Shadow Word: Death

I don't need both my hands to count the times I have used Shadow Word: Death. I have never understood what's so great about it, and I figured it's about time that I do.

So what is it? Tooltip says



Hmm a word of dark binding that inflicts about 620 Shadow damage to the target, with the added twist that if this does not kill the mob, the priest that cast it will get hurt for that very same amount.

When to use it
Uses I have found for it in PvE while trolling dah intarnet includes:

- Stopping a runner with an insta-cast spell, just make sure that it will kill the mob since you will get hurt yourself otherwise, and the 12 sec cd makes you unable to spam it even if you have enough health left to risk that.

- Tag mobs when farming. The Shadow Word: Pain ticks don't set in at once and other players can steal your mob.

- Suicide by SW:D in wipe situations since you take no durability damage if you kill yourself.

- Shadow priests can get a large amount of healing from SW:D'ing a mob that has Vampiric Embrace on it, even though the Word does not kill the mob it seems very useful in raids.

- Holy priests can use it to pass on Prayer of Mending, since the PoM will jump to the tank or another player as it heals you when from the backlash of SW:D.

This is actually a truly imba use for a holy priest and I wonder why I have never thought or heard of it before. Example:

Jools in her healing gear has 597 bonus spell damage, so the total damage from a non-crit SW:D will be about 875.

She also has about 1455 bonus healing, so she will get about 625 extra healing to the PoM's 800 base healing, or a total of 1425.

The PoM will thus heal her for more than the SW:D damages her. And since her Holy crit is about 5 % larger than her Shadow crit, the chance of getting a PoM crit is also larger than the chance of getting a SW:D crit.

The cost for the SW:D is 309, but Jools has the talent Mental Agility, so she only spends 278 mana on it. Putting out a new PoM would have cost 351 mana (or 390 for the untalented ones).

When not to use it

- The Curator fight. Killing yourself with a 300 % Shadow Word: Death crit would be a sure way to make you look naabish ;P

[Edit: After having started to write this topic I was healing in heroic Slave Pens, and now I definitely can't count the times I've used SW:D on the fingers of both my hands ;P]