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As one of the resident ferals, I feel inclined to add my thoughts.
Bear Tanking- Bears are fabulous tanks. They have all the abilties they need to tank effectively. The only thing they don't have which has been covered many times, is shield wall last stand and lifegiving gem. You can actually pot in bear form while tanking on most bosses, if needed, with a tremendous amount of practice in timing it - something I've learned out of necessity. I've been the lead tank on a majority of my guilds early AQ40 stuff back in the day, but I've been phased out, not because I am sub optimal, but because we needed to get the warriors more experience, and we face a chronic healer shortage in my guild. I've been celebrated in my guild for my skills in this matter, and all the druids encourage my feralness to a large degree.
For the future tho, major itemization issues are coming up:
1. The disturbing stats on Dreadnaught
The armor and sta on Dreadnaught is far and away outpacing that which is availible to bears. We get 0 upgrades from Naxx that are of any true substance.
2. The hard armor cap of 75% DR:
Warriors are pushing 10.5-11k armor, and the cap against level 63 is 17325. There's not much more room for growth. Thankfullly, the expansion will allow bears to push this range with the extra ten levels, which will allow us more breathing room against the 75% armor cap. I'm personally hitting the cap in my full aq40 enabled loadout, sitting at 14.5k unbuffed. With mark, devotion and a stoneshield pot, I'm there. The problem previously was that the bears are pushing the cap - theres no where to improve.
3. Tank gear caught up with us quickly.
Going by the profile, yes, I tanked in blues until i got the full AQ set of Feral Gear. It is fun taunting someone in near full wrath that they suck at mitigation compared to you according to tank points. As I said above, Dreadnaught has just completely obliterated the usefulness of bear tanking. As the itemization goes- so too does off specs, especially so with cats and bears.
Cat Form - Limited usefulness.
I've had arguments with my friend the GM of my guild about being able to cat form in raids. I have the gear to do it, and theres no doubt I would be extremely effective - easily top 10 dps. I've been itching to see just how much I can push it in cat form with a full feral spec (14-32-5). His answer seems to be right on when he tells me that my dps would be better then the people that suck, but worse then the people that are as good.
The bottom line for any "off" spec is this -
You really have to overcompensate to be effective, and a substantial amount of this comes from gear. As the itemization goes, so too goes the effectiveness of these specs. You have to work harder at your job in these specs and you need to be on top of everything. The margin of laziness is significantly lower for you. This I think is the primary reason that you don't see many of them in bleeding edge content - the margin of error in places like naxx is so low that it pressures everyone in the raid to perform their roles accordingly. The worst thing that can happen to any of these off specs is to be pressured. Under pressure, cat form pulls aggro and gets himself and others killed...under pressure, an inexperienced bear tank gets himself killed. Under pressure, a shadowpriest goes oom, and is useless to the raid. Its the complexity of the specs that causes the problem. Its the same in any kind of big system. The more moving parts there are, the more likely it is that one of the parts will fail. Offspecs often involve more moving parts then standard specs- and this means the system is more vulnerable. This does not mean that it MUST fail, nor that you can't be tremendously sucessful - some encounters, these specs are glaringly more useful then their plain vanilla "pure" counterparts, and we can only assume that encounter design will continue in this manner - potentially becoming an absolute requirement.
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