Skills to pair with priest?

I've been playing PG for a week and was rolling unarmed/mentalism until about level 35 in each, but decided that Priest is something I want to try since I commonly play with a few friends. There doesn't seem to be much info or discussion on Priest, likely due to it being the newest combat skill. Any general tips or correcting any assumptions I have is more than welcome, since I'm very new.

I still want to at least be able to do a bit of damage when needed, so I'd rather not do things like Priest/Psychology. With that in mind...
...here's a few questions/concerns I have:

1. What skills do you think pair nicely with Priest?
2. Pig/Priest sounds enticing to me, but the whole beast thing is very intimidating to me as a new player. I've worked hard to obtain favor with a lot of NPCs, so not being able to talk to them easily anymore is disheartening. Mostly being unable to sell gear I find to Joeh. Is this as large of an inconvenience as I think, or is more forgiving down the line with what I hear about the Sun Vale?
3. Fire Magic/Priest sounds cool, but the high power consumption of fire magic turns me off. This got me thinking that maybe I'd get Ice Magic to use with Priest instead. Though from my understanding, Ice Magic and Fire Magic sound beginner unfriendly with how expensive they are to level. Would Ice Magic and Priest be viable?
4. Are there any belts around for priest that give them stats? I can't seem to find anything.
5. I don't know much about Druid other than the cool animal transformations. I considered looking it to pair with Priest, but it seems like you need a skill at level 50 first. Another thing is that Druids have those events they have to do, and Priests might have sort of similar mechanic later on. Little scared to pair 2 permanent things.
6. Do you think the upcoming Vampire skill will be useable with Priest? You'd think not, but Werewolves can be a priest.. The idea of a Priest/Vampire sounds interesting, especially if Vampire skills are going to be based off of DOTs or debuffing.

To summarise, a big part of the fun to me in MMOs comes from having a lot of utility in my playstyle, so hopefully someone has some tips and guidance for me.

You have ment at 35, if it was me I'd use that at lvl 25 to begin draging priest upto lvl 25.
This will raise ment some more and give you a good feel of the priest skillset also.
Don't forget there are ment abilities available from the shroom in mushroom cave entrance.
If you can find a way to somehow get to gaz to pick up xbow that would work well with ment/priest as neither of those use weapons and xbow is used via side bar.
After you have priest to lvl 25 you can decide if you like priest enough to continue.

1 No clue I've only raised it lvl50 or so without using it much.

2 Would not touch animals till you have good storage options ,and many of the npcs that deal with animals at good favor lvl.
Only enter an animal form if you have an easy out.You maybe able to get out of cow with your lvl 35 ment against cow boss.

3 Both would work well with priest, you need 25 lvls in fire magic I think to be able to get ice magic skill.
Both require materials to lvl the abilities at mid lvl you may struggle a little.

4 No clue, if you cant get an ability belt at least get 1 that gives extra storage slots

5 The downsides are not massive I'm a wolf/druid. Although things like druid/wolf/priest are permanent this is just a case of having the downsides etc whatever your form. you can for example be a druid/wolf that is currently in human form using sword and shield.

6 You may not be able to have both on the bars at same time, but I'd be amazed if having 1 meant your character could not have the other.
Many play because they like the 1 toon does all approach game the has.

My priest skill is still level 1 since I've been trying to make up my mind about that exact same pairing question. :) So, I'm not too useful there, but some general comments:

You can switch in and out of animal form fairly easily - you will just need to stock up on unpig potions if you are a pig. (For cows, you just need to kill a level 10ish boss to get out of cow form, so cow can be the cheapest animal form to switch around.) I'd basically say try it for a bit and see how you like it - just make sure you have that unpig potion ready if you want it. The game also has occasional weekend events that allow you to switch in and out of a certain animal form for free, so if you are willing to wait for that, that would be the cheapest way of checking out life as an animal.

Inconvenience - yes. You can't chop wood, and lots of important NPCs in Serbule won't talk to you - Joeh, Marna and Sir Coth are the vendors I desperately miss in animal farm. Yetta in Eltibule is another annoying animal hater since she's the closest vendor to the goblin dungeon.
However, you can still sell to any Serbule Hills and Rahu NPCs, and there are multiple vendors in Sun Vale that are only accessible to animals. In Serbule, Harry the Wolf is another animal-only vendor, if rather limited in what he buys.
There are quite a few Sun Vale storage NPCs that are essentially an animal-only bonus right now since you can still access Marna and Joeh's storage via the bookshelf as an animal. Animals can also get a port to Sun Vale that can be used every half hour. So ... it's not all bad, just kind of rough to deal with when you are still starting out and want Serbule to be your home base.

Power consumption for fire magic has never been a problem for me. Getting the research ingredients for fire magic and ice magic - yes, that gets expensive. Since you already have other skills at 35, you are probably fine leveling fire magic to 25-30 or so without needing to buy ingredients from other players, so that might give you an idea of whether you like the skill enough to be worth the future expense. You will need fire magic level 25 in order to learn ice magic.

Not sure about priest belts, but you can likely find a belt that just boosts your other skill. There usually seems to be some delay before belts for the newer skills get added to the game.

I don't know about vampires but since you can't use priest and necromancy at the same time, it wouldn't surprise me if you also can't use priest and vampire at the same time. I'd still think you could learn the vampire skill, just not use it at the same time as priest.

Thanks for the reply. It helped me settle into what I wanna do.
You were also right on the money. I'm now nearing level 30 for fire magic and will need to soon start farming for materials or buying off of other players. The materials needed for ice magic seem even more unfriendly to get your hands on as a newer player.

So my gameplan is this:

1. Continue leveling with fire magic/priest.
2. Hoard whatever materials ice mages need in the meantime if I want to try it eventually.
3. I'm not ready to abandon Serbule Keep as my home base, so once I explore more areas like the Sun Vale and Rahu, then I'll be trying pig.

One step at a time.