The PvE "Sidekick" Shadow Priest build

[Kevin]

This is the idea: Assume you are not the only shadow priest in the raid, and that you want to be able to heal as well. How would you talent and gear?

This of course is something I think I will be trying. I've got my primal mooncloth set and a pretty decent set of healing gear, and since I don't know that going shadow will be permanent, I'm looking for a cheap way to try it out.

It's motivated by the Gruul fight. I just feel dang useless at the beginning, trying to dps with DoT and wand, yet I see mages stuck outside the shadow priest group that end up oom on a fight that is pretty much just a straight up DPS check. A holy/disc priest's best role on this fight is to buff the raid, and then sit out of the fight:(. Let the druids handle shatter damage, and the pallies keep up the tanks. But I've got a lot of investment and interest in healing... so here is the plan. Keep as much healing as possible while still being capable of being a mana battery and decent DPS in fights where that is better.

Improved Fort? Nah, bring candles to donate.

Shadow weaving? Ok it'll stack faster if I take it... but the other shadow priest(s) can stack it up soon enough for a fight that matters that I'd rather save those talent points.

Misery? Let the other guy keep it up.

This frees me up for 20 points in holy. I also assume I can leech Divine Spirit off of someone. Over a typical raiding spriest build, I'm not losing hardly anything in a raid situation. Over a healing priest build, I am losing spiritual guidance, spiritual healing, and holy concentration. I do, howver, retain a lot of healing goodies, most importantly the 2.5s cast time for GH and 15% reduced mana cost.

Here is my planned talent distribution:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=rZfLxccZxGxtM0Rhtxo

Comments and feedback? My main concern is gearing. I've got a smattering of decent damage gear, but it's been skewed towards a smiter build for non-boss fights -- it lacks hit and has too much crit. Capping hit (my first priority) is looking a little bit painful, I'll have to go track down some specific drops. Not having Frozen Shadoweave puts me in a bit of a gear hole. But I'm basically treating this as a utility build, I don't expect to top the DPS charts.

I think it could work. While as mentioned you don't have the gearing you want, since you aren't getting some of the "traditional" shadow spec talents from the discipline tree I like that you grabbed some of the lesser used shadow talents from the shadow tree as a trade off for not getting some of the stuff that the other shadow priest have. I know your crit levels will go down as you get more spell hit, but planning the build around crit MB's and shadow word deaths (that you get VE'd back up or healed by a paladin spammer that isn't paying attention to who they are healing) with the flay in there looks effective.

The only worry is that from our mains we'll only have the one other priest in the guild that has imp divine spirit now. We only really have 4 priests as mains, the 2 shadow, and the 2 holy (we have a lot of priest alts at L70 but only the 4 mains). But as has been beaten to death in other places, priest healing in raids often gets outclassed by other healers. Paladins are designed to spam heals on a single target if you assuming blessing of light is up, and you can if you have 3 pallies and you are talking about the tanks, then a holy spec paladin has the most mana efficient heal in Flash of Light, and from what I can tell if they are spec'd to get the 2 second holy light (OK the first is still 2.5) they will end up with the best healing per second heal as well, and it isn't going to be that mana ineffiecient either. Tree druids are designed to keep a HoT stack on one or two targets and/or whip out big HoTs all over the place for folks that won't be taking damage again for awhile. Chain heal is way more effective of an AoE in raids because of the range issues on priest AoE heals and sometimes the group restrictions as well as the discipline talents you need to give up to get circle of healing. If circle of healing just healed the 4 closest people that needed healing to the person you targeted it on, it would make more priests consider giving up imp divine spirit. Of course then the shaman would feel marginalized even more because why bother with chain heal, oh joy I get to be a mana tide and earth shield bot because that priest instant cast AoE heal will land before my chain can.

This also addresses the design issues where you there are times you need 9 healers and times you only need 2. Who do you not have heal? You become the first choice to go a DPS route. You could even be slotted in as primarily DPS who gets swapped to a healing roll if we need more. We've done that with our Healing Touch spec'd druids who could go moonkin. You are just doing what looks to be the priest version of that build and bringing a different type of utility to the raid.

