In this article, we present you with various talent trees for Shadow Priests (WoW 4.3) that you can use in specific situations. We also give you pointers for customising your talent tree and adapting it to a particular boss. The other articles of our Shadow Priest guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the left.

1. Standard Talent Build↑top

As a Shadow Priest, your choice of talents is very limited. 39 out of your 41 talent points must be spent in a specific combination of talents, leaving you with a few options for your remaining two points.

In this build, we present all the mandatory talents you must take. Then, we list the few options you have for the remaining points.

We highly recommend spending the two remaining talent points in one of the following two ways:

• 2/3 in Inner Sanctum. This will provide you with a 4% spell damage taken reduction, which is very useful to your healers when progressing on difficult encounters.
• 3/3 in Mental Agility (up from the 2/3 you must always take) and 1/3 in Inner Sanctum. Mental Agility will provide you with a small mana cost reduction for your instant cast spells. You will also gain 2% spell damage taken reduction, from Inner Sanctum.

Alternatively, you can take other utility talents from the Shadow tree. We will discuss this briefly below.

2. Customising Your Build↑top

The talent builds that we suggested above are currently the best Shadow talent builds. In the following sections, we will present you with a few additional options for your remaining two talent points, as well as explain what each of your important glyphs does.

2.1. Optional Talents

In addition to the two common variations presented above, here are a few other, situational variations:

• 2/2 in Phantasm. This causes your Fade ability to also remove all movement impairing effects from you. Its use is entirely situational.
• 2/2 in Paralysis. This causes your Mind Blast critical hits to root the target in place for 4 seconds. Again, this is highly situational and unreliable.
• 1/1 in Psychic Horror. This grants you the Psychic Horror ability, which disarms the target and causes it to be feared for 3 seconds. Its use is also situational.

Lastly, it is possible to pick up the Silence talent (ranged interrupt with a 45 second cooldown that may, occasionally, be useful), but this will require you to:

• Take 2/2 in Improved Psychic Scream (reducing the cooldown for your Psychic Scream by 4 seconds), a prerequisite for Silence.
• Only take 1/2 in either Veiled Shadows or Harnessed Shadows and place it in Silence.

2.2. Glyphs

Your choice of glyphs, as a Shadow Priest, is very simple.

2.2.1. Prime Glyphs

The best Prime Glyphs you can use are:

• Glyph of Mind Flay, which increases the damage done by your Mind Flay by 10%;
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Death, which allows you to use Shadow Word: Death twice before triggering its cooldown, when the enemy is below 25% health;
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain, which increases the damage done by your Shadow Word: Pain by 10%.

2.2.2. Major Glyphs

None of the Major Glyphs you can use will offer you any relevant performance boost. We recommend using the following 3 glyphs:

• Glyph of Fade, which reduces the cooldown of your Fade by 9 seconds;
• Glyph of Inner Fire, which increases the amount of armor you gain from Inner Fire by 50%;
• Glyph of Spirit Tap, which causes you to gain 12% of your total mana over 12 seconds, when you kill an enemy with Shadow Word: Death.

2.2.3. Minor Glyphs

There are several Minor Glyphs that you can use, with little effect on your performance. We recommend the following 3 glyphs:

• Glyph of Fading, which reduces the mana cost of your Fade by 30%;
• Glyph of Levitate, which removes the reagent requirement from your Levitate;
• Glyph of Shadowfiend, which causes your Shadowfiend to instantly restore 5% of your mana if it is killed.