153: Almost "Done"

Well, I've now killed ~150 heroic bosses.  I have the i245 headpiece, tanking ring, dps ring, shoulders, and the i232 T10 feral chest piece.  I have some bracers from 25man Flame Levi and a staff from 25man XT.  I still have a couple blues and a couple i200 pieces, but it's safe to say I overgear all the non-ICC heroics.  It was extremely fast and super easy to get to this point but now I'm at the point where I'm looking toward raids - I'll probably be kitty DPS for those.


My DPS is pugs is picking up.  Pushing ~2.8k now and hopefully I'll be breaking 3k before long.  One thing I was worried about when switching from my paladin was that I wouldn't be able to stroke my epeen as much on the damage meter in heroics, but it's looking like I had nothing to worry about.  Ferals do solid damage and when I'm no longer in blues I'm sure I'll be able to give my paladin a run for her money.

Now, there are a few heroics I want to talk about:

Forge of Souls
I've gotten thrown into the first two of the new ICC heroics for the first time this weekend.  They were actually a lot of fun and definitely more challenging that anything blizzard has given us so far from a 5man perspective.  Forge of Souls was easy from a tanking perspective but there was significantly more damage flying around than in other heroics so I was glad to have a solid healer.  The packs with a couple casters are fun because I group up on one caster, throw a few swipes/mauls and then charge/interrupt the other to keep aggro and keep damage intake down a bit.  It's not a huge deal, but it's always fun to throw in a few little tricks to make runs even smoother.

Pit of Saron
I hadn't read up on these new heroics before getting into them as I was expecting to need a little more gear before I'd get assigned them.  So I always had to ask the party to let me know anything important.  Pit of Saron was  a lot less intuitive to me than Forge of Souls.  The huge open landscape had me wondering where I was supposed to go, but luckily the group pointed me in the right direction.  The trash and first two bosses are super easy though even though I was intimidated by the bigness of it at first.  They really don't need any explanation besides "hide behind a rock when he runs away" and "stay out of bad shit and run if he chases you".  They were both easy one shots.  The trash leading to the last boss was a bit harder for my first time there.  I didn't get a good explanation of the collapsing tunnel and wiped once because everyone sprinted ahead of me who didn't know it was a gauntlet type thing.  I'm fine taking the blame though.  After one run through that stuff I'm sure it'll be easy the next time now that I know what the expect.  The final boss wasn't bad, the only explanation I got was "he does evil stuff" so I just stood still and tanked him and he died.  Later I heard that I was supposed to kite him as some point but that didn't seem to be an issue at all.

Halls of Reflection is the last instance to check off the list, but I still need better gear before it'll unlock for me so that'll be for another time.

Occulus
Finally, I want to mention Occulus.  This is now the easiest and one of the fastest instances in WotLK.  Anyone who says otherwise has not run it recently.  If people know how to avoid the trash dragons, you only have to kill 1-2 the entire run and even if people are idiots, you should only have to kill 5-6.  Every boss leading up to the last one takes less than a minute to kill and the trash can be done without a healer.  Yesterday I had a group in which the healer left after the first boss and we proceeded to 4man the rest of the instance without him.  I hotted myself up before each pull but probably didn't even need to.  Everything dies ridiculously fast and you even get 2 bonus badges at the end along with some gems.  I still haven't seen the blue drake, but I'm sure it'll show up eventually.  But the point is, people should not be afraid of this instance, it's one of my favorite to get because of how fast it is and how many badges you get.

59: I killed XT and all I got with this lousy staff

I joined a guild with a lot of people I used to play with during Burning Crusade.  Their raiding schedule isn't great for me, but I told them I'd fill in when I could.  Well turns out I was able to fill in last night.

I was jsut about to go to bed when I got asked if I'd come in and kill Flame Levi/XT real quick for the weekly raid quest.  Keep in mind, I'm still mostly in unenchanted blues at this point.  Furtunatly the rest of the guild outgears the content so it was all a faceroll and since I was the only person that needed any gear from there, I was able to snag a pair of bracers from Flame Levi and got Twisted Visage from XT.  Needless to say it was a massive upgrade over my Witch Doctor's Wildstaff that I had been using.

