Yesterday evening I had an epiphany.

1. Making sure you get at least most of your dailies done in a quick fashion so you can raid is really is a good thing unless … see #2
2. Always check your raid calendar. If today is not your day to raid, sitting outside the entrance to the dungeon is nothing but a waste of time.
3. A lvl 45 Prot Pally doesn’t do enough damage on their own to kill 2 lvl 44 normal mobs in any reasonable period of time.
4. The prot pally having a skill in maces that is higher than 12 would probably help some with this problem.
5. The lvl 43 Resto Druid coming in to help the Prot Pally kill the 2 lvl 44 normal mobs doesn’t really make things go that much faster.
6. Entering ZF (lvl 42-48 dungeon) with a (45) Prot Pally, (36) Boomkin Druid, (37)Feral Druid, (43) Resto Druid, (44) Enhancement Shammy makes elites die really slowly, even though the group can heal themselves until the end of time.
7. Making sure that your bar has updated itself with the highest level of the spell you are trying to use will make things die much faster.
8. All of these things are at least a lot of fun and worth a good laugh as long as you are doing them with friends.

I think you probably get the drift of my evening. We ended up changing the Feral druid out for a 46 Enhancement Shammy as he was not feeling well. That made things go much faster. I also realized that for what ever reason my bar was not updating Wrath with the highest level of spell, so all this time I have been using Wrath Rank 1 instead of Rank 7 wondering how any balance druid did any damage with that spell. (opps) We worked our way through the instance and Sly gained yet another level but didn’t really get anything that I would call great at 44.

I looked down through the Balance tree, and so I can still heal with Sly, and do some damage, I respec’d him into Boomkin before I logged last night. While Knurd was growing up, the druid that I ran with was a Boomkin who later respec’d into a tree at 66 because he was having trouble healing us. This should allow me to solo with him as well as heal a group. I have never played a true caster so we will see how this goes considering I have always relied on the cat to hold things in place while I burnt them down from a distance. The sad thing is, because of the armor bonus, Sly doesn’t have that much less armor than Knurd in his current state. I still don’t think I would want to try and take him some of the places that I take Knurd considering how quickly Knurd dies when beat on.