Shadow Priest DPS and Leveling Update

So my son and I continued to work on leveling our shadow priests together over the weekend. We managed to both hit 40 and get shadowform over the course of the weekend. We were both amazingly surprised by how good our single target dps was in instances. Shadow priests still suffer a bit on trash due to a lack of any AoE abilities that won't be taken care of until Mind Sear at level 75.

Still, we were both top of the dps charts on almost every boss fights, rocking about 200 dps at level 40. Very pleasantly surprised. Leveling as a shadow priest pair continues to be a breeze.

So, in terms of a February leveling update, I managed to get my Shaman up to level 36 via resto instance leveling, got my rogue all the way up to level 25, and got the mage to level 35. I've really been enjoying the rogue a lot. I've been pleasantly surprised with how competitive his dps is in instances, even in my combat leveling spec. I've been toying with the idea of switching to assassination just to see if I can boost it a little bit, but I'm not totally sure if that would be worth it until I've got enough talent points to pick up mutilate.

So my total leveling progress for the month of February was 42 levels (including getting those last 10 levels on my Paladin to 80 - which are painfully slow) over 28 days, so exactly 1.5 levels per day. Averaging that pace with January, it still puts me on pace to hit my goal of 9 toons to 80 by the end of June.

Since it doesn't look very likely that Cataclysm will be getitng released anywhere even close to that timeframe, I may slow down the leveling pace just a little bit and do some more PvP on my existing 80's. I think I'm reaching the conclusion that the PvP world is really best suited for me in terms of gearing up my end-game toons.

My schedule and attitude just doesn't lend itself very well to raiding. I'm not able to raid enough to be part of a really serious raiding guild, but I find being with a guild that doesn't take it seriously enough to be very frustrating. Raids starting one or two hours later than scheduled and then being giant wipefests because people don't understand the fights. Just not my thing.

Also, through leveling the rogue, the shaman and mage, I've also been able to get some more data on xp per hour rates through questing versus instancing at low levels. Interestingly enough, the xp per hour at low levels is significantly higher in dungeons than it is questing. For the rogue for example, I was typically running in the 15-20K per hour range while questing, but could get it boosted to as high as 50K per hour doing instances. The percentage difference seemed to contract a little bit in the mid-30's level-wise, but was still significantly more.

The challenge now will be to figure out where that crosses over and stops being true. I'm guessing it's somewhere in Outland, but it'll require some testing to figure out for sure.