I've continued to level enchanting at a decent pace, I'm up to 225 skill level now and going strong.  And am plugging away at heroics.

0-24: "Please put your tanking gear on"

I wish I had the screen shot of it, but in my first heroic as a tank the healer told me, "please put your tanking gear on".  I didn't notice it until I was watching the video again.  The quality is bad on the youtube version so you can't really see, but it's right after I start pulling.  Obviously the run ended up going fine and since I proved I wasn't an idiot and he was able to keep me alive it didn't end up being a big deal.

The numbers the prefix my blog now stand for how many badges I've acquired.  I was going to use my gear score, but it wasn't intuitive enough.  Keep in mind, these are badges awarded from kills and does not include the bonuses from using the random dungeon tool.  So in reality I've snagged a lot more than that, somewhere around 50ish.

The gearing up process has been really fast.  Yesterday I ran a quick random heroic to get the daily out of the way and then I started farming regular ToC for The Black Heart.  It took seven kills in total for it to drop which was longer than I was hoping, but I was able to grab a few other upgrades from there in the process so it wasn't a complete waste.  My gear has gotten to the point where it's no longer that tough to keep me alive but my threat is shaky at times.  I'm generally able to hold on to everything but it requires that I actually pay attention.  Hopefully a weapon upgrade is in my near future.  VH and ToC (heroic obviously) both have solid upgrades, as does regular Forge of Souls I just don't want to farm another regular instance and waste time that could be spent getting badges.  Heroic Halls of Reflection has a great one that I'll be able to get eventually but I think my gear level still locks me out of there.  Also Onyxis drops some nice polearms.  So I guess we'll see what happens, my weapon is definitely the slot that could use some love the most.

As far as professions go, I've started leveling up enchanting.  I got to 125 last night.  Judging from prices on the AH I'll probably have to head to Outland to do some farming at some point since Arcane Dust are going for 10g each.

And finally I thought I'd end with a screen shot from an H UK run I did last night.  This was after I'd had to chance to get some more gear so I wasn't super squishy anymore.  The healer was a holy priest who healed almost exclusively with Holy Nova spam and was able to put out almost 1900 DPS.  And yes, sadly that was more DPS than I did, everyone point and laugh.

Video: Heroic Old Kingdom

79-80: Ding!

Well I finally hit 80.

The journey really wasn't too bad.  Between the LFG tool, swift flight form/cold weather flying at 71, +10% XP heirloom bonus, and Blizzard's built in quest helper, it went by faster than ever.

The first thing I did after dinging was to start setting up my UI.  I'll have a detailed post about that later, but basically I started moving things around and positioning them in such a way where I wouldn't have to manually change anything when I switched between my tank and DPS spec.  One of the things I hated about my Paladin was needing to turn on different addons depending on if I was tanking or healing.  So I wanted a UI that would dynamically change based on my spec - more on that later too!

So while I was setting up my UI I decided to queue for a random heroic as a DPS.  I knew if I queued as a tank I'd get a group instantly and wanted to have to time to set things up.  Plus I figured it couldn't hurt to try to snag a drop or two being carried as DPS rather than fighting my way through as an undergeared tank.  The queue popped after only 5ish minutes so I didn't even completely finish my UI.  But I jumped in as a kitty and actually wasn't too bad.  Keeping Savage Roar up and swipe spamming was sufficient to put me just below the tank and above a warlock in the group at about 1900ish DPS.  Yes, in reality it's pathetically low, but I'm in unechanted i180 blues and only half a UI.  I did end up getting some i200 blue bracers from the run which was decent.

Thus far, I've titled my blog posts as "LEVEL": "TITLE" unless it was a video or opinion piece. To track my progress now, I'm going to start using my gear score (from wow-heroes).

75-79: Are we there yet?

As I've approached level 80 everything has started to feel more and more "grindy".  The LFG tool is still fantastic and breaking up the monotony of questing but due to the range in group skills they can sometimes be painfully slow.  I'm definitely getting that anxious feeling of wanting to just be at the level cap so I can focus on gearing up and maxing out my professions.  At the time of writing this, I'm about 85% through level 79 but stopped playing to watch the NFL playoffs.