So I don't really see an issue with it. I think you'll have some fun with it as well. I actually had some similar thoughts when I went survival with the hunter. We had a couple new beast hunters coming up and while beast hunters stack we didn't have a survival hunter. I finally had the gearing to support the build (much harder to get survival gear than marks/beast gear in my opinion) I seemed to be the best choice of hunters to switch, besides while I've been beast 90% of my raiding career and nearly 100% of my leveling career (including a lot of pre TBC) I had also done survival and marks before to help provide what helped the raiding group the most I was comfortable having to get used to the new play style and use survival does play differently enough from beast that I needed an adjustment period to help maximize my DPS. Providing 200-240 AP for all our physical damage dealers depending on state of buffs, seemed like a good thing to do at this stage. Of course my survival build still isn't DPS optimized. I still hold a lot of talents that provide PvP, grinding, and 5 man (especially heroics) utility. Even with not being perfect on my shot rotations I'm still able to hit over 700 DPS between me and the pet. I'd say I'm still only running at 80-85% effectiveness based on my auto/steady ratios and the number of arcane or multi's worked in as well. That is certainly good enough though I'm really wanting to be in the 90-95% range, I think my gear and spec should be able to get me to 775-800 DPS if I play perfect.

The point of that last tangent? It's very important to feel useful and like you are doing the best you can do in a raid. I know many of our healers aren't feeling that way because of the design of many of the raid encounters and because we stayed in Kara too long because we didn't quite have critical mass to consisently get 25 man raids going so we were getting more and more overgeared for the encounters we were seeing, even if some folks still weren't getting any gear at all. I also know how fast a healer can get utterly bored. There is a reason that Satura was always one of my favorite fights to heal on. DPS used to face this problem in the old raids, I'll push one button. Now, at least for some of the DPS classes (hunters are quite possibly too far on the other end of the spectrum with too much to do all the time to just stay competitive) this has changed, well it started to change in AQ40 and ocntinued to change in Naxx and TBC. It could still get boring, but most DPS classes on most fights have to deal with constant movement while keeping high performance, they have to watch interrupts or disarms a lot more than they used, hunters have to pay attention to shot rotations, keeping up stings on some bosses (though on Gruul I don't worry about it until the 8th or so growth), misdirections during the fights (makes Gruul and Nightbane sooo much easier if you do the MD's right). Some fights we even get to provide CC. I know with our group hunters are the prefered CC on Moroes it seems because you don't want to distract the healers if you can help it and a practiced hunter doesn't lose much, if any DPS while trapping. But I never get bored on the hunter. I used to get bored on the healer, because healing doesn't change. You anticipate the damage and you get your heal ready to land right after the damage comes in. Some of the fight designs even encourage you to just spam a heal regardless of if it is needed or not. That isn't really fun. Ask mages in Molten Core. There is no art to it. There is no need to decide which heal to use. You take shatter damage you using a binding heal. If you don't take shatter damage you flash or greater.

If you were a good healer from the start, healing has always been the most fun and challenging when you see content for the first few times as that is likely the only times where you will be level appropriate and or geared appropriately. Groups that started TBC in Naxx gear didn't get that on 5 mans till the later Auch instances because the Naxx/BWL gear in many cases has you over geared for the 5 mans and too many people run 5 mans when they are even level to the end boss not -3. Steamvaults with a bunch of L68 toons in greens and a few blues is way way more fun than steamvaults with 5 L70 toons in end game blues. But for a healer it just gets continually worse. The tank gets more mitigation/avoidance/stamina so there are fewer oh crap moments. The healer gets more healing so that you recover from those moments faster, and the DPS does more damage so you have fewer chances of those moments ever happening. This is of course why healers are sometimes the hardest pushers for new content, it's the only stuff that provides them any real challenge. If they are just there for the social aspects then healing anybody will keep you mostly happy (this is part of the reason why I will often volunteer to heal with my enhancement shaman, at his 1053 +healing and 106 MP/5 in his healing gear healing a normal 5 man is pretty much never a challenge, but I play the game for the people more than I play it to progess my toon, that's another reason for my altitis).


So yeah I had to babble again about some of the design flaws in the game and I saw a crack to anchor another wall of text in.

But agian I think you will enjoy the build, I think it will be effective and I think that is good.