I am Guild Leader, Raid Leader and Druid Class Leader in one person. we are currently progressing through BT (5/9). We are Raiding in an Alliance of 4 Guilds (as we are a bit more casual). We usually have a "Tank Heavy Setup" with 2 Prot Warrior, 1 Pala and 2 Ferals. We only swap one Warrior out for Heal or DPS when needed (e.g. Teron, Archimonde and RoS). Pala moves into Heal gear provided by Off-Specc loot (see below).

Loot Rules (set by myself) are Fixed Prices for every item and you can need it if you have the most DKP. Tier Tokens should be spread for one per Person so when drop luck is on me I can get the second Item for 25% of the original price, when nobody else wants it. Off-Specc would for me only be Heal and Moonkin. This way we don't end up with Void Crystals in the Raid Bank.

People can pass on other items to stay on top for one special sought item.

Well, Raid rules set by a Feral are probably different...

We recruited a new Feral and we knew that he had excellent Tank gear. He was a late starter and so he did most of the improvements via badges from heroics. First thing I asked him to do was to join Gruul PuGs to get T4 Shoulders, which he had not before and to ran Karazhan because he passed on those T4 Tokens. So basically he was asked to improve DPS to be a good part of the Raid Team.

Tank is only half of being Feral. I would not join Guilds with above mentioned loot rules.

In the first post is an example a macro for checking whether you are in the global cooldown or not, and only using an item and returning to form if you are not. I start out tanking, and get taunted from after the first stomp, so I start with two slashes. The next time I'm taunted off of, I get stomped and have him for a second or two, so before that happens I swap Pillar in for Forest Lord. The next three stomps are the only full stomps I take, as after that it goes back to taunting immediately after the stomp. The first full stomp, I use Badge of Tenacity 5-10 seconds before it lands. The second full stomp I use Nightmare Seed 5-10 second before it lands. The last one, Badge of Tenacity is back up. It's as important to be at full health going into Stomp as it is to get the right kind of healing and have extra avoidance or health during Stomp, so you really do want to lead stomp with your usage of trinkets or Seeds.

Since we've picked up a second feral druid who is more into tanking I'm almost solely DPS now. Here's why my guild keeps me in on pretty much every progression content fight. This is going to sound like bragging (which is not my intent), but my point is that there are ferals out there who can earn their spots in a raid as DPS.

1. I usually end up between 5th and 7th on the DPS meters in a 25-man raid (except on fights that require AoE or are severely tilted against melee). Compared to other similarly geared guilds (5/5 MH, 7/9 BT) we're typically on the very high side when it comes to DPS, so I'm pretty happy about that. I'm usually behind the hunters and rogues, maybe one or two of the warlocks. I'm almost always above the mages, shadow priests, raid utility specc'd hunter, fury warriors, and boomkin. We have a fantastic retribution paladin who keeps right up with me, along with a very good shaman who can do the same on some fights.

2. I provide Mangle for the various bleeds, and most importantly a lot of +crit for our hunter group (between LoTP and [Idol of the Raven Goddess]. On top of that I add some passive healing from impLoTP. When the boomkin is out I keep up Faerie Fire as well.

3. I'm a good player. One of the most important things in a lot of the TBC fights isn't so much DPS, but situational awareness. I almost never die from standing in flames or some other boss AoE attack. If someone gets a spine from Najentus near me it's quickly picked up. If a more than one healer on the MT goes down I'm quick to go out to caster form to keep him healed up. I know which players to battle rez and which to leave on the ground depending on the fight. I also know WHEN to battle rez them during the fight. You can't easily measure this stuff on a DPS meter or WWS.

4. As mentioned in #3... battle rez.

5. When something goes wrong I can often jump in as a tank. This is usually more useful on trash than bosses, since in DPS gear I can't stand up to most bosses for very long, but we've had more than one fight where we were able to take down the last 5% of a boss because I was able to tank him just long enough. That's becoming less common in later content bosses though.

6. As Astrylian mentioned, some guilds are more interested in other things beyond absolutely maximizing progression. It's a lot more enjoyable in my opinion to have a raid where you're moving at a good pace rather than stopping at every boss to sub out your mages because they did their job sheeping trash and can't do the same DPS as a rogue. It's also a lot more fun to me to play with friends (since this is a game and all). I'd much rather wipe on a boss while having fun with my friends than kill a boss in silence because we've got a bunch of "ringers" who don't know each other and don't care about each other.

What seminarca said, as long as you are not in CD (or have the check in your macro) you're OK to pop it.

I'm not the best WWS analyzer, but it doesn't look like your group(and some of the others too) is setup well and overall raid DPS is low. I tanked Brut with 2 BM Hunters, a Survival Hunter, and Resto Shaman(dropping at least GoA) in my group. I think that is kind of the "accepted" Feral group nowadays, it really has good synergy and you will put out wonderful TPS especially with Drum rotations. That should help your DPS open up if threat capping is the reason for some of the low rDPS.

For sure, I discovered that if you rez a player who is in Felmyst's breath they are resurected MC'd. Luckily all he did was go Tree form and skelly AOE killed him

In a way you can and even should be on this task. If its not safe, I always give a quick "don't accept yet, I'll tell" on vent, as I have more overview over the fight and can say when it's safe.

It makes sense, at least most of the time. While I'm doing DPS more than half the time right now, the situation is that I need to have good gear as a tank. I don't need to as a DPS. As such, I should be spending my points on that first and foremost. I'm also not DPSing 100% of the time, so gear given to me for DPS is in that sense a waste.

And honestly, a lot of the best in slot gear isn't drops anyway. Where this tends to be the biggest deal is in a couple of small slots like the belt or neck. Most everything else is badge loot, tier loot (2pt4/2pt6), pvp gear and random trash mobs. And while I don't get the great DPS drops like the rogues or enhancement shamans or fury warriors do (stupid belt of 100 deaths), I do get my tier pieces a lot more quickly. It also helps that a lot of the gear that no one actually wants is perfect for cats; one example is the [Nether Shadow Tunic], which no one rolled on. Only the survival hunter wanted it but he didn't want to spend DKP.

The long and short of it is that it's meant I haven't been able to cash in on the gems for badges money as early as other guildies, but that's really the only hardship. Proper planning ahead of time and making sure I know what to look for and what pieces to go for next are basically sufficient.

It's worth noting that you can get a lot of fantastic DPS gear from ZA, which is trivial content if you're T6 raiding. I'm sure I'll never get [Shadowmoon Destroyer's Drape], but [Cloak of Fiends] works just fine.

I was happy to get [Shadowmaster's Boots] when a rogue tried to claim they were for his offset

Er, Agility is much better than crit rating, anyways. Those two cloaks are really close.

Well, another way to look at it is, at the points that gear really, really matters, (Brutallus, M'uru) people roster Ferals for tanking. I'll take dps loot if no one else needs it. If it's going to help rogues help the raid kill new bosses faster, though...