The World of Warcraft is an excellent way to bypass the rigors of spending valuable time and energy making actual efforts to progress toward set goals....
Everquest always has (and always will) work like this:
scamper around worry-free for about 3 days worth of glory soloing moss snakes.
hitting the wall where mobs hit harder than you do and needing heals and crowd control and strength in numbers.. ZOMG I NEED TO GROUP.
Hitting another wall where a group of buddies just wont cut it to match content (esepecially here where you need guild instances once you hit CG/FG/POD/EPICS etc). ZOMG I NEED A GUILD.. TAGME..
Eventually it all devolves into Complete Heal Rotations, Phone Trees, Ventrillo, and god knows what else.
But yeah, that's EQ in a nutshell, no matter what form of it you are playing.
The time of day you're attempting to do things plays a big part of how successful your runs will be... Running LDON at high noon PST is suicide, same with mid-day Guk farming or Sro/SKarana epic mobs... The quickest way to breeze through content is to do all your "camping" type stuff at off-peak hours, and whatever...
But yeah, look on the bright side, once you get done with CG/FG, you'll be introduced to the Hidden Banquet, which will likely make you want to kick puppies.. just in time to ... run qvic.... and eventually, be one of the 30 people in public Plane of Dragons T1 wondering why no one rolled a healer class, everyone needs plate drops, and why no cloth classes wanna come dps for them.
There is simply no need to "hurry", it's not going to magically get less grindy and ridiculous at any point of your journey.
