A defender of the light or champion of the darkness, all priests fall into essentially two categories: healers or ranged damage dealers.
Apart for some very special and bizarre circumstance, priests are not meant to be tanks, nor melee DPS.
Shadow Priests:
A priest with the majority of their talent points in their “Shadow Magic” talent tree specialize in dishing out the damage to enemies. At higher levels, shadow priests gain a bit of utility by gaining talents that will let them continue to pour on damage while regenerating their party’s health and mana. The ability to replenish group HP via Vampiric Embrace is a nice gift to your group's healers.
The one thing that perhaps sets shadow priests apart from other priests is the newly moved now 11-point talent in their shadow tree: Shadowform. This gives the priest the ability to change form into a shadowy, purple version of their previous avatar, granting an increase in damage given, reduction in physical damage taken, and giving out spell haste to your group, but rendering them unable to cast any spell in the holy school. This talent used to double the damage from your critical spell hits but that was pruned away in favor of pruning the talent tree and combining talents.
Unfortunately, many non-priest players regard priests as healers and nothing more, so should you choose a damage (shadow) talent build, you may encounter some “lol priests r 4 hael n00b” attitudes. Do not be deterred, though: it is possible for shadow priests to out-damage other damage-dealing classes when played well. Thankfully this attitude has lessened alot since the release of Lich King, you can thank all the face melting end game raiders going for the Kingslayer achievement for that.
When it come to end game raiding keep in mind that a Shadow priest does suffer from the 5% hybrid tax. Many times you won't notice it unless you are in completely optimal gear and can't understand why you just can't quite reach the optimal damage output of a mage.
Many players level as a shadow priest for the ease of doing damage to their enemies. This leads to faster experience gains, and hence, faster leveling.
Healing Priests:
One of the strongest healers in the game, priests focused in healing are able to keep party members alive with ease.
Holy priests are considered to be the hybrid of the healer classes: paladins specialize in spamming heals to keep party member(s) alive, druids specialize in using heals-over-time (HoTs) to keep party members’ health stabilized, and shamans specialize in keeping their entire party alive with area of effect (AoE) group healing. Holy priests can do all three of these things well. This gives us great flexibility in end game raiding and keeps priest healers in high demand.
Priest healers specializing in the discipline tree instead of the holy tree focus more in damage prevention than raw healing power. This unique role makes them the ideal healers for tanks, the soakers of damage. Disipline priest also can use their damage prevention spells to mitigate damage raid wide to create a lot more breathing room for the other healer's in the group. Discipline priests can also hold their own very well in PVP if you are so inclined.
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