The answer
Human
| Place | Race | Scenarios won | Range | Racial worth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Human | 94% | 52–96% | +1.7% |
| #2 |  Night elf | 5% | 3–30% | +0.9% |
| #3 |  Gnome | 1% | 1–18% | +0.5% |
| #4 |  Dwarf | 0% | 0% | +0.3% |
Scenarios won: in how many of the fights each race did the most damage. Range: where that share lands if the one unconfirmed game value goes either way (the deciding question, below). Racial worth: damage gained over a priest with no racial.
Every set of shares on this page is rounded to whole percents that add up to 100.
- Why Human: Ruthless, +2% crit that is always on. It beats the Night elf's 15-second burst in any fight longer than about 1 min 30 s.
- If damage-over-time can't crit in WoW Forever, Human wins just over half: 52%, Night elf 30%, Gnome 18%. We test it on launch day.
- How much it matters: about 1.7% more damage. Pick what you love.
What a scenario is
A scenario is one raid boss fight, simulated. We built 10,000 of them, and each one draws at random:
- how long the fight lasts: 3 minutes in the middle, from 45 seconds to 10 minutes;
- the raid: 10, 20 or 40 players, and the buffs that come with it (Kings, Arcane Intellect, Mark of the Wild, Moonkin Aura, Curse of Shadow, Blessing of Wisdom, Mana Spring, Judgement of Wisdom);
- consumables;
- your gear, from fresh level 60 to raid-geared (300 to 750 spell power);
- how much of the fight you get to cast, and how much the boss resists;
- every game value nobody has confirmed yet (listed in the full method).
All four races play every scenario, with the same draws. The race that does the most damage wins it. Every hit counts at its expected value (the chance to hit times the chance to crit), so within a scenario the races differ only by their racials.
The fight: one boss, one target, level 60, talents Shadow 34 / Discipline 17. The rotation: Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, Mind Blast, Shadow Word: Death, then Starshards for night elves, and Mind Flay. Mana is counted in full, but Shadowform halves the cost of Shadow spells, so mana never decides Shadow.
Built from the game, not from guides. Spells, talents and racials are read from the game's own tables for build 1.60.1.70450, the WoW Forever beta of 16 October 2026. Random seed 20261104, so every number here can be rerun exactly. Sampling error: ±0.8 points.
Why Human wins
Each race's racials as build 1.60.1.70450 has them, and what they're worth to a Shadow Priest: the damage gained over a priest with no racial, in the middle scenario, and the spread across 8 in 10 scenarios.
| Race | Racials | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Human | Ruthless: +2% crit chance, always on, with any weapon. The Human Spirit: +5% Spirit, which matters little to Shadow. | +1.7%1.7–1.8 |
| Night elf | Elune's Light: +10% crit chance for 15 seconds, once every 3 minutes. Starshards: the night elf priest's own Arcane spell. Worth casting in 14% of the scenarios. | +0.9%0.7–1.4 |
| Gnome | Eureka!: for 8 seconds every 2 minutes, non-periodic spells cost 10% less and hit 10% harder. Expansive Mind: +5% mana. | +0.5%0.4–0.7 |
| Dwarf | Earth Fury: crits hit 2% harder. | +0.3%0.2–0.5 |
An always-on 2% beats a short burst. Elune's Light adds 10% crit, but for 15 seconds in every 3 minutes. In a short fight that window is a big share of the fight, so the Night elf wins every fight of 1 min or less. From about 1 min 30 s on, Human wins: Ruthless keeps paying while Elune's Light waits for its cooldown.
The numbers as a table
| Fight length | Human | Night elf | Gnome | Dwarf |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 s | 0% | 100% | 0% | 0% |
| 45 s | 0% | 100% | 0% | 0% |
| 1 min | 0% | 100% | 0% | 0% |
| 1 min 30 s | 95% | 5% | 0% | 0% |
| 2 min | 99% | 1% | 0% | 0% |
| 2 min 30 s | 96% | 1% | 3% | 0% |
| 3 min | 98% | 1% | 1% | 0% |
| 4 min | 98% | 1% | 1% | 0% |
| 5 min | 97% | 1% | 2% | 0% |
| 6 min | 97% | 1% | 2% | 0% |
| 8 min | 98% | 0% | 2% | 0% |
| 10 min | 98% | 0% | 2% | 0% |
| 15 min | 97% | 0% | 3% | 0% |
Gnome wins at most 3% at any length (at 2 min 30 s), and Dwarf almost never; both are in the table.
