When Cata came out I levelled a brand new character from 1-85 instead of taking any of my 80s the last 5 levels.

After hearing that Bliz were actually going to make dungeons hard, and that CC would be required again, I made a survival hunter, for the ability to CC 3-4 mobs by myself (even though I wasn't impressed that Bliz had given the spec the most CC plus the most damage at the time).

I did 1-58 by questing, to see what all the new areas were about (meh, linear, lo real choices about how to go through a zone, so none of the replay value we had before).

I did 58-68 pugging dungeons in Outland, in between doing the Alliance quests (new alt being my first real alliance character), and thoroughly enjoyed some of those dungeons, once I'd worked out that I should save all of my cooldowns for myself, wait until the rest of the party had managed to kill themselves by pulling too much and breaking each other's CC (and plenty of OOM pulling of course).

On a couple of occasions I was the only person to survive a pull (even with feign death on cooldown), thanks to knowing the PvP basics such as CCing the crap out of everything to even the odds, kiting, and juggling both targets and CC. In Setthek halls I think I cleared another 2 packs while the rest of the group ran back, to save myself the pain of watching them do it. I died on the last boss in there, (guess which arcane nova the rest of the party died on, after being told to LoS) but also managed to survive long enough to kill him with Serpent Sting.

Back in Northrend I went back to Questing (at least there's still some choices you can make there in each zone).

Cata?

Urgh, nasty! I don't think a single attempt at a dungeon made it past the 2nd pull thanks to the usual drool-proof-keyboard crew trying to tank and AOE several packs at once with no CC at all. (Not even playing at 4am got rid of them).

A couple of months later I tanked one of the new dungeons on my 80 tauren druid, with my guild's new 80-something goblin alts, expecting it to be tough thanks to the swipe nerf. No CC was needed anywhere anymore. No-one died. I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be doing, and wasn't keeping aggro, but my guild know how to play, and could solo the mobs they'd pulled. Even the healer.

GG Bliz. Nice nerfs. The retarded developer for retarded players.