Shadow Priest Spells: Vampiric Touch

This post is for the WoW players of the world who don't know the first thing about Shadow Priest utility, and for players who need help understanding their own Shadow Priest. Starting with the most important spell in a Shadow Priest's inventory, here's the first in an ongoing list.

Vampiric Touch

Vampiric Touch is a spell gained from talent points in the shadow tree. It requires Shadowform and at least 40 points in the shadow tree. It has 4 additional trainable ranks, and in its final form, costs 16% of your base mana.

VT does a nice little bit of damage over time that scales with your stats, buffs, etc, and can be affected by crit. For example: last week's Sarth+1 drake kill put my average VT damage tick at 2112, with a maximum of 2994 (room for improvement). The tooltip for rank 5 tells you it does 935 damage over 15 seconds.

However, the best thing about VT, and why you should refresh it as often as you can, is the debuff it adds to the enemy. Every time you use Mind Blast (I shall discuss later), up to 10 people in your party/raid gain 0.25% of their maximum mana per second. While this is a SIGNIFICANT nerf from the way VT used to work, it's still an incredibly useful thing to have in conjunction with the other classes that now offer slight mana replenishment. The damage boost is significant, and because of that, it's cast often in rotation.

In your shadowpriesting spell rotation, This should be your first cast in a fight (debatable), and should be one of the first things (if not THE first thing) you refresh when your timer gets low or runs out. The mana replenishment is absolutely adored by all your comrades. I promise.

Hope this was helpful to all!