WoW newbie looking for advice

[Chesspiece_face]

Ok, a few things.

First, I have Spirit Tap at 5/5, I played around with Blackout in the earlier levels but specced out of it a awhile ago, having found it not that useful. I don't see how I could play this Priest without Spirit Tap, frankly.

I just found this thread so i'm not going to comment on the multitude of spell rotations etc. there are a lot of valid cast rotations depending on your needs at the time. What i will say is that Spirit Tap is probably the best T1 Talant imho. as long as you are leveling solo ALWAYS have this talant. I'll also note at this point how important it is to keep your wand up to date for a priest. While you are leveling a shadow priest your wand will be doing a lot of your work (especially if you are balancing your mana use with your use of Spirit Tap.) Best Case Scenario you should fire off your opening volley of spells while pulling a mob and then begin wanding when the mob is down to between 30-40% health. (this changes later after mobs gain more health, but not by much as long as you keep you wand up to date) By going into wanding this early you sacrifice some of your health in the fight in exchange for your mana regen knowing that Spirit Tap will kick in. It's much easier, and quicker, to heal yourself after a fight than to regen your mana. Once you get good at balancing your health and mana by wanding earlier into a fight you can keep yourself at about 70-80% health mana pretty much all the time with no downtime. All because of the beauty of Spirit Tap.

Because of the strength of Spirit Tap I also reccomend loading up on spirit equipment especially in the earlier levels. If i had the choice of deciding between spell damage/healing or even Int, I would choose spirit every time.

So I've basically decided to stack +Spell Damage and +Spirit gear from this point on.

I love my Spirit.