[Shodo]

Edit: After posting I realized it sounds like you're just about brand new to EQ so you might not be familiar with root jousting or some of the mechanics involved (which are useful to know for other parts of EQ as well), so i'll give a bit longer explanation. If you're already up to speed on this stuff you can just ignore it!
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Basic principle: the server only updates health and mana regeneration every 6 seconds, so do as much as you can in between that then sit back down.

How to root joust:
1) Root and/or DoT the mob in the order of your preference.
2) Sit down out of melee range and wait a few seconds.
3) When you see your mana increase, that means the server ticked, so you have about 6 seconds to do your thing until it happens again.
Unfortunately there can be multiple ticks due to desynchronization so this sometimes takes practice to find the "real" one, but i'm not sure how
to describe that better.
4) After the tick, stand up and run just barely into melee range of the mob, then turn on auto attack for a single hit, then step back out and sit
down.
5) If you were fast enough, you should be sitting again before the next server tick and get full mana regeneration. Repeat 2-4 as needed (and #1
when spells wear off).

Why would you do this?
NPC melee tends to outperform PC melee as levels increase, especially if you aren't a pure melee class. So anything you can do to give yourself an edge is great. Slow and haste one approach to leveling the scales, but they cost a lot of mana so they aren't always feasible - especially at low levels when their percentages aren't great to begin with. Root, however, is typically pretty cheap as spells go so you can use this to turn the course of combat to your advantage.

At your level, mobs are probably hitting you for the 20-24 dmg range (the equivalent of wielding a 10-12 dmg weapon), and their unhasted delay is something like 25-30 - call it 12/30 to keep things simple, a 0.4 ratio. Your weapon is a bit worse at 8/26, or about a 0.3 ratio. Add to that the fact that you're a priest class and the math turns against you pretty quickly - even with your 25% slow the mob is doing as much or more melee damage to you than you are to it.

Now, assume you swap out that 8/26 for a Runewood Great Staff at 22/40 and dirt cheap (probably ~50p in EC, around the same as your hammer). Now you're beating the mob's melee ratio by a little for now (not accounting for them possibly dual wielding etc), but not for long. However, if you root joust as described above, both parties are only attacking each other about every 7 seconds. So now the mob is effectively attacking with a 12/70 weapon while yours is 22/70 - winning by a much larger margin.

This isn't always the best strategy - if you're really just getting beaten to death it's probably better to just root, dot and wait for them to die. But at least through the 20's I found this to make things go a bit faster, and it breaks up the monotony a little. Watching for server ticks is also good practice for canni dancing, and you can make it a pretty effective strategy at 30+ with a Barbarian Spiritist's Hammer.

Tldr: In Everquest, unlike most MMOs, you will almost never be outperforming the enemy toe-to-toe unless you're heavily twinked out. So you have to root/kite, use mechanical quirks to your advantage, or group up with friends.