Shadow Priest Spells: Shadow Word: Death

Shadow Word: Death

Velcome to spell number four on our epic journey to Face-melty Priesthood. Shadow Word: Death is our instant-cast, cast-while-moving damage spell. The tooltip reads "A word of dark binding that inflicts X to Y Shadow damage to the target. If the target is not killed by Shadow Word: Death, the caster takes damage equal to the damage inflicted upon the target." This ability scales with gear/talents/glyphs etc. The damage it does to you, the caster, can also be mitigated somewhat, though the mechanics of that changed somewhat in the last patch. You probably notice that the icon for this spell is almost the same as the one for SW:P. Don't get confused!

Here is a handy dandy chart telling you base stats for SW:D:

Rank	Level	Mana Cost	Damage
1	62	14%	450 to 522
2	70	12%	572 to 664
3	75	12%	639 to 741
4	80	12%	750 to 870

There are just a few quick things to note about SW:D.

1. If you type it into many chat programs, people think you're smiling at them in a creepy way.
2. The best times to use SW:D are at the very beginning of a fight, when your more important cooldowns are less than 2 seconds away, or when you want to kill yourself to avoid durability loss.

This is a short post for a spell, because this is a short spell. I use it as number 4 in my opening sequence, and apply as needed (while running/vortexed/not quite cooled down). Healers, please don't be alarmed when we suddenly lose 5,000 HP. We did it to ourselves! Remember warlock hellfire spam? It's like that only less obnoxious.

Next time, we'll take a look at a little beauty called Mind Flay. Toodles!