Originally Posted by Xelopheris
1. Mana wise, you just CANNOT do it anymore. I sport a 6k mana pool raid buffed in a decent set of DPS gear (Broke 4k ap without flasks or pots today for the first time)
2. You lose on your white damage, and maybe make up for it with the increase in yellow
3. To power shift Shreds properly, you need to wear that stupid level 40 helm, and that will gimp your DPS enough.
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If you have a natural shifter spec, the mana cost is not too far out of bounds. If you have that and the 4-piece Moonglade set or Staff of natural fury (and they are not bugged) then its well within bounds and you have more mana to spare anyway.
Also, you don't need the helm, you can get a shred every 2 seconds or so with powershifts if you so desire and time correctly - which actually isnt that hard in low latency.
All that said - is it still worth it? The case (to me) for powershifting is if you go with a hybrid setup (...T3.5/T4/T5, heroic epics, PV Blues, PVP epics, nearly every druid specific feral item in BC) and decide that you want to convert that mana into damage as opposed to saving it for emergency utility.
How good is the conversion rate? Not that tremendous, but since you can easily be doing 3k shred crits at high frequency in even hybrid gear setups, not that bad either. You may loose that claw hit, but you gain a white weapon hit, and get almost all of the energy for that next shred which you can do immediatelly after a near-instant shift sequence.
Here is the other kick though - it is a method best used in highly static, highly controlled fights. There are very few of these out there. It takes a lot of concentration to hit the shift timing in conjunction with the energy timer while managing your energy very percisely. I have not really found a good situation to test this out emperically in BC raiding in terms of DPS boost simply because most fights don't support it well or because I value my mana more for things other than DPS.