Happily HoTing everything

Well my guild is kind of on a break from raiding, four of our core raiders are deploying to Iraq this week and one of our healers just found out she's going to have a baby so we're not raiding because people's schedules are nuts and unfortunately we need to replace four people for the 15 months! they will be overseas (We all hope they will be safe over there, and they promised to stop by our forums now and then to check in)

So I've been leveling my alliance druid on the same server as my main. I find myself throughly enjoying happily HoTing my way through Ramparts and Blood Furnace with my elemental shaman leveling companion and Rez buddy lol. I wonder if I'd have a more difficult time finding a group for these instances if he wasn't there.

Now, I've been looking at the instance drops, and while there are some nice leather items it seems that the cloth items, to my untrained resto nooblet eye, have slightly better stats. Should I pass on these clothie upgrades and hold out for the leather ones since I essentially have no aggro dump, or resign to be completely dependent on my tank to save me when I draw the attention of some of our not so friendly PvE opponents? Ideally I wouldn't have to worry about as I shouldn't be taking damage, but this is BC, and we all know that BC means AoE lol. There have been a couple of instances, like the last boss in Ramparts for example where if my tank isn't particularly attentive of when the dragon lands I can easily be two shotted. Even though I tell the tank before hand that when that dragon lands he's coming straight for me, a lot of the PuGs we end up in... well they just don't listen or they don't care. I wonder if there's something I can do about this or if they are just nooblets and I should take the cloth drops.

On the flip side of things I've also started leveling another druid! Horde side on Bronzebeard. She's my stealthed feline assasin to offset Luna's peaceful HoTing. If you look closely you can see her stealthing up the stairs to dispatch a quick death to her most recent quest objective. I really wish I would have rolled a druid as my first toon. I enjoy this class so much more than my current main!