thank you for your quick replies. all of this is helping me to better understand what it taking place here. i will look in to Jamba, as i am not familiar with it yet. unfortunately, i covered the rainbow of profession choices, incase i decide to 100 boost them after hitting 60+. i realize i could probably have lvl1 prof's at 60+, and they'd be auto-leveled to 700, but i made my dumb choices early on, and everyone is around 200 (incl. fishing / cooking / etc) due to resources i apparently had on hand already, along with more relaxed WoW rules about how nodes could be looted. given up on BRD (likely my favorite instance of all time), and moving team to Stratholme today for further testing.