The deciding question: can damage-over-time crit?
In Classic, damage-over-time ticks couldn't crit. In WoW Forever's spell data, Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague and Mind Flay carry the flag that lets a spell's ticks crit, and Mind Blast, which hits once, doesn't. A spell without the flag (a warlock's Siphon Life) never crit in 219 logged ticks. So the answer is very likely yes, but nobody has seen a crit tick on a priest in the game yet, so the model draws it: yes in 19 scenarios of 20, no in the other.
If ticks can crit
- 96% Human
- 3% Night elf
- 1% Gnome
If they can't
- 52% Human
- 30% Night elf
- 18% Gnome
Human stays first either way. But if damage-over-time can't crit, crits matter less, Ruthless with them, and Human wins just over half.
How we test it
On launch day, 4 November: cast Shadow Word: Pain on a target dummy and watch the ticks. One crit tick settles it, at any level. This page gets the answer, dated, in its changes.
Also open: does Eureka! boost Mind Flay?
Eureka!'s tooltip says non-periodic spells only, but its spell data lists exactly the channelled spells, Mind Flay among them, and none of the damage over time. So the model says yes in 85% of the scenarios. If it does, the Gnome's share rises from 0.7% to 1.6% (from 6.6% to 20.1% if ticks can't crit). It changes nothing at the top.
How much it matters
Human's racials are worth about 1.7% more damage than none. The others' are worth 0.3–0.9%.
In a single pull, it's close. With the same raid and the same gear, a Human out-damages a Night elf in 55% of pulls (51–60% across the scenarios). We count the luck of hits, crits and partial resists; real pulls have more, so the real number is even closer to 50.
Pick what you love. The gap is real, but small.
The human factor
Simulators press every button the moment it's ready. People don't. Ruthless is always on; the Night elf has to press Elune's Light and Starshards. With perfect use the Night elf wins 5% of the scenarios. With less, fewer:
| How often the button racials get pressed | Human | Night elf | Gnome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every time | 93.8% | 4.8% | 1.4% |
| 3 times in 4 | 97.6% | 1.8% | 0.5% |
| Half the time | 99.2% | 0.5% | 0.3% |
| 1 time in 4 | 99.8% | 0.0% | 0.2% |
| Never | 99.9% | 0.0% | 0.1% |
In the middle scenario, a Night elf has to press them 82% of the time just to draw level with a Human. After launch we count how often our own raiders press theirs.
Why other guides disagree
The newest Shadow table from the open simulator, gunba/wow-forever-sim (a fork of wowsims/classic), ranks Dwarf, Night elf, Gnome, Human: our order upside down. So we gave our engine the simulator's own character sheets and its fight (5 minutes, no movement) and ran it two ways.
| Against Human | Simulator | Ours, with its racials | Ours, with the game's |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human | 825.2 DPS | base | base |
| Dwarf | +0.77% | +0.76% | −0.88% |
| Night elf | +0.76% | +0.65% | −0.89% |
| Gnome | +0.20% | +0.44% | −1.10% |
| Order | Dwarf, Night elf, Gnome, Human | Dwarf, Night elf, Gnome, Human | Human, Dwarf, Night elf, Gnome |
Same order, once we copy two of its inputs: Human without Ruthless, and Dwarf with an extra 1% crit. Both are the racials from before build 70425 (Sword and Mace Specialization). The simulator's code has the new racials, so its published table looks older than its code. With the game's current racials, Human goes first.
The game changed under us
Up to build 70374, Human had Sword Specialization (+2% crit, but only with a sword), Dwarf had Mace Specialization, and Eureka! boosted your next 3 abilities within 15 seconds. Build 70425 brought Ruthless (+2% crit, any weapon), Earth Fury and the 8-second Eureka!. With the stress-test client's racials (1.60.1.70245), our model says Night elf 72%, Gnome 28%, Human 0.1% (2,000 scenarios). A guide written for that build was right, for that build. That's why every number here names its build.
