Mind Control (MC): Use mind control to make enemies jump from high places or take a healer out of the fight while your DPS teammates make a kill. Mind control is powerful and tricky to master. 

Priest Mind Control is in the shadow tree and therefore the shadow resistance of your target has a bearing on its effectiveness. Spell penetration reduces the chance that your target will resist or break your MC. Also distance plays a big factor in MC effectiveness.  Here is a list of battleground cliffs to use for MC.

Arathi Basin: MC off Lumber Mill cliff, or off click leading to Gold Mine. Also it’s possible to MC a target into the water off at Black Smith in order to take someone out of the fight so your team has the advantage.

Alterac Valley: Mind control people off of a tower to buy you and your team more time. Or off the bridge leading to Dun Baldar

Eye of the Storm: Make them jump from east side of the flag spawn or from the other two bridges that cross over.

Warsong Gulch: To protect flag carrier MC them off second floor down below.

Fun World of Warcraft PvP Mind Control Video (This was my first video ever, I am making an improved version)

Tips / Tricks for Success in Mind Control

If you are a healer, keep in mind that mind control has to hit your target. Since holy and disc priests do not stack hit very often it means that you may need to re-gem of find a few items with +hit bonus to help you land you MC. You should have at least 4% – 6 % in hit rating in order make sure your MC lands on the target.

In addition to hitting your target, MC can be resisted if the target has shadow resistance. In order to combat this you need to have an equivalent amount of spell penetration. Spell penetration offsets resistance on a 1:1 ratio. For example: I have 50 spell penetration on my priest, if my target has 80 shadow resistance that means he still has 30 points in shadow resistance from my MC spell. This could cause the the MC to break prematurely or possibly be resisted from the start. Having more spell penetration than your target has resistance will not provide you with any additional benefit. Optimally you want to have a spell penetration equal to your target’s resistance. Generally 75 to 130.

Try to cast MC while your target is close to you. The biggest problem with MC is the short range of only 20 yards. Standing close to the ledge yourself helps as the spell will hold more effectively as you bring you target past you to jump off the cliff.

The #1 role of a priest is to either heal or dps so make sure you have the time to perform a MC before you cast it.

Due to the short range and long cast time it is critical that you have the health and the opportunity before casting MC on your target. Remember your target can be attacking you and dealing significant damage while you are casting. Put up Power Word: Shield, Renew, and Prayer of Mending to help buy you extra time. You can also chain  Psychic Scream and MC. Often the target will trinket out of your fear which means they can’t trinket from the MC. If you are Shadow Spec then cast Psychic Horror followed by MC since the horror CC will keep your target in place and from attacking you for 3 seconds which gives you just enough time to cast MC on him. Of course the best time to cast MC is while your target is fighting someone else.

DoTs still tick during mind control so it is possible to DoT up a target and them MC them so they can’t heal.

Mind Control has diminishing returns against a PvP target. The first cast has full duration of 10 seconds. The second cast reduces duration by 50% to 5 seconds and the 3rd cast reduces the duration by 75% to only 2.5 seconds. After that the target is immune from MC for the next 18 seconds of the *end* of the duration  In other words, if a target hasn’t had a MC spell active on them for more than 18 seconds, the next mind control spell will have full effect.

Mind control shares the same diminishing returns as a Death Knight’s “Death Coil” spell.

 After writing this article I found a PvE version of Mind control here at Misery’s blog.