I've got 5x shadow priests at lvl 66 and have done a few BG's with them. My initial thinking was exactly the same as most here - they've got big healing power, good single target dps, 5x shield, plus 5x fear. My experience in the BG's didn't pan out as I had hoped. After running a few games, I fell victim to cleave toons and would get torn apart by melee who were alway immune to fear for some reason (fear is useless), or mages who would nova my team in place and finish me off with a blizzards ... granted, this was before 3.1 and psychic horror, but I had major problems with melee. That being said, I was a total n00b (played pvp spriest solo in vanilla wow, but that's it) and new talents could make this class better to box, but the AOE (especially melee) is a major roadblock. I still plan on taking them to 80, but may end up speccing them disc, or at least far enough down the disc tree to get Reflective Shield ... 45% dmg return x5 seems like a good counter to aoe ...at 80, my disc priest shield absorbs somewhere around 4k with only 1k spell power - so a 20,000 damage return may be effective. Glyphed holy nova would be enough to restore ~9-10k hp to your team per tick (with about 1k sp) which may be enough to heal through it. The strategy would have to be more along the lines of DOT and kite (DOTS are AMAZING!!) - you don't have time to sit there and cast.