So, here goes my first meaningful post. I'm going to be adventurous here and talk about choosing your talents! Actually though, I've got a couple of reasons for doing so. First of all, this question keeps popping up on the forums I ready, and I keep seeing the same spec recommended. Many people out there will tell you that the talent tree is pretty self-explanatory, but I've actually seen a few interesting wrinkles that I'd like to share with the community. So, I'm going to discuss a few varients you might want to look at.
1) The Pre-Canned Spec 13/0/58 (View on WoWHead)
So, here's the typical build you come up with by just grabbing all the obvious PVE talents. Notice that you take 13 points in the Discipline Tree in order to pick up Meditation. This point investment is pretty much considered a requirement for all PVE builds, as Meditation allows 50% of our mana regen to continue while casting.
We then swing over to the Shadow Tree. Most Priests, especially ones who've just hit 80 recently, will have 3 points in Spirit Tap and 2 points in Improved Spirit Tap. These are amazing talents to use while leveling, or if you plan on farming mobs on your Shadow Priest. Combined with some of our other abilities, this Spec actually winds up having almost no down-time while leveling or farming.
DPS wise, this spec has every talent you'd want. It also brings
Improved Vampiric Embrace, for those of you wanting to maximize the utility you're bringing to your raid group. Note that we skip the talent this blog is named after, Shadow Affinity. Interestingly enough, your average Shadow Priest really doesn't need to put any points into this talent. You'll find out why if you hover over the talent Shadow Form, and flip to Chapter 5, page 27. "Assume a Shadowform, increasing your Shadow damage by 15%, reducing all damage done to you by 15% and threat generated by 30%."
Yep. So you can spend 3 points to get 25% threat reduction, or 1 point (that you're going to spend anyway) and get 30% threat reduction. Most people choose not to make this point investment, and just live with the threat reduction provided by being in Shadow Form.
This build has one typical variation. You can drop the 2 points in Vampiric Embrace, and pick up Improved Shadow Form. Many new priests skip this talent, as at first glance it looks like a PVP talent. Read the last sentance of the talent though, it gives you 70% resistance to spell push-back mechanics, including push-back from random raid damage. You see, any amount of push-back will cost you ticks from your Mind Flay casts. It'll also delay your Mind Blasts and Vampiric Touch casts. That 70% resistance to push-back can wind up being a significant DPS increase on several boss fights. What's even better is that it stacks with the Paladin buff, Concentration Aura. Combined, these two abilities render you completely immune to pushback.
2) The I'm Doing Pretty Good DPS Spec (View on WoWHead)
So, at some point in time, you'll eventually start to notice that Shadow Priests actually generate a ton of threat, especially when your DPS starts increasing. And if you keep your Vampiric Embrace buff up, you're going to be gaining threat both as a DPSer and as a Healer. There are certain fights in this game, such as Malygos or Hodir, where a good Shadow Priest will be producing more threat than a tank. After getting flattened by a boss a few times, you're gonna want to start looking at grabbing extra threat reduction.
Now, if you use the first build in this post as your starting point, you see that you've gotta find some PVE talents to sacrifice. Well, the first place to look is Improved Spirit Tap. Why? Becuase aside from farming or grinding mobs, this talent is actually pretty useless. This talent provides you a 10% increase to your Spirit, and extra mana regen while casting when you crit with either the Mind Blast or Shadow Word Death spells. The buff lasts for 8 seconds.
First of all, the extra mana regen is really not needed. We start off with 50% mana regen, we've got a Shadow Fiend who restores half our mana bar every 3 minutes, and as a back-up we've got Dispersion, for another 1/3 of our mana pool. And even if we needed the regen, take a look at how we activate the buff. Of the two spells, Shadow Word: Death is used very rarely. Additionally, with so few talents in increase our base crit, we actually wind up with fairly low crit percentages. So the buff in hardly ever maintained.
Now, if you've payed attention to your talents and glyphs, you'll notice that 10% of our Spirit is turned into Spell Power through the Twisted Faith talent, and another 10% if we use Glyph of Shadow. So Improved Spirit Tap is a DPS gain right? Well ya, but barely. Let's say that you're raiding with 1000 Spirit. So, when the talent procs, you get 100 extra Spirit, which we can convert to 20 spell power. Not exactly impressive. Next, consider that you're not going to have the buff up 100% of the time, unless you somehow have a 100% chance to crit. Honestly, this talent is pretty much worthless if you're raiding.
So, we give up Imp Spirit Tap, we get a bit more threat reduction for peace of mind, and we still have pretty decent mana regen while farming. As with most builds, you get to chose between Improved Shadow Form and Improved Vampiric Embrace.
3) Max Utility and DPS (View on WoWHead)
So, this is a build I've been testing, in preperation for the 3.2 patch. One common complaint you'll hear from Shadow Priests is that we "don't have as much utility as other DPSers". Well, part of the problem is that many Shadow Priests ignore Improved Vampiric Embrace, preferring the personal DPS gain from Improved Shadow Form. Another part of the problem is that game mechanics render some of our potential utility kinda useless, but that's another post for another time. Well, the 3.2 patch introduces a nice little buff to Shadow Priests, the talented spell Silence will now work as an interrupt on bosses. Yes please!
Ok, here's the problem though. To pick up Silence, we first have to spend 2 talent points in Improved Psychic Sceam, a talent which provides you with almost no benefits on your typical boss fight. So we've got to free up 3 talent points, basically to gain 1 useful talent. This means that we need to be abandoning some pretty useless talents. Luckily, we've got 3 points in Spirit Tap, which just happens to be even less useful in a raid than Improved Psychic Scream.
You'll also note that I've removed two points from the talent Focused Mind. This is a talent I've been able to remove points from as my gear has steadily improved, as I'm now finding that I don't need the mana cost reduction from my spells as desperately. The extra threat reduction has been very useful though, as I prefer to use Improved Vampiric Embrace, and tend to keep the spell up on every boss.
The downside to this spec is that I now have very terrible mana regen when farming. Well... terrible regen for a Shadow Priest. I actually have to use drinks now when farming mobs, which cuts into my profits a bit. Luckily, we have a ton of daillies to choose from in this expansion, so I'm actually doing a lot less farming than I did back in The Burning Crusade.