Post by cosmicguen
Not sure about the dragon mount problem, although if it's southeast Outlands you're probably talking about the netherdrake. If I remember correctly it starts with a quest...
Check
this page, just to make sure I'm talking about the same thing you are. If I am, you need to do the quest chain to unlock the daily quests for the netherwing faction...long grind, but eventually you'll get Exalted reputation and be able to purchase your very own netherdrake. Of course, you could grind Wyrmrest Accord rep in Nothrend and get a proto-drake, which I think looks cooler, but anyway...
The deal with heroics. Well, hopefully you've done (some of) the normal instances on your way to 80 (Nexus, Utgarde Keep, Gun'drak, Azjol Nerub, Drak'Tharon Keep, etc). If you haven't, they're dungeons - get 5 people together, run the dungeon, kill anything that moves, loot cool stuff.
When you hit 80 you can go back to all those instances and put them on the Heroic setting. That means more and harder mobs, uber bosses with nifty new abilities and, above all, better loot.
Raids are generally harder than heroics, and where normal/heroic instances only require 5 people, raids require 10/25 people (some of the older raids required many more) and usually take longer to do. Again, much better loot.
I imagine you've come across battlegrounds? Lots of horde vs lots of alliance, everyone running round like crazy chasing flags, yelling at each other, splatting each other with every ability they have, generally spend a lot of time face down if you're not quite sure what's going on. The arena is where you go to beat the tar out of other players on a slightly more level playing field. Put a team together (2 people, 5 people, whatever) and enter the arena to face a team of the same size. Beat each other up, earn honour, use honour to buy new gear. Arenas actually take teamwork, coordination and preparation. Battlegrounds should, but generally no one bothers.
Now you're 80 you're not 'supposed' to do anything in particular. Most people grind faction rep for new gear/enchants, run heroics over and over to get better gear, and a lot of people then progress to raiding. Some simply spend their time in PvP (arenas, wintergrasp, battlegrounds, whatever). Making money is also a big theme, as is completing achievements...really, it's time to do whatever you want to do.
Hope some of that helped. Not on your server or I'd have dropped a hello :)
Post by cosmicguen
Mm, can be a problem if you're not used to the abbreviations. I remember reading the different chat channels when I first started playing and being so confused by all the non-words that I messed around with my chat box until I figured out how to mute channels. Haven't switched them on again since ;)
In all fairness, it's about 40% of players who treat people like garbage. Unfortunately, they tend to be the most vocal, so it seems like everyone's an ***hole. But yeah, ret pallies, non-prot warriors and non-holy priests tend to get the short end of the stick :/
I think probably the best advice I can offer is that you check out
WoWWiki if you haven't already. Some people will probably bounce on my head for suggesting it, but whatever. It's where I learned a lot about what things are and how they work. Example, I drop the word 'daily' into the wowhead search engine and it spits out things that have the word 'daily' in them. I drop 'daily' into wowwiki's search engine and it gets me a page that tells me what a daily is and how/why I would go about getting one. It also explains a lot of the more common abbreviations (I drop 'LFG' in the search box, I get a page that tells me what LFG means and how I would go about using the LFG interface to get my very own lovely group of people).
Wowhead and wowwiki have slightly different functions. I love them both and I use them both.
Anyway, it's late, I'm rambling. Apologies for second wall of text ;)