A priest with problems pre-teen.

[Treesh]

Even when I played pure holy/disc, I never used Holy Smite.  The cast time was way too long and the small dps boost above just whacking things with my staff wasn't worth the mana that the spell costs, especially when the Smite gets stuttered and takes even longer to cast. 
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Aleri still uses holy fire and smite very frequently when soloing. Open with holy fire, cast smite while the critter approaches (and I rarely get hit more than once while casting smite so it really doesn't get stuttered much for me), then mind blast when it's directly on me. Depending on what kind of critter it is and how fast it's approaching Pain gets thrown in before or after the blast. Since I have Holy Specialization maxed, holy fire and smite crit much more frequently than mind blast does so it's actually more mana efficient for me to use those. No, they don't crit all the time, but they really do crit very frequently. Holy fire damage also gets boosted by Curse of the Elements so if you've got a warlock who's using that because you have mages around too, it's quite nice. Unfortunately, it also doesn't work on the fire immune critters, but that's fine. You can't have it both ways. ;)

Aleri does not have Improved Smite nor does she have Divine Fury so she's using the vanilla versions of those spells except for the crit chances. Are they as good as the shadow crap? No, but you can still dish out some DPS when you want to with those. Do I recommend Aleri's build to others? Hell no! But smite, holy fire, and holy nova aren't as worthless as all those level 60 priests would have you believe. Aleri is also on a PvE server which makes a difference too.

And yes I realize that I said I wasn't going to talk about how Aleri plays anymore on the boards. :P