How much do they differ from one another? I would really like to focus on at least one of them, but I have only leveled mage to a max level, so my knowledge about them is limited. Therefore, I’m particularly interested in learning how Shadow Priest and Warlock differ from Mage and how would each of them fare in PvE and PvP. There were things I liked about both classes while leveling at around level 30, but I don’t know how they will feel at max level. Are they good for AoE dmg while doing open world content and PvP scenarios?
for andy content - just pick it thematically.
mage - cast hits
priest - dots
lock - pets dots or bolts.
none of them have any particular advantage except mages having portals for quick travel.
demo locks can tank harder elites tho.
in pvp? idk all of them are good but difficult to master.
Priests and demo locks have the coolest animations imo
Shadow priest had the advantage of being absolutely broken in pve right now. Warlocks seem good too. Mages are good in the right hands, but I’m guessing it’s hard to make them work in pugs because all mages I encounter barely do more damage than tanks. Some of the mages I encounter legit do less damage than I did on my mage in S2.
When it comes to fun, I find shadow priests kinda fun to play, you dot everything up and then you do your single target rotation on a big target while trying to spread your devouring plagues.
I can’t speak for the other specs because I haven’t played them, but destro is all about building a resource and spending it on chaos bolt or rain of fire, it’s quite a simple play style, but it requires you to pay attention and you aren’t very mobile.
I’ve only played fire and frost mage, mainly frost. The frost rotation is quite busy nowadays. You always have a button to press and the rotation in AoE is all about spamming as many blizzards as possible to reduce the cd of frozen orb. I find it quite fun, but it can be frustrating as well if the tank moves. With fire you cast fireball to fish for crits and then you use a spell that always crits to get an instant cast of pyroblast, that’s the core to the entire rotation.
All 3 are casters, all 3 are sought after for group play. Mages have the most active defenses and warlocks are the tankiest passively. Priest is somewhere in between. All 3 have great theme and flavor.
Warlocks and mages are safer picks for a dps player because even when one or more specs are garbage there is always the third dps spec while priests only have 1 dps spec and when it is garbage then it’s game over.
Anyways it comes down to if you want to blast enemies with void and summon eldritch horros, blast enemies with felfire and summon demonic servants or blast enemies with forces of creation and summon arcane familiars. But that is pretty much it.
Never played Warlock
Shadow Priest on the hand can be very cool or very dissapointing. They tend to get nerfed every expansion. They can have two play styles. Mind Flay (channeled) or Mind Spike (cast). Either style is determined by the meta, tier sets or sometimes trinkets on use ability items. They can be very OP in both PvE and PvP. For PvP you need to know how to play or you will be dissapointed. You will also be ignored by healers as SP tends to have some amazing self heal abilities if used and timed correctly. They appear to be pretty hard to kill in PvP unless stun locked. Feard by mages, warlock and druids.
Mage is mage and pretty boring except Fire Mage in PvP. You can have a ton of fun with them and out of the three specs still pretty mobile while dishing out damage. PvE I find all three specs pretty dull.
Mage can be… tricky. It’s probably the most powerful of them all as well though, which leads to a fairly ironic situation where mages dominate the top but are relatively unpopular overall.
In the current season there’s a mage in practically every top team but there are far more rets at +10 than all 3 mage specs combined.
So that’s fun.
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I have been playing a bit of both this season and I gotta say that fire mage for me is way harder than shadow priest.
On my priest I’m ok, on my mage is bad.
Might be because, personally, I think as mage you have you be fast at getting everything right.
There is no difference. Classes are so homogenized that all 3 cloth casters have copy pasted kit with just different colors and animation to their skills.
Not true for Affliction though, which maybe be why it’s my favourite DPS spec in the game.
If only it was this simplified.
No shot, SP does way more damage than mage.
In raids, yes. In M+? No, mage does way more - though of course a large portion of it is happening because of the priest, but due to lust you can argue the same is true the other way around.
I don’t know what to tell you, SP does at least 20% more damage than mage when you compare two players of equal skill and that’s not accounting for PI.
You’ve already told me something that contradicts logging data, so you’re free to stop there if you’d like.
Or you can try to convince me in spite of the graph data by asserting that mages have more skill or that there’s a special set of circumstances that have to happen for mage to be good whereas priests are more generally good. If you make a really good argument I might buy it, but it’s gotta be pretty good. 
But all this shifts and changes anyway, and is rather hard to predict when and how it does. To be good enough where these things are a major determining factor, you need to pick one and get very good at it, and if you want to be good, you have to have fun. Otherwise you won’t stay. That’s what it all comes down to in the end.
Go to Warcraftlogs look at overall damage dealt in any dungeon from 15-20 and 70% of all top parses are shadow priests and it’s not even close. Go watch the echo mdi team stream, meeres is ahead of gingi by at least 20-30% every single dungeon. Have you played any high keys this season? SP is completely busted.
Gotta admit, no. I find this season unbearably boring for some reason - can’t tell which, however the stats seemed to show otherwise.
Good argument, I’ll take s further look.
Nevertheless, I will not change my recommendation to play whichever class speaks to you more on a personal level - especially among these three. Last season SP was ghastly. You never know.
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