Driving and Crying

Last Tuesday, we headed into Firelands. We currently have two bosses down, Shannox and Beth'ilac. I'm not sure I'd say on farm, but we usually get them both down each week. We are working on Lord Ryloth. Shannox and Beth were both one shots. I don't remember that happening before. We actually had some new trash to clear. It's trash that is tied to Shannox and usually it has despawned before we get to it. We figured it out pretty quick and began to march up the hill to Lord Ryloth.
I really don't like this fight. There is so much going on, and I need to be in about three places at once. Our melee dps takes care of steering. With our current raid composition we usually have all the buffs and debuffs covered so I go with a my cat, a Stranglethorn panther, named CamNation. Yes, I’m a Carolina Panthers, and Auburn university fan. How often does the favorite player from your college team get to play for your favorite NFL team? Pretty cool, huh?
I have two macros from my pet.
/tar Left Foot
/petattack
/tar Right Foot
/petattack
I listen for which foot the driver wants dps on and hit the appropriate macro. While Cam is chewing away on Ryloth, I'm helping out on Sparks, and Fragments. Sparks need to be dpsed down. If you don't kill them fast enough, they will charge one of your team members and do damage equal to whatever hit points they have left. Fragments are a bunch of little elementals that we have to AoE. There's also fire on the ground that moves that you have to avoid. It brings back bad memories of Archimonde.
I spend a ton of time running around getting in range of Sparks, or Fragments, and trying to avoid fire. We use a single tank, so I try to help out by misdirecting the Fragments to him as often as I can.
We had been stymied by Ryloth for a couple of weeks. We'd die just about every way possible on this fight. We'd die to fire, die to stomp, die to adds, die to bad driving. At some point in nearly every attempt, Lory Ryloth moves in front of me and blocks my whole screen. I can't see a thing and invariably that's when I get caught in a fire trail and boom, dead dwarf. Also the fire trails are not considered AoEs, so it would end up killing Cam. Being MM, I didn't bother rezzing him most of the time.
Of course, we had never killed Ryloth.
Then we go in Tuesday night, and the fight is going well. We're dpsing down adds and steering him to volcanoes. I don't know how Wich keeps everything straight, cause I'm doing well just to keep track of the adds I'm supposed to be shooting, but he called for the healers to get everyone topped because Ryloth did some big AoE, and then got big and fiery all over. The adds despawned and we poured all our DPS into him. He toppled over and gave up his loot. After a moment, we looked around and realized we had just one shot him.
We found out the next day he had seen some nerfs. I think the biggest one that helped us was his stomp not knocking people back. We lost people in other attempts from stomp knocking them into fire. The other big help was the burning down of his armor faster, shortening the fight. Less time we have, the less time things can go wrong.
I don't really care that they nerfed him. We didn't have the option to do the fight any other way than the way it was presented to us. We had been hitting our head against him for a couple of weeks and I know people were getting frustrated. It was nice to get him down, nerf or no.