[Druid, offtopic] Kalecgos down - onto Brutallus

After more than a few close calls, we got our act together and downed Kalecgos for the first time last night.

It's odd in that I'm the one doing a lot of the herding of the cats in that fight. "Group 2, take a portal". "more decursing!" "Less decursing!" (which is my favorite one to yell out, as people get all decurse-happy). Unfortunately I was the only one dead at the end of the raid. Sigh. That happened because I was the only one with a brez available, and instead of taking my portal I ressed a healer. Which basically nuked me about 2 seconds after the res, thanks to arcane blast. I think it was the right choice, but it still felt crappy being dead for the final 20%.

It kind of helped being dead because I could yell at people more and tell them to take portals more. It's a lot harder to announce things when you're trying to decurse, take portals and beat people up. Plus hey, I got to be the loud druid! That's always fun. (in my guild it's almost always a druid of some flavor doing the announcing of various timers/rotations. I don't know why. It's been this way for a while.)

It's a very fun fight, and it's one of those that is really frustrating and really awesome when you accomplish. I love coordination raid fights, even if my guild isn't the best at them. You can outgear DPS checks, you can outheal healer checks, but coordination is about player skill and awareness. Nice to see we could do this one.

Which...is totally not what Brutallus is all about. Brutallus is a total gear check on everyone's part. There's very little coordination by comparison; you have to move burn victims out of the way of the meteor slash, you have to taunt on a regular cycle and you have to do everything you can to make your healer's life easier.

Some things that I've been learning recently about this fight, from a tanking perspective:

• Brutallus has only a 1% base chance to miss for taunt's sake. No amount of +hit will help here, but it'll only be resisted if you're very unlucky. Because of challenging roar/shout and the shorter cooldown of warrior/druid taunts, paladins are disadvantaged here.
• Brutallus does dual wield, but he has no dual wield penalty. Yeah, he's just that bad ass. I actually just found this out today, and it changes a lot of my preconceived notions of gearing.
• There is, of course, the fun time sunwell penalty, which gives a -20% dodge chance and a -5% miss chance. This makes avoidance a bit more painful to stack.
• And of course, one of Brutallus' abilities - Stomp, which halves your armor. In theory you'll not take a stomp and then a hit. In practice, it's hard to avoid a bit of damage, and you'll want to have as much armor as possible. Which means being a bit over the cap.
  

I've been fighting between a full stam build and a mix build of stam and avoidance. The tricky part is balancing this all out with crit immunity, some amount of threat and the armor. I can go with 44% avoidance but not reaching the armor cap entirely and just under 21k health, or I can go with 38% avoidance, 1k over the armor cap and 22k health. It's quite the conundrum. I think that the 6% avoidance is worth the 1k health and armor for now, but if stomps start sucking I'll probably switch.

Any ideas guys? What all worked for you on Brutallus?