When I finally ding 80, I've come up with a basic gameplan.  First, I'll enchant some of the crappy blues I have so that I'm at least geared enough to tank heroics without people leaving as soon as they see my HP.  It's looking like I'll be somewhere between 22k and 23k HP unbuffed, which is about where I was on my pally when I first hit 80.  I'll try to snag the tanking trinket from reg ToC first since it should be pretty easy and I might snag another drop or two while I'm there - I haven't actually looked at the loot lists but I'm sure there's at least an upgrade or two.  From there it'll be pretty much constant random groups.  There are upgrades everywhere so I figure I'll just farm badges for my good gear and pick up whatever i200 stuff to fill in gaps on the way.

As far as professions, I think I'm going to go with enchanting and either leatherworking or alchemy (I already have JC on my paladin).  I'll pretty much buy all the mats for enchanting unless something looks way to expensive.  I imagine it might be worthwhile to solo farm ramps or something.  I'm leanding toward alchemy for my second prof but we'll see how I feel when the time comes.

Professions will be secondary to heroic farming though.  I expect to make decent money just from farming heroics and it'll be nice to use that to powerlevel professions when I need a break.

74: Black Circles are Universally Bad

The above dialog is from a DTK run I had last night.  If you don't remember, the first few pulls in DTK will put big black "void zones" on the ground that deal a decent amount of damage while you're in them, even on normal difficulty.  There was a priest in my group who was standing in one of them spamming heals on himself while also trying to keep me alive.  You'd think the fact that his health was plummeting would have been an indicator to him that something was wrong.  Or the fact that there was a giant black circle under his feet.  But no, he just stood there and died, excusing his performance with a casual "it's been a while since I've been here".

Now, this is one of the more obvious times where a player completely lacks situational awareness and needs to be told that black circles are bad.  Even though for most of us, if you're standing in something that looks bad and you're taking damage, chances are you should move.  But in my adventures through pug world, I've encountered a lot of people who need to be explicitly told to do something that seems painfully obvious to most people.

Silencing casters.
This is painfully obvious in Old Kingdom with the spell flingers who have a ridiculously long cast but deal a lot of damage.  My only interrupt as a bear is on a one minute cool down so I can only interrupt one of these casts ever couple pulls.  In one run, I marked the spell flinger with a skull to make it really apparent that it was a threat and should die first.  I then faerie fire to pull, but can't charge in because I don't want to aggro a second pack.  I could have run way back and LOS'd them but since we had a mage in the group I figured he'd do the intelligent thing and CS it.  Well he didn't.  Instead he stood there blasting away at it while it charged up its spell basically shouting "please interrupt me, I'm slowly but surely casting a spell over here".  Finally I yelled "WTB counterspell".  But by the time the mage realized what I was wanting, I had already decided to screw it, charge in and bash.  It was about that time that I saw the counterspell animation go off on the spell flinger - while the mob sat there still stunned from my bash.

Killing rifts.
The "rift boss" in Nexus... I'm too lazy to look up his actual name.  He occasionally goes immune and summons some rifts.  If you've already discussed that you're going for the heroic achievement then I can understand if you don't want to kill them.  But I can't even count the number of times I've seen somone continue to attack the boss long after he's gone immune and the rest of the party is off killing rifts.  Even if it's your first time ever doing the instance, wouldn't you take a hint when you see "immune, immune, immune" over and over while the rest of the party has moved on to killing something that isn't immune?

Tremor Totem.
In a pug I don't think I've ever seen a shaman use this on his own initiative.  It usually takes several pleas in party chat and some yelling (which reminds me how frequently I get annoyed that I can't do raid warnings in 5 mans anymore) before they take the hint.  And usually by that point the mob(s) that fear(s) are(is) dead.  Specially, see the T-Rex and the last few pulls in DTK.

Buffs, especially those of paladin origin.
When did we start needing to request buffs?  Before 3.3 I remember people buffing as standard procedure in 5 mans.  Sometimes you wouldn't get the Paladin buff you wanted, but you'd at least get something.  I see priests do this sometimes, but mainly it's paladins.  Probably 50% of all the paladins I run into won't buff anyone unless they're ask to, and then they'll just give a 10 minute ghetto buff.  When the shitty buff runs out you'll need to request a refresh which will usually take 2-3 pulls to get, while the paladin presumably rumages through his spell book to find it.  When I'm in a group with a paladin and see a 30 minute kings over my head it feels like a luxury.

