shadow priest tactics

I recently dual-specced my holy priest for shadow and got a few glyphs,
revamped the action bars, practiced on some wilderness mobs, etc, but
I'm still basically a noob at priest dps. However, advertising as
healer/dps for heroics I've been pulled in as dps a surprising amount of
time despite cluelessness. :) Can any other shadow priests out there
clear up some questions for me?

My general attack progression is to just walk through everything:
Vampiric Embrace, SW:P, Devouring Plague, Vampiric Touch, Mind Blast (to
trigger VT mana regain), and then Mind Flay over and over. Mind Blast
gets thrown in when possible, and I'll refresh VT when needed. Is this
the right approach? For AoE I'll use Mind Sear instead -- maintained
4k+ dps that way in heroic Occulus yesterday with mostly blue gear. :)

I don't pay much attention to the other DoTs because there are just too
many to track, though perhaps I should watch SW:P more often since it's
a decent amount of damage and also contributes 10% more (via glyph) to
Mind Flay, but it seems a pain to keep checking which ones are up.

For shorter fights I'll stick with Mind Blast and Mind Flay, no debuffs
of DoTs. Is that unwise, and are there certain DoTs/debuffs that should
go up no matter if the mob dies in 5-10 seconds?

Also, I'm wondering about the effectiveness of Devouring Plague and
Vampiric Embrace in groups, since shadow priest healing looks miniscule
on the charts these days (seemed to be much bigger at lvl 70) and it
just slows down my attack.
.

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