I personally like learning my toon skills from the ground up - not a big fan of the strapon epeen that are premades, or even porting over my toon from live. Maybe I'm just not bright enough to take in all the ramifications of system changes at once, but leveling's 'progressive' education as abilities are accumulated is better for me. Further, it seems evident to me that a lot of effort is going toward balancing skills for lvl 80-85, I fear that lower levels of ability might get broken on the way.

That said, I finally got a PUG on the PTR for my lvl 20 warrior toon.

My impressions of my first PUG run (SFK) as a lvl 20 prot warrior:
- UGH I miss being able to charge into combat, or do a significant amount of pull damage with a throw. Waddling slowly into combat - with DPS that don't understand that initial bodypull aggro is extremely minimal - makes for very unclean first pulls.
- rage is an issue. Even with +20 rage on battle shout, it becomes mechanical that you walk into combat, shout, stomp, and then the incoming damage-to-rage is so low that I'm waiting...waiting...waiting for the next ability to light up. Very definitely not GCD-capped.
- mass pulls are ugly, due to slow incoming rage. very little ability to grab aggro if stomp doesn't hold them, and you've used taunt on the first loose mob.

I admit, it could have been my group, but they didn't seem like noobs (and I'll say too that for some reason my sound effects were lagging about a full 5-10 seconds behind. Very disconcerting to finish combat, and then continue to hear stomps, spells, growls, etc. My group probably thought I was insane or retarded), but it quickly got into the following rhythm (against 2+ mobs):
1) i move into combat, shouting as I arrived
2) stomp while right-clicking to auto-attack one mob
3) wait while rage was accumulating, auto-attack another
4) rend another
5) wait....
6) wait....
7) taunt that guy going after the healer
8) stomp to spread rend around (then I finally had enough threat ticks on most of the mobs to hold aggro decently through the rest of the fight)

Seemed like an awful lot of waiting, and I've tanked warriors, druids, and pallies extensively since vanilla. I don't ever remember it being this little to do at low levels. It was fun because it was hard, but I don't see this system encouraging anyone who isn't tank to try it (maybe that's not the goal anyway).

FWIW I'd say that at low levels incoming rage is too low for the point-costs of the abilities. Sunder is WAY too expensive at 15 rage. Pedestrian multi-mob pulls were a little harder than I'd expect (or remembered, and trying not to let the stupid-easy WotLK experience color my judgement), and single boss pulls were WAAAAY too easy. DPS was sick quick at killing any boss. Even with a 1min c/d, I'd rarely get to use battleshout on 2 fights in a row.

On a side note, and I know this hurts any complaints I'm making, but we have a guy drop early and 4-manned SFK without too much trouble. As I said, the other players clearly knew what they were doing.

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