My Demon Hunter took a back seat to some other alts who he'd normally level up ahead of, due to the fact that my Death Knight was already in the Venthyr covenant, and that's where I wanted the DH to go. So, a few weeks after the release of the expansion, I got him to 60 and started working on the gear treadmill.
The good news is that it's way easier to get into heroic dungeons now. By working through the covenant campaign, you can get 171 pieces for your covenant set - which then allows you to upgrade all your previous pieces.
This isn't actually a widely publicized system, but it's a crucial one given that you'll be able to, eventually, have a full set of Epic gear for the price of going through the quests and spending increasing amounts of anima.
There is a pair of NPCs in each covenant sanctum, one of whom can sell you any pieces you might have vendored back for anima, and the other can upgrade your older pieces to keep them in line with whatever your most recent pieces are, item-level wise. As such, a Venthyr by this week can have I believe 5 item level 171 pieces through this system, which takes them a long way toward getting them geared for heroics, and even mythics.
At the moment, my Demon Hunter is stuck at 168, two points too low to queue for LFR - I think I might just chain-run Sanguine Depths for two shots per run at a weapon upgrade, given that his off-hand is currently his lowest level piece of gear.
Without bonus rolls, there's basically zero agency players have over getting drops they want, which is something I find very frustrating. The days of Need or Greed were problematic, to be sure, and so I understand why they went with personal loot. But I think there needs to be some interactivity to make the system feel slightly less like a slot machine.
The truth is, I miss Badge gear. I don't know why they got rid of it. Indeed, once Wrath introduced and Cataclysm formalized the distinction between current-content versus old-content currencies, there was an easy way to keep people from feeling that they had to run content they were done with. Today, if you run a dungeon and don't get loot - or worse, you get loot that is useless to you and anyone in your group - the entire exercise feels like a waste - you got nothing out of it (other than the fun of running a dungeon, which, you know, is fun, after all).
Additionally, I took my first character into the Threads of Fate leveling system. Unfortunately, I did not realize that if you went to the various zones before picking your covenant, you'd get a chance to try out all the abilities - I had thought you'd just talk to the representatives and be able to use the ability until you came back, but when you leave the Enclave, you lose it. So after I'd committed my Warrior to the Night Fae (gotta get that wooden armor!) my friend explained how one could try out the various abilities. Oh well.
I wonder if this version of leveling is truly slower than the main story, or if it's just that the story provides a sense of momentum and propulsion - leveling this way (and I've only done a little - I mainly wanted to get the Warrior up there to work on his Blacksmithing so he can make legendary pieces for my Paladin and Death Knight) I've done a couple bonus objectives and some side quests in Ardenweald. Each zone, you get a slowly-filling bar that tracks your progress through the zone. I think the general idea of it is that once you fill it up, you can feel free to move onto another zone, so I assume you'll get roughly 2.25 levels doing each of these quests, given that you finish the Maw intro at more or less level 51.
Oh, and by the way: at least for the intro, Worgen can use Running Wild in the Maw, which is a game-changer.
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