The Enigma Order

Having a shadowpriest on trash is very attractive, but on bosses, the VE healing is just not strong enough. A shadowpriest in Karazhan would only work as a 4th healer, with the other 3 in healing spec. At least at our current gear/skill level.

Additionally, as a priest you simply have to heal sometimes, and even if you are shadowspec you should have the absolute best healing gear possible. Obviously with Tullys current healing gear that is no problem, but many of our dedicated shadowpriests have not good enough healing gear.
This is why I encourage all you other priests to gather the best healing gear you can, and enchant it.

Playing shadowpriest good is no easy task, as you not only have to deal damage, but you should keep an eye out for the raid HP as well. Cause no matter how much shadowdmg you do, you are still a healer.

In my opinion, when you sign up as a shadowpriest, you sign up as a damage dealer. By having a shadowpriest in the raid it assumes that we have enough healers to keep the raid alive, without the shadowpriest having to worry about the players' HP. If a shadowpriest have to start healing he first have to go out of shadowform, for then to start spamming weak and expensive healing spells. When the raid has enough HP he might go back into shadowform, and has quickly wasted 30-40% mana which could have been used to do alot of damage.

It's true what you say that a shadowpriest is, and always will be a healing class. However, when it's crucial for the raids' survival whether the shadowpriest starts healing or not, something wrong has happened. The healers/damage dealers are obviously not doing a good enough job, and it should not be the shadowpriest's job to resolve it.

The only situation in my opinion where the shadowpriest should start healing is during the last 10-5% of a bossfight when 50% of the raid is dead.

Obscure wrote:

a priest who is not looking at the raid hp is a bad priest. no matter spec.

And a shadow priest that is pvp specced when joining for a pve raid is just as bad imo, because he won't anything near as effective as a pve specced shadowpriest.