73-74: Some numbers

I didn't get to play much last night as I had some other stuff going on.  But I was able to ding 74.  I thought it'd be interesting to look at exactly how much instancing I've done in Northrend so far.

Number of times I've finished each of the WotLK instances so far:
UK: 13
Nexus: 7
AN: 5
OK: 3
DTK: 3

Those numbers sound about right, but I'm almost certain I've only run DTK once. I don't think it was available until level 74, and from what I remember I only did one run last night since dinging.

Regardless, it's a fair amount of instancing, far more than I'd ever done while leveling any of my other characters. Since I imagine Blizzard spends a fair amount of time developing these leveling instances, they're probably happy that people are finally experiencing them instead of just rushing to 80.

Opinion: Druid vs Paladin ... so far

Now that I've gotten to tank some Northrend dungeons on my druid, I thought it'd be a good time to do a quick Druid vs Palain comparison of my experiences so far.

Clearly both classes are fully capable of tanking any content in the game.  They each have their strength and weaknesses, but Blizzard has done a good job of balancing the various tanking classes.  One could argue about slight imbalances here or there, or how a certain class is better for hardmodes than another class.  But for 99% or raiders out there, any class can tank any encounter.

That said there's no doubt that there are differences between the tanking classes.  People can talk all they want about how homogonized the game is and how the tanks are soon going to be the exactly the same with different attack animations, but the truth is that they all feel quite different when you're playing them, at least that's my experience so far playing a druid vs a paladin.

So here's my comparison, keeping in mind this is only in reference to 5 mans.  I'll do a raiding comparison after I hit 80.

AOE THREAT
A paladin's staple AOE move is consecration.  It has an eight second duration and an eight second cooldown.  It's fantastic to standing still and burning things down.  But it gives the paladin terrible mobility.  Druids on the other hand have swipe, which has no cooldown and since 3.2? has the same range as concecrate.  In order to keep threat, druids have to spam it, but they're able to move around while doing so.  In 5 mans, it's nice to be able to move from pack to pack without keeping on eye on your consecration cooldown.  Obviously, paladins will have Hammer of the Righteous, which is great for tagging three mobs, and the new Seal of Command which cleaves mobs left and right.  But they require more targetting and precision than swipe.  On my druid I can just run in circles spamming swipe without targetting anything and no that I'm going to have aggro on everything.  Both classes have great AOE threat, the main difference is that as a paladin you have to think a couple seconds ahead and plan accordingly.  On a druid some foresight helps, but if things start going to hell you can just run around swiping everything and you'll be ok.

SINGLE TARGET THREAT
This is more of a factor for raids and since I'm still only level 73 on my druid I can't talk to that point.  I've been able to keep single target threat without a problem so far :)

MOBILITY
Paladins don't have very good mobility but they make up for it by having two ranged taunts, Avenger's Shield, and to a lesser extent Exorcism.  Druid have decent mobility with charge, but only one ranged taunt and Faerie Fire in their toolbox.  This makes the two classes have very different playstyles.  When I'm tanking stuff on my paladin, I usually make the mobs come to me.  On my druid I'm fine with a caster hanging out 15 yards away for a little while while I'm tanking another pack because I know I can charge in to interrupt his cast anytime I want.

UTILITY
Each class has good group buffs.  Paladin blessings/auras can't really be topped by anything, but Mark of the Wild is a solid all around buff.  Paladins shine in their ability to cleanse while tanking.  It really comes in handy in five mans when you can rarely depend on pugs to get rid of debuffs on people.  Druids can't dispel anything without shifting out of bear form, which makes it tough to do while in combat.  But between pulls or during phase changes on boss fights, they're able to really shine.  On the last boss in UK for example, I've been able to battle rez people, innervate the healer, and tranquility to top off the entire group.

