The Shattering and a strange sort of leveling plan

Not much time left to go until the Shattering hits European servers, in fact tonight is the last play night. The big news from my DK is that Jessica Sellers won't be trading Ink of the Seas any more, so I need to hit Dalaran tonight and get my stocks of glyphs made up. Several gold blog posters are expecting another Glyphmas like 4.0.1 so I shall ensure I am prepared.

Meanwhile I shall be trying to flog a lot of Netherweave bags once 4.0.3a hits, as I suspect people will be rolling level 1 alts either to see the new quests, or try the new race/class combos out, or both. I hope this means an increase in demand for bags and also heirloom enchants, I am ready to go on both of these.

The DK is also just level 79 and one quarter, so I have a little over 2 weeks to get to 80 if I am to have any chance of playing with friends in Cataclysm. Unfortunately this does mean my plans to have a crack at tanking at level 80 will have to wait.

In fact, I have a strange sort of leveling plan, which is to do the quests with the DK and gain gear that way, maybe playing with friends in instances when they are around. On the other hand, I am toying with the idea of just grinding the Dungeon Finder hard on my Druid tank with guildies, trying to gear up and level up from dungeon XP and drops alone. Doing a whole lot of instances should make me very familiar with the pulls and bosses for level 85, but may be boring. Whereas questing to 85 will make me utterly unfamiliar and unpracticed with tanking the instances, but is likely to be more interesting.

I am somewhat concerned over the equation that you need gear to tank instances, but to get gear you need to run instances, or be lucky with quest rewards. The Dungeon Finder also puts you in an appropriate instance for your level, so with every ding you are getting pushed into harder instances, even though your gear may not have improved enough to actually tank them.

Without just picking quests to get good tanking rewards I can see randomly doing quests and instances will result in my death through not being geared enough. However, grinding instances may result in my death through boredom. So I am really hoping those Hyjal and Vashir quests give a good reward that I can use to try tanking up some normal mode instances with.