Any “quest item” that you pick up, or anything extremely unusual (the Fire Extinguisher in Zul’Drak for example.. I still haven’t figured out what to do with it. I’m keeping it for now) should be stored away until you know 100% if you need it or not.

I don’t think Blizzard is going to do anything similar to the “Luffa” thing again. Plus, we downed Moroes without the thing way in the beginning as well, so such trinkets aren’t indispensable, they merely help out in some cases.

However, I think you can safely sell off all of your rings/pieces of armor/weapons/shields/etc.

If you’re a cook, and you plan to go further down that path, I would advise you to hold on to the Chilled Meat you find. You need 4 for a Feast, which is a nice way to skill cooking up to about 400 (not to mention it’s funny to look at when you deploy it). Some high level cooking recipes require it as well.

Concerning questing:
To give you a quick answer: questing is better. Most of the turbo levelers on my server quested the entire way and didn’t even touch an instance.
I tried doing the instance grinding thing at the beginning. It just doesn’t work. Even on my server (Azshara, PvP DE-EU), which is one of the fullest German servers, instance grinding just paled in comparison to getting experiences through quests.
A slew of questions surround this. What is your gear? What is the gear of the people you are playing with? How do you rank yourself in ability, and how do you rank the others with which you do it? If you’re going to go PuG, my gut tells me you’re definitely not going to be leveling as fast as questing. If you have a good group together, everyone is geared up to a high standard (allowing quick grinding of high-level instances), AND your server is extremely full, and you didn’t get a chance to get a head start (which would have applied to WotLK release day, or the day after), then it might have been a good idea.

Consider also that instance grinding can be terribly boring, because it’s always the exact same thing.

If you’re playing solo and in a relaxed way, stick to questing. Stay prot! It’s amazing how powerful it can be. As prot you can AE grind entire camps down. On one occasion in Dragonblight I accidentally pulled a mob that belonged to a 4 man group quest I had in my quest log. He went down without much of a problem. Something similar happened in Zul’Drak, there’s an elite quest very early on, I think it’s a 3 man quest, soloing it as prot is a piece of cake.

I hear you! I hesitantly sell off gear myself. What I have been doing with regards to trinkets in particular, is just keep the ‘best in class’ of that version and sell off anything less. IE, I have kept the best Haste, Crit, and AP trinkets.

I can’t really comment on the instance XP as that isn’t really a route I have tried.

One question I have: early on, it was speculated that instance grinding was good xp, but then someone said Blizz nerfed it…what’s the deal? Is instance grinding a good way to go or no?

And here’s one final question I had in BC and also for Wrath: all these items we’re getting at low level from quests… Is it safe to just sell them all when I determine I don’t need them? I’m afraid of selling some unique quest reward that I will wish I had later. Especially the whole lufa quest item from way back in the day (although I didn’t experience the problem myself). My bank and bags are really filling up with this stuff and I just want to dump them. But I don’t have the experience to know whether a trinket with haste rating is worth keeping. Insight, anyone?

Thanks!