We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges?

On Monday night, we had a blood bath in Zul’Aman.  The bear boss is basically a tank check, and while my druid seemed to do okay, our undergeared pally tank seemed to get 3-shotted real quick.  (We just had him respec, and while he’s doing an awesome job with what he has, he just doesn’t have a lot atm.)  Then we tried our hand at the eagle boss, and WoW locked up on my computer about mid-way in to our last attempt.  Apparently though, I help agro pretty well with just white damage until I went offline.  So no loot from ZA.

Last night, we had two groups that were headed in to Kara to help gear people up.  The guild’s MH was in my group and asked, “Is this the Kara group?  ‘Cause I’d rather get badges that wipe tonight.”  Just to clarify, there’s two ways that that statement can be taken, at the extremes: (1) He’s not interested in learning new experiences -or- (2) He’s really interested in getting the badges.  Knowing him, I’m sure he was just joking around about the wipes (kinda a necessary evil in learning new instances), but I’m sure he was relieved about the badges.

So, in a way, it seems that the badge implementation was made just for us, or a guild exactly like ours.  It basically brings back an incentive for people to run Kara even though they have all the drops out of there.  Due to numbers, we have to leave some people out at times.  We usually determine who goes to which fights based on who needs what (among other factors).  But I guess I also forget that there’s a lot of easy badges right there at the beginning.

I’ve read in lots of places that the 10-man to 25-man transition is a hard one, and I can testify that that’s true.  We were doing the 25-man content, and then slipped a few raiders, and are now, once again, right on the cusp of starting it again.  Sure there’s been a few times when all of us, at one point or another, probably thought it would be easier to just give up, but we’ve pressed forward.  We’ll get there.  And, at least for now, the Badge motivation in Kara is helping motivate a lot of people to gear up the new recruits.