Not to mention the fact that Rend and Tear is only useful for cat soloing if mobs generally aren't even close to dead by the time you hit 4-5 CPs. If you're entering Northrend in greens and dungeon blues, that may be the case, but otherwise it'll likely only be useful for soloing elites. There are definitely talents I'd rather have.

I doubt it. My bear is currently plowing through outlands at lvl 65, wearing blues and greens with one epic (X11 goggles) aimed at hybrid tanking. Generally on the occasions I get to 5CPs, the mobs are already dead, or so close it's not worth wasting a finishing move on them. I rip after 3-4 CP and move on (or FB if nothing else is close). I suppose I could move into the highest zones already and start fighting orange mobs, then they probably wouldn't die so quick. But I always find leveling goes faster fighting green and yellow mobs because things don't zerg you as much and you just go where you want and never stop rampaging. I want to finish all the CE quests anyway, that alone plus some instance runs seems to be enough to outlevel the content massively. I think I may get to 70 on this guy without doing a single quest hub where I don't need the rep.

If I can get him a few good bits of kara/ZA/badge gear before the expansion, I'm guessing he'll be even more OP than he is now in early northrend. Let alone if I were already raiding T6 with him. My mage never got close to Sunwell (can't do it even post nerf, we were only 1/2 way through T6 when patch hit), but he takes out lvl 72 normal mobs like they are so much newspaper to light on fire, and my cat is now doing dps similar to what my mage did at this level, even though I have a bear build and avoidance/stam gear.

Are they really trying to tune cat dps down? The only change i saw was to tiger's fury, which could arguably produce a lot of burst, which is why they changed ret paladin skills. It might have been pre-emptive nerfing for pvp because 131 damage is a ton on such a short cooldown.

Agreed, it is mostly the stuns, both from new talents and the excess of ret pallies. Despite the nerfs ret still melts faces very quickly at 70. It is not so bad at 80 on the beta but right now don't even bother attacking one you wont win as feral without backup. Mages have gotten somewhat worse as indicated above. On the bright side we can now viably take out a warlock that isn't afk every 3 minutes.