I had actually given careful thought to running with a shammy instead of the hunter, but there were a few big reasons why I decided not to. First, my main reason for leveling these is to save time. I want to have one of every class at 70, and it saves a bunch of time if I can level them all in parallel. Running instances at 70 is just icing. I've already got a druid at 70, a shammy at 60, and a warrior at 62, so those three are redundant. I don't have a rogue, but I know they'd be uber-painful to 5-box with. That leaves pally, priest, mage, warlock, and hunter. Hey, works out pretty well! Plus, I'll have the benefit of two offtanks, a physical damage dealer, and more CC (might be hard to multi-box hunter traps).

On the other hand, my hunter has definitely been the most painful of the five to party with. Her medium quiver can only hold enough arrows for one instance run. She's always dropping auto-follow because she sometimes enters melee combat (not a problem in instances, just when questing). Her pet has a way of NOT assisting me when attacking, even when my macros clearly call for such behavior. This doesn't happen often, but enough that it's annoying and sometimes makes me sweat a little.

I'm not unhappy with my hunter, but I certainly think I'd be more happy with a shaman in that spot if I didn't have a high-level one already.

Moving on, I ran Razorfen Kraul at 25 and Gnomeregan at 26, today. I didn't really have any issues with either. No wipes at all in RFK (not even close), and only one wipe at the last pull before the final boss in gnomer. My warlock's imp got impatient and firebolted the huge group at the end before I was ready. That's kind of bugging me. Is there some way to turn this thing off? Specifically, I'm talking about when you're spamming a button on a mob, then if that mob dies faster than you expected and you spam the button an extra time or two, it selects the nearest mob and executes the ability you were spamming on it, instead. Sure would save me a couple headaches.

I'm 27, now, and not quite sure what to do with myself. Unfortunately, my instance runs have been dropping almost exclusively melee gear. My pally's looking pretty good, but everyone else looks like utter crap. I could boost my non-tanks through a few instances with my druid to get them better gear. I'm afraid of them getting too far ahead, though. There certainly isn't much in the way of future instancing before level 30 or so. I'm certainly not going to grind Gnomeregan. :thumbdown: I don't know what Blizzard was thinking with their level ranges for instances. There's three instances for the teens, five for the (mostly lower or mid) twenties, two for the (mostly upper) thirties, three for the fourties, and a bazillion for the fifties, but actually just two for the lower fifties. That means you've got a huge number of choices in the lower twenties, but as you near the upper twenties and lower thirties, you only really have one or two small wings of an instance to choose from. It gets better as you get higher, but there's around a seven or eight level range with extremely slim pickings.

Anyway, fifteen levels on a weekday. Not bad progress at all.

Happy hunting!