Smaller differences
- Devouring Plague costs nothing in the simulator (it stacks two 50% cuts). We charge about 200 mana a cast, as the open-source server cores do. A look at the mana bar settles it; it changes no ranking.
- Eureka! is worth 0.44% to a Gnome in ours and 0.20% in theirs: we line it up with Mind Blast, the simulator fires it whenever it's ready.
- Our damage is 12% below the simulator's at its own character sheet. It wears a Tier 1 set and on-use trinkets, which we leave out because they help every race alike, and it uses Shadow Word: Death's old 15-second cooldown.
We read the simulator's published table (commit 03a5b49, 17 October 2026) and didn't run it. It's open source under the MIT license.
The full method
Every unconfirmed game value, and the odds we gave it
Each scenario draws every one of these. The ranges on this page are how far a share moves when one of them goes one way or the other; the deciding question is the one that moves it most.
| Value | In the scenarios | Why it's unknown |
|---|---|---|
| Damage over time can crit | yes in 95%, no in 5% | the game's spell data flags these spells' ticks as able to crit (a spell without the flag never crit in 219 logged ticks); in Classic they couldn't; not yet seen in WoW Forever |
| Eureka! boosts Mind Flay | yes in 85%, no in 15% | the tooltip says non-periodic spells only, but the spell data lists exactly the channelled spells (Mind Flay, Starshards, Penance) and none of the damage or healing over time |
| Renew ticks can crit | yes in 95%, no in 5% | Renew carries the same flag |
| MP5 on gear pays every second | yes in 15%, no in 85% | the open simulator's unconfirmed option |
| Earth Fury's +2% | 2% of the crit bonus, up to 2% of the whole crit | the tooltip allows both |
| Improved Mind Flay's ramp | each tick ×1.2 the last (1, 1.2, 1.44), or +20% each (1, 1.2, 1.4) | the tooltip allows both |
| What Divine Aegis shields | the whole crit, down to only the part that landed | its tooltip says "the amount healed" |
How the model reads the game
The model reads the game's own tables (DB2) for build 1.60.1.70450, exported from wago.tools: every level-60 priest spell at its highest rank, WoW Forever's talent tree (a tree with one column per spec, each talent's value from its own curve), and the racials. The spells' data decides what modifies what: whether Shadowform, Twin Disciplines or Eureka! touches a spell comes from the spell's own flags, not from its tooltip. Nothing is a number copied from a guide.
10,000 scenarios with the random seed 20261104, so every number here can be rerun exactly. The fight-length chart reruns 2,000 scenarios at each of 13 fixed lengths.
What we typed in by hand
- The talent builds (51 points): Shadow 34 / Discipline 17.
- The races' stats against the priest baseline (Gnome +3 Intellect, Dwarf −1 Intellect and −1 Spirit): the game keeps them in tables wago.tools doesn't export, so the values are wowsims'.
- The priest's Spirit regen outside the five-second rule (6.25 + Spirit ÷ 8 mana per second), as the open simulator measured it in the beta.
- Spell hit against a raid boss (83% base, 99% at most) and crit from Intellect (59.5 per 1%): Classic's rules.
What isn't in the model
- Set bonuses, trinkets and procs: they help every race alike.
- Fights with more than one target, and movement beyond how much of the fight you get to cast.
- Power Infusion from another priest.
- PvP. The PvP racials (Will to Survive, Stoneform, Escape Artist and the rest) don't count here.
The data. The rankings, ranges, racials' worth and the fight-length sweep on this page as files, free to reuse with credit (CC BY 4.0): CSV and JSON.
Our prediction, before launch
Simulated on 19 October 2026, on build 1.60.1.70450, before WoW Forever launches on 4 November. After 9 December we grade it against our own raid logs, here on this page.
Changes
- Stress-tested and corrected. Two fixes in the damage engine (the Night elf's Starshards was hardly ever cast, and it got a hit bonus it shouldn't), smaller fixes in the healing model, and the odds of two open questions raised from the game's own spell data: damage over time can crit, 75% to 95%; Eureka! boosts Mind Flay, 50% to 85%. Shadow: Human 80% to 94%. Healing: Gnome 82% to 79%. Same build, same seed.
- Simulated and written, on build 1.60.1.70450.