The new shred idol gives 203 extra shred damage.
The current terror idol gives 65 agility.
There is another idol wich increases rip damage by 21 for every CP.
The new PvP-Idol increases the AP by 94 to 120 if you mangle.
The old T6-Idol gives 94 AP too.

Powershifting is dead: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t26297-d...54/#post871207

Edit: That post is fairly old, Furor has since been updated to restore up to 100 energy when fully talented. It still doesn't give you any additional energy though, which is what powershifting relied on.

Depends on whether it's raid or individual damage dealing, I suppose. I would think that the [Idol of the Raven Goddess] would still come on top for raid DPS, so which idol is being used would largely be moot.

As I pointed out in beta forums, this does have one nice benefit - shredding attacks is no longer a must-have talent for feral druids wanting to do seriously competitive DPS.

It's not that hard to do a cat build that has both feral aggression and MS without skipping anything particularly relevant for cats. If it turns out that shred is not that much better than mangle and mangle is better CP generation, a cat could skip shredding attacks too.

Are you sure on that? The 20 crit rating added by Idol of the Raven Goddess amounts to less than 0.5% crit at level 80 while the new Shred idol (Idol of the Ravenous Beast) adds 203 damage per shred. I don't have any numbers to say for sure, but I don't think you can blindly assume that Raven Goddess will still be the superior raid DPS idol at 80.

2 pieces of sunwell T6 might well be worth holding on to. That way you won't lose any T7 set bonus.

15% Mangle threat is a shit ton, especially with Berserk. Not that threat matters at all at the moment, but if things ever scale to a point where DPS is threat capped, I'd drop 1k hp and misc other stats just to get that boost.

Knowing Blizzard's (justified) record of adjusting bonuses so that people aren't forced to do obsolete content for an edge, I wouldn't be surprised if set bonuses were adjusted for many classes.

If it is, the developers will nerf the set bonus. I can't imagine that they want players wearing TBC items on WOTLK raids.

I don't even think that's true. If you have 2pT6 mangle is hands down a winner over shred. If you don't, it's less damage per energy point but more CP per energy point. As the table before shows, Mangle is only behind Shred by 6 damage per energy point at 9k AP but gives 20% more CP. That's a close enough value to make me think Mangle will be better if only for smoother, more reliable cycles and more adaptability; mangle does not require mangle to be up for max effectiveness, for instance.

.5% crit to the entire raid is probably a large enough boost compared to 203 damage per shred. With a standard melee and hunter group (which I realize is not exactly applicable any more, but I digress) you're looking at 8 spots + a tank or three that will get the crit bonus. Is 10 people getting .5% crit better than 203 damage? Depends on their crit rate, I suppose. In the best case (which isn't realistic) you're looking at 10 people getting a .5% DPS boost compared to adding 133 DPS via the idol. Which is basically having those 10 people do 2.7k DPS, roughly. That's the best case though; the worst case is them having a very high crit rate, in which case they'd need to be closer to 5k DPS.

It will clearly depend a lot on your raid makeup and your raid performance, but at the very least it should be considered.

The 2T4 proc rate diminishes each level past 70. At lvl 80 it no longer procs at all. There was a blue post on it 6+ weeks ago.

2pt4 was already nerfed, FYI. It scales down to a 0% proc chance at level 80.

I'm not sure why the devs preferred to obsolete shred rather than simply removing its positional requirements. It's not the choice I would have made.

What if instead of nerfing the base armor of bear form they just removed points from thick hide? A 400% armor increase and the first point in thick hide is a 5.2 multiplier. Or they could just remove thick hide completely and put natural reaction into that spot, so if they're nerfing druid bear form armor, we may as well get some freed up talent points to deal with the bloat of the feral tree. If removing thick hide completely is too much, adding a 1/2/3% armor bonus on one of the tanking talents: Protector of the Pack, Survival of the Fittest, or Natural Reaction would end up putting the multiplier at 5.15.

The solution of reitemizing feral weapons to not have armor to reduce loot table bloat would work better than a base armor nerf as well. Neck, ring and trinket armor has to remain due to sharing with death knights.

Perhaps Blizzard intended to nerf the armor as a way to hurt resto pvp as well, though I don't think it's the most elegant solution. Has moonkin armor also received a similar armor nerf? It would seem strange if a pvp geared feral had less armor in bear than a pvp geared moonkin.