RESOURCE
Mana vs Rage.  Before WotLK introduced mana regen from BoSanc and Divine Plea, mana sucked for prot paladins.  But now I'm farily certain I prefer mana over rage.  It's nice to start off fights with a full resource bar and you shouldn't ever go oom except if you completely outgear content and are only pulling one pack at a time.  Rage is nice because if you're constantly pulling you shouldn't ever need to take a break but on boss fights it can often be a limiting factor for your threat during the first few seconds. As I'm getting more used to using rage it's definitely growing on me but it can be frustrating how fast you can go from 100 to 0.  At the end of the day, they both serve their purpose.  Warriors probably have more to complain about but that's not within the scope this blog.

CONCLUSION
From a 5 man perspective both classes make fantastic tanks.  I'm loving my druid right now and prefer him to my paladin, but a lot of that is because he's new and because Blizzard has won be over with the new LFG tool.  I will say that I can't wait to be able to race change to a troll though!

69-73: Leveling is actually fun

For the first time since I leveled my very first character, I'm really enjoying the experience of leveling.  Usually it's just a necessary annoyance in order to get to max level and start raiding and running heroics.

The thing is, questing is generally still better XP/hour.  If you have a fantastic instance group who's able to chain pull with no mana breaks or random AFKs, I think instancing is competitive but it's rare to have a group that doesn't have at least 1-2 players who are either only doing 400dps or are a healer who somehow manages to go oom every pull even though no one is taking much damage.

I've started getting into a good routine of finishing a group of quests, usually 5-6 that all take place in the same area.  Then I go turn those in and queue for a dungeon.  The tank queue has been just a couple minutes so usually by the time I grab all the new quests and start heading out in their direction I get teleported to the instance.  It's made leveling very fun and hasn't felt like a grind yet.

Here's what I've been getting:

69/70: UK
71: Nexus and all of the above
72: AN and all of the above
73: Old Kingdom and all of the above

It's really great because the one thing that does get old is if you have to run the exact same instance over and over.  They're all fun, but not when you run them 4 times in a row.  So now at level 73, I queue up and really do get a good mix of stuff to run.

The other thing that I've been getting a wide variety of is the quality of pugs.  I was in a Nexus run over the weeked where the healer just kept saying "pull more, pull more" and wasn't having any mana problems so I was pulling entire halls at the time - in the snowing hall leading up to Ormorok I didn't even stop moving, I just kept running from pull to pull, spamming a couple swipes and charging into the next pack while AOE finished off the previous one.  It made me realize one of the awesome things about druids is their Infected Wounds talent.  I got it for the attack speed reduction, but the movement speed reduction is awesome because mobs can't keep up when you're charging off to the next pull and they're foced to slowly waddle through a mage's blizzard, a few seeds of corruption and a divine storming ret pally. 

But I haven't only gotten good groups.  I was in a UK run with a Shaman  who spammed the damage meter after the first couple pulls.  Usually I don't mind this too much because at least if someone cares about 5man meters, they're doing good DPS and making the run fast.  But then we get to the first boss and I get frost trapped right as the skeleton adds spawn.  So I'm sitting there, yelling for someone to break me free so that I can pick up the skeletons and stop them from destroying the healer, but the shaman just keeps on tunnel visioning the boss and the healer dies while I'm still waiting out the ~20 second or so ice trap.  We ended up wiping so I made fun of the shaman for ignoring me and therefore letting the healer die and he goes "you're the tank, it's your job to pick up the adds".  At that point I knew he was just clueless.  Granted, I probably wasn't overly polite when I told him off, but based on his response he couldn't even comprehend what had happened.  He obviously wasn't looking at anything that was going on besides alternating between his action bar and the damage meter.  He probably had no idea that the boss even put people in ice traps. 

And I think that's the defining difference between "good" players and "bad" players.  Anyone can put out good DPS.  But good players have situational awareness while simultatenously doing good DPS.  In so many of my runs, I'm the only one breaking people out of ice traps or web wraps, or moving out of poison clouds, fire, or void zones.  The problem is that normal 5mans are so fogriving that a half decent healer can keep an entire party alive even if they're all standing in a firey poisonous void zone while the tank is web wrapped.  What I'd like to see in 5mans, or even raids, is more accountability for DPSers and more tests of situational awareness in general.  But now I'm starting to get off on a tangent that is probably best used for another blog entry in the future.

