I did heroic ramparts last night with my girlfriend's brother (tanking on a warrior). The run was... less than amazing. We had to PUG it because his guild was mainly doing TK at the time, so we had major scrublets as dps and they were reasonably bad. Oh well, I won a pattern drop which sold for 222 gold on the auction house (and I needed that gold pretty desperately), a shard, and got 3 badges. I do not honestly understand the complaint of hardcore PvErs who say that giving away amazing badge loot in 2.4 slaps their accomplishments in the face. Getting badges seems hard. It took me 3 hours to get 3 of them... I'm not going to spend 150 hours total getting an amazing feral staff... it's just not going to happen.

Anyway, I was promised that this type of run is rare, and it will be much faster in the future. That, and I do not think we're going to be doing ramparts anymore because he (gf's bro) got his tanking belt to drop, so we'll probably move over to heroic mech for the 5-badge drops. Admittedly, I may finally finish the kara keying chain to get keyed for that... 22 badges dropped on a run that should take no more than 3 hours sounds pretty amazing to me. I do not really care the mode of getting said badges... I'm not planning on getting the 150-badge weapon, it would just take too long. Instead I will settle for the idol, then get back to honor grinding.

Though, I am not happy about that situation either... it seems that the honor cloak and the honor neck are only minor upgrades to my blues. I am starting to remember this... vaguely. Maybe that was my main problem before, I was running around in blues and purples with 200 resilience and 10k health. While those stats may be fine in the generic sense, on a double-dps team, it just will not make the cut. Anyone, I have replaced the two blue rings I used with their purple honor counter-parts, and I am about 1000 honor away from replacing the blue wrists with the vindicator's wrists (a substantial upgrade in its own right). In terms of "what's left", there is the neck, the cloak, the pants, the chest, the boots, the wrists, the weapon, and the idol. Like I said, I will have the wrists tomorrow easily, and this coming Tuesday will mark the s2 weapon for me (we combined teams and so my druid has a personal rating of 1525 now >_< ). After that, I will be spending my arena points on s3 feral chest and pants, which leaves the honor grinding down to neck, cloak, and boots. That means that I need to make ~45000 honor starting tomorrow before 2.4 lands... and that is no easy challenge even for an amazing honor-grinding machine like myself. Especially when one considers that I have to continue running heroics to get enough badges for the idol.

Grawr... it's a long grinding road ahead of me... at least feral is still in the distance. I wrote very early on that the defining characteristic for my brother and myself is that we both are gluttons for punishment. We are stubborn, we stick to what we like, even if it does not work to our advantages, and we love the fact that we are doing what we want, even if it means losing... which we hate. We are only truly happy when we're miserable... which is, in and of itself, miserable... which is probably why I am looking forward to grinding honor/badges/arena-points and then finally trying a horrible team make-up that will struggle to get above 1650...

I am a glutton for punishment.