Shadow Priest Spells: Devouring Plague

Devouring Plague
Devouring Plague is a trainable spell, available at level 20. It costs a percentage of mana, does damage over 15 seconds that scales with the spell's level and your stats. It also heals you for 15% of the damage done. Below is a rank table from WoWwiki:

Rank	Mana Cost	Damage	Level
1	28% of base mana	152	20
2	28% of base mana	272	28
3	28% of base mana	400	36
4	28% of base mana	544	44
5	28% of base mana	712	52
6	28% of base mana	904	60
7	25% of base mana	1088	68
8	25% of base mana	1144	73
9	25% of base mana	1376	79

This is DoT number 2 on my refresh list. The damage it does is significant, and when soloing can be very nice to have to help save on health pots. On our last Naxx25 (well, the last with a WWS anyway) DP accounted for 18% of my total damage on bosses. The average DoT tick was 1670 and the max was 2181. This is all well and good, but let's get to the reason raid leaders should like this spell.

First of all, It's a DoT. This is good for the same reason any DoT is good: you can keep hurting bosses even if you have to move. It is an instant cast with a 30 yard range, which means we can still do damage to Malygos during the Vortex phase even if we're on the outer edge of the vortex. It ALSO keeps us healed during that fight, when the healers can't really do much. It ALSO increases healing if we have Vampiric Embrace (will discuss later) up on the target, making the Malygos fight even easier on us, and making it less likely that we will die before phase 2--something which cannot be said of mages and warlocks.

The other VERY nice thing about this spell is that it is a Disease, not a magic effect, and will be affected by the Death Knight spell Pestilence. Moving on to the next target and discovering DP is already there gives me the same feeling as getting an extra candy bar from a vending machine.

As mentioned, this spell should be second in your initial cast rotation; preceded by Vampiric Touch, and succeeded by Shadow Word: Pain. We'll discuss that next time! Hope this helps!