The (Leveling) Story So Far.

As I reach the midpoint of leveling my druid to 60, I've had a few revelations about the entire process that I wanted to share. 

1. Playing a druid is fun. I find that the combination of shape changing and multiple different playstyles fun. Charge in as bear, aggro a cluster of mobs, get over powered, heal as troll, back to bear, still too many, change to cat and run like an angry mob is chasing me!! 
2. Heirloom gear is highly overpowered (on the plus XP side). With 150% XP on every kill, I am flying through the zones. Complete 4 quests in an area and I gain half a level. By the time, I reach the last quests in a zone, I am seeing grey "low level" alerts on the quests. If I run a random dungeon in the middle, forget it, hearth back to Orgrimmar, look for a new zone.
3. ...Making it pointless to level professions. As much as I had intended to keep my leatherworking up to snuff, it's been impossible to do so. In order to catch up my leatherworking and skinning, I'd need to go back to level 5-10 zones and level up my skinning further. At this point, my skinning is at 30 and I need 115-120 to skin Blackfathom monsters. 
4. The Vanilla dungeons are huge and complex!  Take a dungeon like Blackfathom Deeps, where

   

   BFD from above looks so simple!

   there are 4 distinct bosses. Finding the entrance to those bosses requires swimming through underwater pools or hopping over rock piles. I've been in this dungeon now 3 times and still haven't found the "Fathom Core". Now it's green and not going to be worth it. 
5. By playing the Tank, some groups  actually expect you to lead and know where to go. I haven't seen most of these dungeons in well, 4 years when I leveled my priest this way. Luckily, most the time I can simply follow the bouncing ball of lights to the next area, but sometimes I go down a path and no one follows. 
6. There are still jerks. It's not just LFR. I think it has to do with heirloom gear giving people a sense of invulnerability, but people still over commit. The other day, Tanking dungeon and the healer announced at the entrance "follow me or die...I am heading straight to the end boss". Just sitting there, thinking to myself  "Um why? The epic loots that drop off Thermaplug? Aren't we only here for the XP?" I see my clothie brethren hanging back around me as we go through the dungeon. We made it passed into the first big area of mobs, all the dps and me die. Healer is off running through. I put on kitty run mode and scoot passed tons of mobs. Guess what, they kept following until we caught up with him. Dungeon wipe. Zone in and  /IGNORE <healer>, g'bye . That should make sure I don't see him in a dungeon again.. PLEASE!

Overall, it's a pleasant run up the levels to 30 (or 29.5 so far). It's nice and nostalgic to run these classic dungeons over again. Would like to see some of the WoD dungeons not feel so "on rails" as seems like they've been since, well, Wrath? By running to 60, the professions will take care of themselves, so at this time, it's pointless to keep trying.