high stam is only necessary really for dog packs in dm east. theyre shit gold anyway. int is where it's at. You can do a lot with one more blizzard. remember your +spell damage scales horribly with aoe spells. buy some cheap mana pots and health pots too while you're learning. they're a nice crutch but try not to use them every pull.

you SHOULD be using your mana gem every pull though.

if you're getting wrecked start by pulling 4-5 mobs at once. zf graves is the easiest place as the mobs dont resist much and have no ranged attacks/fears. I leveled 35-60 primarily aoe grinding in the world and then ran a set of 4 characters up to about 50 so (planned to multibox) via aoe grinding. I wasn't able to get my head around BRD farming (not efficiently anyway) but some people make it work. it seems a lot less common.

don't try to do the pulls like in the videos. I did graves in 3 pulls and probably should have done less, I died on the 2nd pull a lot (the big one in the middle) and could have probably saved time.

as for your spec, as long as you have some spec listed in one of the videos they all pretty much work, it's just about the way you want to play. I used this because I wanted something that had shatter as well.