My interest in raiding has gone down significantly since the big lolpatch. The newly buffed DPS and nerfed bosses mean the fights are hollow parodies of themselves. Particularly the big coordination fights like Kael'thas or Illidan; now you can just power through them without spending weeks learning them first. But like everyone else I do appreciate being able to see new content, in my case Sunwell. Before the nerf we didn't expect to ever go in there. And Sunwell is still a pretty good challenge for us.
Kalecgos is a fascinating fight. The gimmick is there's two realms you phase between; in one realm you fight a dragon, in one you fight a demon. And you have to kill them both at the same time. But individuals in your raid can only move between realms every minute or so in a chaotic process all the strategies try to codify as a %26quot;portal dance%26quot;. It's a real challenge to have the right people on each side of the fight at the right time, particularly since chaos always disrupts your coordination. Last night I finally figured it out and did a good job thinking on my feet. In our kill two of our three tanks got ported to the demon realm at the same time, totally screwing up rotations. But we adjusted and I figured out how to split myself off from my fellow tank so we weren't always in the same place. Towards the end we were short DPS on the demon so even though it was my turn to tank him I didn't, staying in cat form and DPSing until the last possible second. I think that was the right call, and I liked having to figure that out on my own.
Brutallus, by contrast, is pretty simple. There's some trick about positioning and switching between two tanks, but the real challenge of this fight was DPS. It's a big DPS race and before the nerf a lot of raids had a hard time beating the enrage timer. Now post nerf it's not nearly so hard, we've killed him several times with minutes to spare. What I like about this fight now is it's the only DPS fight that lasts long enough that I can really test out my cat DPS rotation. I've got my sustained DPS up to about 1900 now, compared to 1400 when 3.0 started. That makes me about 5th on the DPS charts on Brutallus if Recount is right, which is just fine by me. Most of my improvement comes from learning how to use Tiger's Fury and keeping Rake up. I still get behind on the rotation sometimes, still room to optimize, but I'm not going to stress about it too much until level 80. Here's the damage breakdown: