Their plan for sorting out a cat/bear split doesn't look implemented properly to me yet. The only talents which only affect one form are:

Natural Reaction (Bear)
Nurturing Instinct (Cat)
Protector of the Pack (Bear)

This seems like a shockingly small list to me, which makes me conclude that the proper split/redesign hasn't been done yet, and Natural Reaction and Protector of the Pack were put in (but not implemented) to try and stop people whining about bear survivability in comparison to other tanks while they actually sorted out other things.

Toranshalur: I think the reason for the change is to stop the use of Tiger's Fury's additional energy during berserk, effectively doubling the effect from King of the Jungle.

There's a list on the beta forums - pretty much every class has a DPS test thread on the practise dummies in Dalaran. However, what I'm seeing there things are largely out of whack, with numbers varying between 1700 and 4500 (! - might remember that from a Death Knight AoEing somewhere though). I don't think it's too useful at this point to compare things.

Armour on Live in Bear without buffs: 32208
Armour on Beta in Bear without buffs: 24080

Both values with full Thick Hide.

Additional armour items on Live that were changed for me:
T6: Helm, Shoulders, Chest, Gloves, Legs
Treads of the Den Mother.

Other items I have additional armour on and retain it on:
PvP bracers and belt, both rings, staff, cloak.

It looks like the existing high end PvP gear might be the best "head start" tanking gear, although I doubt it'll last for long considering the upgrade in stats on entry-level epics at 80.

There has been a fair bit of activity on making AoE tanking more "fun" / easier for warriors in the last couple of pushes ... anyone seen mention of anything similar for us?

e.g. TC hits harder and can be glyphed to 8? targets, Shockwave, the damage reflect on blocking ability etc.

We have an extra (melee range) swipe target so far ... still puts tanking Heroic Shattered Halls just under a trip to the dentist in terms of things i'd do for fun.

(In flavour abilities might be improved thorns. AP scaling?, or some kind of frontal AoE roar based ability)

It seems to be a general issue with us - not just AoE - we are going to be using the same 3 buttons as all through TBC (well actually at a certain point its down to 2, when swipe becomes > lacerate)

Now I do agree with the general sentiment on the warrior thread that more buttons is not equal to more fun ... what is equal to more fun is having more meaningful choices to make - when to use cooldowns, when to use situational abilities etc.

Also - looking at some of the loot / badge rewards on mmo-champion i notice tanking necks with no +armour ... which of course are pretty unattractive to us - I wonder if they are thinking of dumping +armour in general as a stat?

I think the changes to feral gear were only half-baked by they had to compile the patch for deployment to the beta realms. Taking off armor and using that budget to pump a stat that's already quite high on the item results in a net loss in gear effectiveness (Compare this to how some stats on warrior gear had the icing lopped off to put quite a bit of Strength on, which is the opposite)

For example, M'uru chest still retains 800 armor this push, among a few other items. They're obviously not done with it. Suffice to say I'll be putting in feedback to get our tier gears (at least T6 and Sunwell stuff) re-itemized "properly" and hopefully see some stuff like dodge*/crit*/expertise rating put in place of the armor, instead of 5-8 extra agility.

* Never thought I'd be saying that :P

Well, let's include ones that are much better for one than the other for a pve raiding build.
*Feral instinct (* bear if you don't consider sneaking important to pve raiding)
Thick hide (bear)
** Prececision (** better for bear once dodge capped, which is easier than parry capped).
SotF (bear)
Shredding attacks (cat)
King of the jungle (cat)
Rend and tear (cat)
Nautral reactive (bear)
Protector of pack (bear)

That said, I've been saying you can get all of the important tanking talents and most of the sustained dps talents with a build like:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...00000000000000

The tanking talents I'm missing are:
Improved Pack - Hurts.
Feral Aggression (-atk)
Tenacity (better not to depend on this for pve IMO)
Rend and Tear - Fairly minor tps per point.
Imporved Shapeshifter - Less than 4% threat for 5 points.

The cat pve dps talents I'm missing:
Improved Pack - Hurts
Feral Aggression - Either a loss or not significantly more damage than rip or rip/roar rotations.
Nurturing Instincts - Nice, but not a dps necessary.
Rend and tear - 10% loss to shreds hurts, but 5 talents is a lot. Ferocious bite is (currently) not that great for sustained dps.
Improved shapeshifter - somewhere less than 4% damage.

Pack is the one that bothers me the most. I'm just not sure what I'd give up for it. KotJ is huge for cat dps. Wounds could go if you always have other tanks around, but I won't always have them. 2 points in tenacity could go, but AoE avoidance helps tanks a lot. Hm...

Judging from the love they just gave the tankadin tree, I'd guess they'll do 1 more pass for the feral talents. I built my tankadin and had points to spare. Granted, tankadins deserve more spare points. They really can't do as much when they're not tanking. But the difference in trees is pretty huge now.

That gives
72.9% Live
vs
66.8% Beta

On beta you receive an extra -12% damage taken which brings its total mitigation up to: 70.8%

So a solid 2% less mitigation. Could you post what your dodge changed to (taking into account new talents and the agi->dodge changes?). My gut says that its not pretty looking, tanking wise at this point unless some new talents come up (at least at 70)

Edit: I was wrong.

What about Predatory Instincts? I wonder if 5/2 Master Shapeshifter is better than 5/5 PI? PI seems to be more of a boost to cat due to the random avoidance it provides bear.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying. The Live armor gives 72.9% physical mitigation, while the Beta armor gives 66.8% mitigation, which means 33.2% damage taken. Reducing that by 12% gives 29.2% damage taken, for an equivalent of 70.8% armor.

Comparing damage taken, you get (29.2% - 27.1%) / 29.2% = 7.2% more damage taken from physical attacks.

Has it been confirmed that Mother Bear/Protector of the Pack is worth 12% mitigation rather than 15%? If it gives 15% mitigation when we move to 71.8% reduction, which comes out to 3.9% more damage taken compared to Live.

Also remember that we will benefit from Inspiration/AF now. On Live Inspiration would cap out armor and give 75% reduction. On Beta it would increase armor to 30100, worth 71.6% mitigation. Coupled with 12% reduction from PotP it would amount to 75.0% reduction, plus or minus any rounding errors.

That's a build that I've been looking at as well since it's well rounded. You lose a little dps over a pure cat spec but could still do great damage when you need to fill a dps role. It also allows for great tanking with very little loss in threat production vs. other specs.

The loss of Pack is a problem. I think the bloated feel of the tree could be reduced by freeing up 2 points from Improved Leader of the Pack with folding the functionality of it into the 1 point Leader of the Pack talent. That would allow a little more freedom with your points and let druids have more of a choice in what they do with their specs. Currently, I feel like there are so many "must have" talents for a particular role that I have little choice in what I take. I don't think that's the aim of the developers.

If simply folding ILotP into LotP seems too overpowered to the devs, they could use the mechanics of Mother Bear (now Protector of the Pack) to nerf it somewhat. It could read "While you are in a Feral Form, all party members within 45 yards have their ranged and melee critical chance increased by 5%. Additionally, each party member's critical hits will heal themselves for .8% of their total health per party member."

That would give us the 4% from ILotP when in a full party but nerf it significantly enough (.8% health when solo) that you don't see bears soloing group quests.