Isn’t it somebody other than Nat himself who gives you the Nat Pagle pole? IIRC, on Horde-side at least, it’s a troll in that coastal village in Hinterlands that gives it as a quest reward. And I think, with the Cataclysm changes, Alliance players get it from a dwarf, also in Hinterlands.
Yesterday, my paladin joined a group and tanked Galleon, Sha, and Nalak. On Galleon, some asshat joker started the pull countdown timer thing, and I went charging in … only to discover that almost nobody was following me, and I died almost instantly. It turned out it wasn’t the raid leader who started the countdown, a lot of people weren’t even there yet, and a couple people were in the middle of a duel :smack: And of course, Galleon dropped only gold for me. Sha went smoothly, but he also dropped only gold. Nalak was a cakewalk, but I’d forgotten that I’d already done him on that paladin this week, so he dropped nothing for her 
Meanwhile, my rogue had a blast soloing Wrath heroics with a tabard for Tushui Pandaren rep. I did Halls of Stone, Halls of Lightning, Gundrak, Drak’theron Keep, and all three ICC 5-mans. I had run all of them many, many times on my paladin and mage via LFD when they were current, but those were always go-go-go groups and I never had/took the time to explore.
So after (or even during) clearing each dungeon, I took time to look around. I looked over the railings in HoS and HoL and saw all sorts of tunnels going off in every direction, and the inaccessible levels below me filled with not-yet-animated iron vry’kul. I explored behind Loken’s throne in HoL and discovered a doorway and a broken railing that let me jump down to the first part of the dungeon and run back to the entrance, something I’d never noticed or used because I’d only ever entered HoL via LFD, and had always teleported back out after killing Loken. In HoS, in the section full of rock elementals, on the way to Krystallus, I noticed for the first time that those large stone pillars with embedded orange crystals weren’t actually pillars — they’re inanimate stone giants in the process of being carved by iron dwarves.
In Gundrak, I finally, for the very first time, found that giant snake I’ve seen mentioned so many times.
In Pit of Saron, I took my time freeing the Alliance slaves before I got to the first boss, and on a whim I followed a gnome as she ran away after I freed her. I was surprised to discover that those freed slaves don’t just run a short distance and despawn like most rescued NPCs. They actually run all the way back to the dungeon entrance and hop on the teleport platform that takes them (theoretically) to where the soldiers are waiting to get them out of there. A few minutes later, one slave I freed actually stuck around to fight alongside me for the next several enemies, before excusing herself to go join the soldiers for the main attack on the last boss. I encountered a group of freed slaves getting ready to charge into battle alongside the Alliance soldiers, only to see them ambushed and killed by a bunch of those leaper-undead (what were those called again?) I was about to rescue some slaves in one area, only to see some gargoyles fly down, grab the slaves, carry them high, and then drop them to their deaths. I was really amazed to see so much detail and story going on in there - stuff I’ll bet almost nobody actually saw when it was current content because they were too busy just rushing to the next boss.
Halls of Reflection, I finally got to watch the RP between Jaina and Uther. I’d never seen that before, because every group I’d been in always just ran straight for that alcove and waited for the mobs to start attacking. The fights before the “escape from the Lich King” part weren’t hard, considering that I was doing them at level 90, but man, were they tedious.
I did run into an odd glitch in HoL and Gundrak. Since my rogue had never done any of these dungeons before, all the dungeon quests were available to her, so I went ahead and accepted and completed them. But in both dungeons, when I returned to where the questgiver should be (according to the yellow “?” on the map), the questgivers had disappeared. In HoL I fixed this by exiting the dungeon, resetting my instances, and re-entering. That brought back that questgiver. Unfortunately, that didn’t work for Gundrak, so my rogue now has three quests in her log that she can’t turn in. I’m going to poke her head back in there after the 12-hour timer thing expires to see if the questgiver has reappeared.
I had minor difficulty killing High Overseer Bloodmane until I put my brain back in and popped 
Shame that the level 25 perk is pretty useless to a 2-man guild.
and enough supplies when the weekly resets to get Gahz’rooki. Pleasantly surprised to see the belt is upgradeable, too.
