This is correct and intended, all of the spells are meant to only be triggered in combat to prevent pulling non-needed packs in M+, holding shift will send a shadow crash as your opener to initiate combat, or usually what I will do is Vampiric touch manually while the tank is grouping mobs or simply bubble the tank to start combat and go from there.
As for the talents I apologize, I use the current Meta talents on IV/Wowhead with a small change as I use Void Touched instead of Ancient Madness for a little more single target DPS. The talent string is listed below.
Talents:
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As for your “starter spell” difficulties, simply remove the “,combat” from the macro strings and they will fire automatically. Or just from whatever spell you would like to pull with and it will start on its own.