State of a shadow priest

I suppose my first actual post should be a summary of some kind of where I feel shadow priests stand in relation to other classes and roles in WoW, as well as a biography of my own experience as a priest. Should be easy, right?

Shadow priests have come a long way since vanilla. Even though I was primarily a healer throughout pre-BC content, and almost all shadow spec throughout BC, I have some cross-spec experience in both eras. In vanilla, summarizing shadow priests is fairly easy: we were a diet warlock. One calorie, no carbs. Our best use was stacking Shadow Weaving on targets to boost the damage of the warlocks in the raid. Damage, even in decent gear (which I actually had, surprisingly enough), was abysmal. Vampiric Touch didn't exist, and Vampiric Embrace was a sub-par ability. If you were a shadow specced level 60, most people would call you a noob and tell you to go heal. Of course, this was also the period during which Discipline was an awesome healing tree and Holy, in comparison, was woefully underpowered until Priests finally got their second talent review.

In Burning Crusade, the addition of Vampiric Touch to our arsenal was a huge hook in the opposite direction. Suddenly healing priests were hard to find in the upper echelons of raids. Some top-end guilds completely lacked healing priests of any kind. Shadow priests were the indispensible mana-batteries of the raid. Our damage still sucked, but at least we could do more than a trickle of healing. Instead, we were needed solely to give caster-dps classes and healers the longevity they needed for boss encounters. Our damage abilities were just gravy. It wasn't even until later on in BC, when gear improved, that shadow priests began to do respectable damage. The fantastic scaling abilities of Vampiric Embrace all but guaranteed a raid spot for well-geared shadow priests. I would estimate I spent 90-95% of my raiding time as shadow spec, speccing holy for brief periods for a refreshing change of pace. And then patch 3.0.1 happened.

Everything changed. Shadow priests were finally a dps class, at the cost of our wonderful ability to restore mana. Instead of mana return, gear levels were measured in dps. Mind Flay could crit. Mind Blast no longer drew tremendous amounts of aggro, finally making it the primary dps ability it wanted to be throughout BC. Devouring Plague was no longer the horrendously overpowered racial class ability of undead priests (*tear*). In many respects, we were much more like warlocks.

At first, I found this confusing, and annoying. "What good is 0.25% mana per second?" I asked. Replenishment seemed a pale shadow of Vampiric Touch, a woefully inadequate bone thrown to what I saw as a spec gutted to the core. I could see my raid spot fading away as I competed with pure dps classes now instead of having a niche of my own. Wrath of the Lich King came out and I started a Death Knight, spending most of the first months of the expansion levelling the Flavor of the Month and making half-hearted attempts to return to my priest. I lamented the loss of our indispensibility and waxed nostalgic about our halcyon days of yore.

When I finally returned to my poor, neglected shadow priest (after a brief flirtation with levelling as Holy) I found something shocking--doing damage was fun. All I needed was a fresh perspective. Once I got my head out of the past and wrapped my brain around the new, improved shadow priest, I found myself actually enjoying it. Now, you couldn't tell me different. I finally saw the incredible improvements made to the spec, including the Shadow Weaving change (it never really made sense as a debuff on the target), a phenomenal AoE ability in the form of Mind Sear, the threat reduction while in shadowform, the talent to reduce and virtually eliminate spell pushback (one of my major complaints in BC), and many others I won't bother to continue to list. I cut my Death Knight out of my regular play experience, only hopping on to tank heroics and raids when desperately needed, and haven't looked back since.

Now, here I am almost fully Naxx-25 geared, averaging 3300 dps in a sub-optimal spec. I frequently outdamage mages (mages!) and never pull aggro, a common experience in BC. I can still restore your mana, and pew pew while doing it.

We've come a long, long, way baby.