We had our first raid today post-3.0 patch. 4/5 Hyjal, 2/9 Black Temple, fast and quick. Everyone had a good time with all their massive new DPS. Hyjal in particular was ridiculous with all the new AoE class abilities. On the other hand the game is now completely unbalanced, at least at the Tier 6 level. Way too easy. We made all sorts of dumb mistakes and got away with it and things died ridiculously quickly. I think Blizzard has thrown Burning Crusade under the bus to get this patch out. I'm really glad we got Illidan down once before 3.0.
My new DPS oriented spec seems to work pretty well... for tanking. With my spec and in my DPS gear I have about 18k armor, 39.5% dodge, 16k health in bear form. And only 1/3 Protector of the Pack. Even so I was able to tank all the Hyjal trash I felt like. I also ended up main tanking Kaz'rogal after a healing accident in full cat gear. No problem at all, our healers had no trouble keeping me alive. Thanks to our defense talents the difference between cat gear and bear gear is much smaller than it used to be: I'm always crit immune.
DPS-wise, my cat DPS is not so impressive. I'm managing about 1400-1600 on single target boss fights as measured by Recount. That's about 10% more than I used to have. I haven't optimized my gear yet and I'm having a hard time with the new DPS rotation, so I'm sure I can improve. Still, our hunters and rogues were looking at 30-40% increases, so I'm a bit concerned. On the other hand we're now playing a game intended for level 80s, so /shrug.
The new Feral Charge - Cat is super-fun. It doesn't break stealth and the animation is hysterical. Swipe hitting unlimited targets is ridiculous, too. In Hyjal I went bear form on trash just to Swipe-spam 10 mobs at a time for about 2500 DPS. The Glyph of Maul is nice for multitargeting, too. Cat DPS cycling is definitely more challenging; keeping Mangle, Rake, and Rip all active while using Tiger's Fury every 30 seconds is a lot of juggling. OTOH Ferocious Bite is quite nice now: 6000+ crits.
In other news, it turns out Inscription pays for itself if you're lucky enough to be the only one on the server with Glyph of Feign Death. Hunters will pay at least 100g for one of those today, just my luck!