Dispril

You want to have spirit tap if you want to do a lot of stuff solo while leveling, just to reduce the down time, but you you will be fine using a smite specc as well. You will however not be as strong in pvp though. Spiritual guidance and spirit tap has nice synergies for killing stuff fast.

Channeled spells and dots do not critt in vanilla. This is blizzlike.

Play what you want. In terms of fun NE priest >> dwarf priest. You have to have played as a ne priest to know how good shadowmeld is on a pvp server, and how much fun you can have with it as a priest. starshards is not too bad either, it will be used when you are farming stuff. And if used in pvp bad mages tend to counterspell it. If the tanks of today are so shit that they can't do nef without a fearward, then so be it. There will be room for you anyways in raiding guilds. And choosing to play dwarf just because of the few fights where fear ward is semi useful but easily done without (nefarian, onyxia, magmadar, bug trio and gluth) seems to be a stupid reason to play dwarf. Play dwarf if you like the look of it, but choosing to play dwarf just because of that spell for pve means you will be unhappy with your priest for the most of your time playing as it is useless in pve except for a few fights. If you want to have the "best" racial for pve, then human will be slightly better than the rest in the end.

As far as I can remember, pw:s on patchwerk fight was a really bad idea on retail vanilla. (Was perfectly ok to do it on wotlk version though).To the op: 1. Learn that everyone do not need to be at 100% health all the time. If ppl will not take future damage, they will regain health naturally 2. Learn how mana regen works, and learn to cancel spells 3. Learn to chose the appropriate rank of spell and which kind of spell to use to be most effective. 4. Learn to prioritize, it is perfectly fine to let some dps die if you are unsure if you will have enough mana to keep the tank and yourself alive. Better to rez a dps than for it to be a wipe. 5. Put good hunters on your friend list (they are rare, but very nice)

You could just start by running around in the world and pickup flight paths, you should be able to get a few levels from doing that, and then return to a low level zone. You may save time overall by doing this. It will be a lot of corpse running though.

The document is nice, but it is important to chose your class/race combination on what you actually like to play, and not what is considered the "best" as you are going to be stuck with your choice for a long time (or you will quit because you do not like the combination you have made). As for the speccs with lesser viability: Vanilla isn't tuned that hard that it doesn't allow for some of the lesser used speccs. And there are advantages to bringing utility over pure dps as well. You may not be able to join an elitist "try hard" guild, but if you are running with "sub optimal" specc those guilds aren't the ones you would like to be in. As for choosing the race when it comes to priest alliance side: If you are really into min/max human > dwarf for pve in the long run. Yes, fear ward is nice for certain fights in the early raids, but you only need 1 dwarf priest for to have the tank fear warded ( my retail vanilla alliance guild didn't get a dwarf priest until we were in aq40, and had no problems in clearing all the content prior, so either ppl wants easy mode or they are just bad players). The 5 % more spirit humans have is always good, and gets even better when you have 3 T2 items and darkmoon trinket. Choosing NE will give you an easier time when leveling, as you can generally avoid getting corpse camped. Shadowmeld and stars shards also has its uses in general pvp. So my general point is. Do not feel forced to chose dwarf (even though ppl that do not play priests say that you have to) if you do not like the race, there will be a raid spot for you in any case.