you can avoid locking your Shadow school by casting Mass Dispel. Snobolds will have a cooldown on their interrupt roughly the same length as your school is locked out. Simply re-cast Mass Dispel. At Lord Jaraxxus, Mistress of Pain will cast Mistress' Kiss on several raid members. This spell has travel time and really easy to spot if you are aware of it. It is also possible to fake-cast and have Mistress' Kiss and Snobolds interrupt nothing, but using Mass Dispel is much easier.

It's not that I stopped updating this site, but there's just nothing interesting about the bosses in hardmode from the perspective of a Shadow Priest. The only hidden gem of slight interest is in the Twin Val'kyr fight. If you are wearing the Dark Essence and using Shadow Word: Death at Fjola Lightbane, the shadow damage returned will deal no damage to you and you will gain the same buff as when absorbing a dark orb. Essentially this means you will reach 100 stacks and gain the damage increase buff earlier.

On a side note we're also seeing the expected scaling problems become more visible. It's not that we're any worse off than earlier, but that gear from Crusaders' Coliseum has so much haste, spirit and hit. They are upgrades to previous Tier level, but other classes scale so much better with these stats. Our Tier9 set is so poorly itemized we can't really afford taking on the four-piece bonus. Basically what you want right now is the two-piece bonus and stack spellpower and crit. A simple summary of how poor the itemization and scaling is would be to take a look at our best-in-slot ring. It has spellpower, crit and mp5. All the other rings has either haste or hit which we don't want. The Tier9 set has way too much hit to afford picking up other items with hit, really. This is directly comparable to a healer taking a ring with hit on it because all the other rings has stats he doesn't favour and this is the best-in-slot with wasted item points.

I've hesitated to post about Algalon since it's a relatively brain dead and simple fight from the perspective of a Shadow Priest. There's little room for damage improvement no matter how you angle it.You can offer help to the designated Collapsing Stars' killer by dotting up his target to atone for our relatively weak single target damage.

You should also consider Glyphing Dispersion as you can safely use Dispersion through a Big Bang. What I do is I Disperse if the closest Black Hole is far away. I have a key bound to /cancelaura Dispersion to quickly get out of Dispersion and minimize damage downtime. You should be using your Shadowfiend at the start and end of the fight, preferably right before bloodlust is called as normal.

Shadow Priests has high survivability in this fight and you hardly have to move to dodge Cosmic Smash due to the damage reduction of Shadowform and health regeneration of Vampiric Embrace. Consider speccing 2/2 Improved Vampiric Embrace in favor of mana-talents. Don't hesitate refreshing Vampiric Touch if it's going to expire before you exit a Black Hole.

All in all your damage output is of minimal value in this fight, but that's no reason to not try and dish out as much as possible.

Stuck in traffic Blizzard for various reasons when attempting Thorim hardmode? Blizzard has a slowing effect, but there is a way you can cheat it. Besides using Dispersion and running through Blizzard, you can avoid parts of the damage with 2/2 Improved Shadowform talented. If you have to run through a Blizzard, simply jump into it since you're not slowed while in air. Press Fade and immediately jump while pressing forward. If done right you should not be slowed during that jump.