Suffice to say that 69-73 has been enjoyable and the pugs are getting much more interesting.

66-69: "This is way easier than I remember"

At 67 Sethekk Halls finally got into my random dungeon rotation.  It's an interesting instance because the first half of it is ridiculously easy, a whole bunch of 2-3 pulls.  But then in the final two rooms before the boss you're faced with a series of ~5 pulls that contain some nasty mobs.  There are Sethekk Prophets who will chain fear the entire party if you're not careful, Time-Lost Shadowmage who will target a random player and pelt them with a handful of shadow bolts, Avian Warhawk who charges random party members and knocks them down, and a handful of other bird/human hybrids who want to kill you.

Having a shaman in the group makes everything a lot easier since a Tremor Totem trivializes the fear.  But if you don't have a shaman, you're going to have to rely on good dps to burn down everything quickly (or CC, but who uses that these days?).  My typical kill order is Prophet -> Shadowmage -> Bird.  The Prophet dominates you the most because when the entire party is feared no one can do anything.  The Shadowmage presents the biggest threat to randomly gibbing your healer so he's next.  The Bird is really only a threat because he will knock down your healer for a couple seconds, but if the prophet and shadowmage are dead, this isn't a big deal.

I enjoyed Sethekk halls more than Crypts or Tombs because it was faster and better XP/hour.  The big groups went down pretty fast, partially because I was fortunate enough to get grouped with good DPS, and I actually had a shaman in most of my runs.

Dinging 69 meant I was finally able to queue for "Random WoTLK" dungeons.  I consider this step the "beginning of the beginning".  I can finally start getting some badges, two per day for running a random WotLK dungeon, which means I'm starting the gearing up process.  Leveling with pugs hasn't been as bad as I expected, there were a few rotten eggs here and there.  But I think pugging heroics will be the most interesting part of my journey.

Leaving Outlad without getting to run any of the Tempest Keep instances, or Shattered Halls is a little disappointing.  Those were all really fun heroics at level 70.  Just like how the pre BC level 59-60 instances are being forgotten, I think the level 69-70 BC instances will have the same fate.

64-66: Mobs that do stuff

In the mid 60s I've still been getting assigned the occasional SP or UB, but the majority of my instance runs have been either Mana Tombs or Crypts.  These two instances are some of my most hated in BC.  They're just annoying.  I hate all the mana burns and  I hate possessors, although the later are a non-issue on normal mode.  I remember needing to explicitly yell at pug DPS to switch to the possessors sooner on heroic difficulty but I've found that I'm able to easily kill them on my own now - they only have 1300ish hp.

In other news, I've now switched to leveling almost exclusively through instances.  I didn't even spent my last two talent points for my DPS spec for a long time.  As an aside, for anyone who looks me up on armory and wants to make fun of my gem choices - I basically just buy whatever's cheap and I see first when I'm scrolling through the AH.  I know my crit/stam gem is retarded but it was like 2g I rather than continue scrolling through for something else I just bought it and jumped back into an instance.  Min/maxing is for when you're at the level cap, not for gems in gear you're gonna replace in another couple hours of play time.

The one time I did head back to bang out a couple quests, I noticed that it's actually a lot faster for leveling than running Tombs/Crypts.  I think questing will always come out a little ahead because the reward XP is ridiculous and with flying mounts be available at level 60 now, quests take no time at all.  But when the ranom instances are Tombs/Crypts I'm not able to bullrush through the way I can in something like SP.  As you can see from the video in the post below. SP is an isntance where you don't really have to care if the group gets feared into the next pull.  All the mobs are nonthreatening and you can AOE several pulls at once.  In Mana Tombs you can't do this because of the mana burns, the healer will run OOM before you're able to kill everything if you pull too much.  And in Crypts you can't just round everything up because a possessor might be able to snag someone, and there are so many casters that the mobs won't neatly gather in a pile for you to AOE.

All in all, I'd say this is one of the least fun stretches in a while.  I'm just not a big fan of the instances I'm getting assigned.  Unfortunatly, I don't think I'll ever get to run Shattered Halls, Mechinar, Botanica, or Arcatraz, which are some of my favorite BC instances.  I assume random Northrend dungeons will be available at 68 or 69 and I'll be running those instead.

