WOLK Leveling Questions

I have spent the last 15 hours of game time and I am now lv 70 1/2.
It seem this is rather slow for leveling, but that is the way it has been so far in Questing with a 5 box. So I am wondering about it and I have a couple questions:

1. So far I only see +spell power plate or +str and +crit/atk power plate. I have not found any good tanking gear. So should I keep my protection pally as a protection tank or make him into a Retribution Pally for the leveling? I know 3.0 made some differences in the tank abilities, but do I still need any defense?

2. Would it be faster for me to grind through Botanica normal / heroic or should I keep doing the quests - it seems the quests are a bit slow.

Keep questing, avoid the bad ones. 20k+ xp a pop is awesome. Instances probably won't give you much of a xp rate. Spec ret if you want. Prot is for instances. Most of your taking gear will come from the dungeon quests, that's where I have seen all the items that i would even consider using to upgrade s2 with.

For me personally I have found it slightly faster instance leveling (Utgarde Keep is pretty easy once you "learn" the place, you may spend 1-2 hours the first time but you should get it down to 30-40 mins after af ew tries). However, this is INSANELY BORING. I just couldn't do it, my plan was just to grind UtK over and over and over till level 75 but I stopped at level 71 (lol). Now I just kinda wander around, do quests, explore, get diverted extremely easily (spent 2 hours in lake Wintergrasp yesterday) and have fun.

WOTLK endgame is fairly easy, there really imo isn't a huge reason to rush - enjoy the game, have fun, the stuff at 80 will wait for you.

For tanking gear i went ahead and droped close to 350 to 400g on Cobalt Bars for a friend to make mee a complete set of the Cobalt Tanking plate, as of right now just in that gear my def is over 508 and i only have 11K hp, but then again its all unenchanted and no sockets but it will help out a bit. Also did that quest in Nexus to get the blue tanking shoulders.

Hehe same thing here, stacked myself with repair bots (never realised that perhaps dmg pots and such would also be very handy -.-) but anyways was all planning to zerg UT. In fact I did it 10 times or so and stopped. Actually I decided to lvl my main pally to 80 first and then pick up the shammys again. The whole questing and instances goes so very slow, makes me feel like an old man.

Download Questhelper if you don't have it. It makes questing a LOT faster.

Faster then not having questhelper, granted, still .. still you are faced with all kinds of troubles

I have actually found the quests to be centralized and very simple to do, so far. I have only skipped 2 quests so far.

Only good tanking gear I have gotten has been from instance quest rewards. My paladin is still pretty bad, maybe 11k hp and 430 def.

I'd just quest it out, forget outlands instances. There are quite a few 'collect one', or 'interact with x number of' type quests that are multiboxing friendly. Any quest that interacts with an object that's part of the environment seems to be giving credit to the entire group, si I'm having to skip very little.

I'm not rushing by any means, I've messed around in instances and spent probably 4-5 hours camping meeting stones and ganking but it's lookin at 10-12 hours per level at this point.

Been about equal for me as far as instances/quests. I averaged about 200k/hr taking my time doing quests from 70-72. Running UK I get about 220k/hr unrested at 72 (not looting). For content/money/rep the quests are better...for mindless leveling - instances are better (I watch tv while I run them). All depends what kind of mood you are in I suppose.

and yes...thank you Blizzard for making almost all of the gear from quests either ret pally or enhancement shaman. I replaced my paladin's shoulders and sold or de'd everything else. Let us know what the xp/hr is for BC heroics...I've wondered but just not bothered wandering back there.