I did not start raiding until Tier 7. My overall thought of Cata as a whole is that it brought a lot of updates to the game that are good things. LFR, Transmog, More dynamic rotations to master, the erasing of many points of unneccesary tedium a la not having to learn FPs. But for Raid content, WOTLK was superior.

Ditching the sprawling 12-boss raid instance model has not worked for me. Actually I do not recall a single person telling me how relieved they were to not have a big raid or a 12+boss tier. The 'Less is more' philosphy to bosses from Firelands and beyond is not more, it's still truly less. These designers have so much creativity to unleash, but they really do lose out on that if they have to ditch any idea they have that has a high-risk or experimental nature to it. Becuase if they F up, then thats 18% of the raid that just got butchered. Where's something weird/surreal like Kologarn been this expac? (THAT GUY HAD HUGE HANDS AMG.)

The quality of the encounters has not exactly soared. My favorite encounters from this one are probably Twin Dragons (esp heroic), Rag and Madness-H - although I can see how people don't care for the four repetive platforms.

But they do not touch my favorite encounters from wotlk - Firefighter, Algalon, Lich King-H, or Putricide-H. The lack of a technical kiting encounter on the scope of a Mimi or PP really stands out to me.

On the plus side, I did notice that they stuck to their timetables pretty well, and there weren't any patch days that were god-awfully buggy.

I'd like to see the process-refinements of cata mesh with the ambition of wotlk in Mists. And for the love of god, 28 bosses does not an expansion make! (not counting bh)

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