Buwhahahahah "Not too bad" , wheew let me catch my breath.
OK so we are going to start treding on thin ice, some folks don't like where this convertaion leads, and take it the wrong way, or only see there own way of things, and precive this is a attack.
Warcraft has a saying you may have heard, it revolves arround a post on the offical forums, the term is "Melt Faces" and it was a refrence to shadow priests. The poster was agnry that a healer class did such awsum dammage, and was totaly unstopable. the point elebroated that with a simple change of gear and droping out of shadowfrom, theese same "Face Melters" could act as healers with a capacity to keep a few folks up and running no matter what.
This had a side effect that diffrent folks took diffrent ways there became a devide, those who thought a priest was a support role(theese players still used Shadowform when relevent, and it is the most effecent leveling build)and those who read the posts,saw folks complainging about priest DPS and deceided to "Join the DPS group". The latteer of theese players oped to play a shadow priest essentaly to play a diffrent mage or a weird petless lock of some sort. A shadow priest is Soooo diffrent from a non shadow priest, that the presents of them can put the world topsy tervy. By defult I and obviously lazychewie as well as Gunstar see the class Priest as a support role, there to keep a party up, to dolop out a helthy helping of team play, yet a shadow priest dosent do that(By there design). sure you get players that have a shadwo spec, and they will sheild a buddy, or even drop out of SF to heal but those are rare.
To Somebody who chose the Shadow Priest to play DPS, My words may sound sacrelous, deticating there precous Damamge dealing mana for sub task like Healing! It is best to think of SOME shadow preist as mages, or locks, for those shadow priest you cannot think of them as a healer. REMEMBERING THAT NOT ALL PRIEST WITH SHADOWFORM ARE EXCLUSIVE DPS. The irony of the whole thing is that the plaers taht started complaing about shadow preist were not complaing about the "I sheild only myself" and "Look at my DPS" type of shadow priest, but the kind with shadow form who could shed it and play a healer role when they recoginsed it was best to swich out of shadow form, and start healing.
But a preist who only wants to do damamge is just as welcome IMHO as any other player, I first came to terms with this with Druids, Post feral buff patch, to me it seemed so meny of the new driuds wanted to be rogues, they clearly stated that they "HATED" to heal and that it was boring. My first impression was that of amazment, how could they roll a healer and not like healing. It took months but finlay i decided they are entitled to there choices as they would never see the full spectrem of class utility, i fell the same of the priest who "Hates to heal", and "Will never give up shadowform no matter what my guild needs". let them play the game as they choose.
But the Biggest point i have to make is that a shadow priest is a Insaly compentent healer, and usualy are better preist, since they dont have tallents to help fix any mistakes they make.