Video: Slave Pens

59-64: Home Sweet Home

In BC, I tanked a lot of heroics on my Paladin.  A whole lot.  I didn't start playing her until after 2.4 had introduced nearly BiS badge gear so by the time I hit 70, heroics were basically the best use of my time.  Additionally, I had a good friend who played a holy priest and the two of us could chain run heroics for hours.  Suffice to say, I can run BC instances with my eyes closed.

So when I finally hit Outland on my Druid, instances became a breeze (not that they were difficult before).  I knew every pull, I knew which mobs feared, which stunned, who hit hard, yadda yadda yadda.  This made runs go really fast and provoked countless "awesome tanking" comments from the group.  And it was all a ton of fun.  By the low 60s, Druids have acquired almost all of their tanking tools (with the exception of Lacerate) and have enough talent points to pick up virtually all the important survivability and threat talents.

Ironically, having all these talents and abilities means I'm able to spam one button almost the entire run... Shift+R which I have bound to the following macro:
/cast Swipe (Bear)
/cast Maul

The rest of my party can just AOE everything down and unless I'm chain stunned or something, threat has never been a problem.  If rage becomes an issue then I just hit "R" which is bound to simple Swipe (Bear); it still generates decent AOE threat.

One downside to Outland was that instance queues were no longer instant.  I'm guessing this had to do with DKs showing up. 

Those Silly DKs:

Queues were still generally under 5 minutes, but healers were now the limiting factor instead of tanks and when I was trying to queue in the morning on Saturday I was getting some annoying waiting times.

Through level 64, I was getting a mix of Ramps, BF, SP, and UB.  All of which are pretty quick and with almost no noteworthy obstacles.  The final few pulls of BF might be worth mentioning though - these are the pulls with two felguards and a warlock.  The trick is that the felguards will randomly drop aggro and charge a party member.  The best way to deal with these is to have the entire party stack up on the tank so that no one is far enough away to be charged.  However, in pugs it's usually not worth the effort to try to explain this to the group so I tend to just deal with the aggro dropping and charging.  Here's how I do it:

• FFF the Warlock to establish some aggro and start the pull.
• Mark one of the felguards as skull and first target to die (this means hopefully 1-2 of the DPS will get the clue and DPS it first).
• While DPSing the felguards, be ready to taunt either of them who decide to charge one of the other party members.  If taunt is on CD then charge and mangle to grab aggro back.
• Toss FFF on the warlock occasionally to make sure the healer doesn't get aggro.

None of the mobs hit hard enough that you should ever be at risk for wiping on these pulls, but having a bit of a gameplan going in makes sure no one dies and it makes you look like a better tank.

55-59: I've never been here before

At level 56 I started getting Dire Maul East from the random LFG tool.  Not only had I never been there before, but in virtually every group I was a part of, there was at least one member who had never seen the instance either.  In a way we were experiencing new content even though it'd been around for years, and I think that speaks volumes to what makes the new LFG tool so much fun - players get to enjoy old instances that are completely deserted.

The instance itself is easy and straight forward.  The hardest part of my first run was figuring out that we needed to kill the other bosses and then talk to the tree guy to go break down the door to the final boss.  The trash pulls that stunned were occasionally a pain because as a druid I can't generate any AOE threat while stunned, it definitely made me miss consecrate.  DM East is different from a lot of the high end vanilla dungeons in the sense that its very linear and the trash pulls are straightforward and intuitive.  It's not like BRD, Strat, or Scholo where there are clusterfucks of mobs all over the place and if it's your first time there you never know how many mobs are going to come when you grab one of them.  With how easy AOE threat is nowadays, pulling a bunch of mobs isn't really a problem; but I still tend to prefer trash that hangs out in neat little groups.

Interestingly, I didn't get any other parts of DM or Strat or Scholo during my high 50s.  When I dinged 58 though I immediately went to Outland and at 59 I was finally able to queue for random BC dungeons.  I also finally bought dualspec (my primary spec had been focused on cat dps) and picking up the rage generation on dodge talent made swipe + maul spam much easier on AOE trash.