The Spirit Realm

I play on Test now as well and gear and xp gain isn't your only concern. My shaman went without a lot of PoP and OoW spells due to lack of availability of groups in the appropriate zones and the non-existant bazaar. My gear isn't too bad, but I am still sporting a few of the level 45 TSS quest pieces from Goru'kar Mesa and could use some hit point upgrades and Focus gear. FT and Regen really isn't hard to come by anymore, even on Test, I am maxed out in both (helps that I have Fabled Fungi and the 2 TSS Valdeholm quest bracers). My shaman is currently 73 and there are still quite a few 60-70 spells that I am missing and would like to have.
Root-dotting is more difficult as the only non-DD dots I have are disease, I am still missing the poisons. Tanking in the face is almost impossible in TSS as the mobs hit really hard, so I end up only tanking old world mobs. Luckily, I have a necro friend and we kite a lot, so the spell situation doesn't hurt there as much. As you know, grouping is pretty scarce on Test, but when I do get groups, my spells are fine. Especially since the RK1 spells for 71+ are vendor buyable. His gear is worse than mine.
My necro friend started a bit before I did. He was around 60 when he talked me into going to Test. To give an example of the speed of necro kiting xp, he is 75 with over 400 aa and I'm only at 73. I stopped here for Canni 5, CoTW, and am working Pet Affinity for group panther, then I think it's on to 75 since we can kite TSS bears and spiders pretty well in Icefall. Without the necro, I would be going alot slower and it would be difficult with the spells I had/have available.
Still working on gear, I'm at 4500 hp and 1200 AC unbuffed. 37 aa.

Ya, from all I've heard necros kite really well. In fact if I ever make a second char it'll prob be a necro since it's so easy to get them up the levels and AAs (or maybe a mage, since like Muk said they're quite the monster even without good gear). But the thing is for my main I'm not that worried about leveling speed, as I'm not in a hurry to get to 75 or 1000+ AA's. I like to take my time and find that I'm more willing to play a character if I'm inspired by all the cool things I'd be able to do once I get to the end, even if that end is really far away. After all, if I'm going to spend a year or two playing a character, it had better be a character I'm happy with at the end In that respect I guess necros aren't as good of a choice since I haven't seen any big posts about necros soloing old raid mobs like that big thread on this board.

Anyways thanks for the tips and I'll give you a holler if I ever see you on Test, and yeah I do agree that spells are really hard to come by