Spell Focus: Fade
Description
Fade
330 Mana
Instant cast, 30 sec cooldown
Fade out, discouraging enemies from attacking you for 10 sec. More effective than Fade (Rank 6).
Fade is one of the most useful spells a priest will ever use. However, the wording above is not very informative and needs a bit of elaboration.
When you fade, the spell will reduce your threat with every target that has you on it’s hate list by 1500. This value is not divided, it’s applied as a static "penalty" to all mobs. You may cast Fade preemptively. While you cannot go below 0 threat, it will apply to all threat accumulated during it’s 10 second duration, too. So, you may fade and then run into a mob group (already in combat but not necessarily tagged) and shackle one of those mobs without fearing swift retribution from it’s friends.
Additionally, Fade becomes better the more mobs you are fighting. Because of it’s static application of 1500 negative hate to each mob, it will scale well with large groups of mobs.
Strengths
When something goes wrong, you can use Fade to buy yourself and your group some time. You can also cast it preemptively to avoid drawing aggro in the first place.
Weakness
Don’t forget that the reduction is only temporary. Your threat will come back to you. If you need to fade to heal an encounter properly, your tank is doing something wrong. Either you need more crowd control, your tank needs better equipment or he needs to push his gaming at generating threat.
When & how to use
Cast it right before any aggro sensitive situations. Like the start of a trash fight with many mobs, or running into a wave of trash in the Hyjal Summit to shackle one of them.
When not to use
Do not use this spell if you don’t need to. It’s no permanent aggro dump. Casting it just for kicks will do nothing good.
One awesome trick about Fade relies on understanding its mechanics a little more. The temporary threat reduction does eventually get reapplied to the priest — but only after the priests casts his first spell after the buff wears off. In other words, if the priest still needs a couple of seconds to keep from being brutalized by the enemy and can get by without healing during that time, he can just wait until the tank has a little more threat against the mob. That next spell he casts will have its normal threat and the threat that Fade removed/prevented.