Upgrades!... almost

So, with all the tanking my druid has been doing lately in Kara and ZA, I thought it would be a good idea to see how many Badges of Justice I had and if there were any good upgrades for me.  Before last night, I had 29.  And a really great upgrade would be the Band of the Swift Paw (Shouldn't it be "Bands" - plural?)  So close.  Only 6 more badges to go.

We had enough people to run Kara online, but since they were saved in different instances, neither group had enough.  So, we looked at the Heroic of the day and found that it was Hellfire Ramparts.  With the guildies that were online and not in an instance already, I grabbed Leiandra to DPS through Ramparts.  We had to PUG one person, but I had a great warlock on my friends list so it was relatively painless.  We had our pally tank, our ret pally*, myself (mage), our priest, and the aforementioned warlock.  Our guild's not lacking in pallys atm.  It was fairly easy.  We died a few times due to bad pulls just before the split to the two bosses, Omor the Unscathed and Varuzden & Nazan.  The pat there makes things a little tricky if you can't remember the last time you ran the instance.  :)  So, 5 badges and 25g later (after turning in the quest), it was a pretty good instance.

So good, in fact, that before we had even finished splitting the loot from Varuzden, I was planning to go back in with Justicar (my druid) to get a little bit closer to the 35 badges.  This time it was all guildies: Druid tank, Shadow Priest, Rogue, Hunter, and Tree Druid.  So, we had 3 forms of CC which helped a lot.  I'm still learning how to solo tank in 5-man instances, so there were a few wipes.  But overall: successful.  But, as I've seen in the past, it was just fun hanging out with people from the guild.  We were mostly chatting and having a good time.  They understood my noob-ness, so it wasn't a big deal when we had to run for our corpses.  So, again... 5 badges and 25g later, I'm now just 1 badge away from finally not having blue bracers.

*Our ret pally has actually become a great asset.  Not only is he great as a person (always willing to help out the guild and other players, and understanding if he's not included in every run), but his DPS is also actually quite impressive.  If I'm not paying attention (read: being lazy or 1/2 falling asleep on a run), he'll beat Leiandra in DPS.  So I'm certainly not saying that all Ret Pallies are great, but I am saying that they can be.