You know why I love these forums? Lots of following posts and all of them intelligently put, even the ones I sort of diagree with....just wouldn't happen on the WoW Forums.

Ok, so the bits I disagreed with:

Kill Speed(1) - a number of posts argued that as groups we kill substantially faster. I concede that we do kill faster of course, but not often 5 times faster. I found very often that 5xLightning Bolt would leave the mob still standing (albeit with only a few % health left) forcing a 2nd cast of Frost Shock to finish them off. Having played Hunters quite a bit, I don't think the Shamans kill five times faster, maybe three times, but I admit that's pure supposition on my part.

Kill Speed(2) - the really big constraint on our kill speed isn't the mobs survivability but the mobs availability. I found that in many of these collection quests (excluding those that are "pick items off ground" types) it simply wasn't possible to make the most effecient use of the Shamans grouped power for lack of mobs. By this I mean, either the mobs were too dispersed to collect together (without going into Evade), or they were casters who'd refused to move anyway, or there just simply weren't enough of them to mow them down with great gusto. More often than not, I found that collection quests, those involving mob drops, meant long pauses in my leveling while I hunted down and fought a large number of small battles, often with only 1 or 2 target mobs involved in each.

Mob XP - My Shamans would typically get almost all their XP gain in a session from quests. Out in Northrend, I'd make brely 250xp per kill (rested!). My Paladin meantime is knocking up 1500xp. Where's the bonus? I mean admittedly the Shamans started outlevelling their zones so were also taking a hit due to lower mob levels, but it really felt like mob XP in a group was almost pointless. 250xp for a kill would require me to kill well over five THOUSAND mobs for ONE level. Ouch.......so much of non-instanced grinding. Even at double this rate (which I was almost able to achieve in higher zones), we're still taking just over 3,000 mobs per level. Very much most of my XP going to 80 came from the quest rewards.

Party Penalty - This is my biggest gripe I guess, because I think it's the one most fundamentally at odds with what MMO's should be. I got into Blizzards games from the Diablo series (and plan on going back there on D3). The philosphy of that game to group was perfect: always encouraged, always rewarded, never required. WoW seems to suffer a little indecision in its design. For end-game WoW's philosophy can be summed up as: always encouraged, always rewarded, always required. I don't have any problem with that. However, for leveling, it changes into: sometimes encouraged, sometimes rewarded, often penalised. In a game designed around bringing large numbers of players into a persistent virtual world, grouping should never be penalised. I just can't see how it ever should be.