On tanking and hunting and the march to Cataclysm

Huge relief to do okay last night, tanking on my main, and kill Archavon the Stone Watcher, by far my favourite "lore" character in the game.
I really enjoy the archavon fight, and its the only raid fight I've tanked before (so that's handy), and we killed him, even with our comedy DPS totals. My threat with Noah is massive compared to Lohengrin, and their gear is of a similar standard, so I think I will pursue tanking with both characters for the time being.
As my partner has found a good chunk of work on a show for the next 12 weeks, I will hopefully have quite a few more evenings to sort out dungeon runs on. With the plethora of stuff I am enjoying in game at the moment, I am quite looking forward to the autumn! Apart from getting stuck into more 5mans, Noah is now very comprehensively geared for pvp, having finally replaced my spiked titanium helm with the 213pvp version, so Battleground achievements are "on notice". Lohengrin is slowly finishing off Northrend quest achievements and running Wintergrasp for his pvp starter kit, and tanking bits and pieces for fun. Fear is barreling up to 40 and a fast mount, and really enjoying low levels Arathi Basin. Hunters completely rule in BGs, and it is easy to take charge of situations in the brackets before multiple pvp trinkets, with a fast Raptor and traps on every cooldown.
I think I might shell out to change fear's name. It was kind of funny at the time to have a silly pvp name. Going into BGs everyday, you get used to seeing names that are supposed to be dramatic sounding and slightly related to the mechanics of the game, things like painhammer or tremorkill, and I thought I would just go with the flow of that. I was also trying to think of something a little native american in etymological terms, but now it just looks a bit silly, and eventually I will probably spend a lot of time with this character, trying to nail casters in Eye of the Storm and Warsong, so I might change it now. I was tempted to name her after something theatrical again (I'm still absurdly pleased with Loh after all). On another realm I've rolled a pala called Chekhov, which could be contrived as a bit silly too, but is more ordinary sounding on a european battlegroup and maybe not as childish. It seemd perfect, when faced with the prospect of levelling pala again to be named after someone who wrote tedious one trick plays, as judgement and autoattack is easily as boring as the post imperial malaise of the russian hinterlands.
Another notable thing about Fearwings is that the plan was to have a flying pet for pvp in endgame (a big red bat from the plaguelands) and the Wings bit referred to that for me, but levelling with a raptor this part is lost...
On the subject of shelling out, Our tedious friends in Orange chat are now all about rerolling Horde, as paid faction change has gone live. It was interesting to discover that a few of our top Arena guys on Nord have gone Horde to make getting 2200 ratings far easier, but it all seems a bit silly to me. If you faction change on Nordrassil, you're going to be facing alliance BG teams from different servers, most of which, the armory will tell you, are doing quite well on the horde killing front, and have arena teams doing much better than us, which indicates guilds and premades who are going to kick your ass. As rated Battlegrounds are going to make a serious impact on who and where you fight next year, It seems daft to swap your pala to Blood Elf now.
Currently, I have it very vaguely in mind to switch Fear to another faction or server post Cataclysm. Partly for the experience, and partly because the last thing my guild really needs is another Hunter. Come Cataclysm, I hope to have my tanking house in order, in important ways that I really didn't when Wrath came out (and don't now, particularly where my control surface is concerned). Everyone will be taking a back seat to Noah for a few months at least, as we've got some speedy levelling to get done and hopefully some new pools to fish:-)