I'm pretty sure it used to be Berserk. Why does it not have a dps bonus on it?

Defender's code is still +5.6% TTL from armor, +10% dodge with 1/6 up time, coming out around ~+7.3% TTL. That makes it a very good tanking trinket, but no longer a godly trinket.

Just because they are removing the mod on armor doesn't mean it still won't work for us. Armor will still be usefull, but we now get to make a choice about getting slightly more mitigation, or something else. instead of passing up 50% of our total mitigation.

(4) Set: Your Shred ability deals an additional 75 damage, and your Lacerate ability does an additional 15 per application.

Not at all for cats, you could argue for it for tanks.

But honestly it just seems like a mistake, all the other feral-set-bonuses from tiered items have had bonuses that help both bear and cat individually. Seems weird that they not only would stray from this setup, but also give something worthless like that.

The 4 piece T7 bonus is consistent with the other tank sets in that in increases the duration of your damage reduction ability by 3 seconds. The other tanks get 3 seconds added to Shield Wall, Divine Protection, and Icebound Fortitude. I agree that it's strange that this bonus does not help our dps in cat form. At the same time, the T5 2 piece bonus didn't increase our dps either. Overall, I'm very happy neither of the bonuses is wonderful, as we won't be obligated to keep wearing it for instances 2 tiers above the T7 gear level.

Meant T5 (2) set. Regrowth is used all the time when we raid, right? So it's not at all the first time one of our set bonuses is gimped.

The feral T7 (4) set is pretty weak even for bears though (compare it to DK (4) set for example - 50% dmg reduction every minute, and also 1 min cooldown).

True.

I think the suggestion is to go 1 AP > ~2.5 Armor and not how you've stated it. That would net the loss of 15k armor if above values of AP and armor lost are fair. Yes it could influence what bears are assumed to be buffed with but that doesn't mean that we would be nerfed in 10 man content. They're not going to assume that we have the same amount of buffs in a 10 man raid as we do in a 25 man.

That being said, it could lead to Bears being better in one or the other depending on the buffs you receive. If you get talented Might/Shout and Kings vs neither you are suspect to 750 less AP or 1875 less armor. Groundbreaking? Doubtful. Noticeable? Yes. It would be possible that we could receive +AC based solely on Str instead. Being 1 Str > X AC. Where X is greater than 5 so that you gain the missing AP from Agi.

Overall I'm happy with the changes. I'd rather not be pigeonholed into another Badge of Tenacity situation where something low level is the best you can get. However, I said this a long while ago but I would like to see us scale off of either AP or Str so that we do scale from tier to tier and it adds some variability to our item desires.

On Feral weapons: does the feral AP on weapons count towards our item budget? From my understanding it doesn't. This would need to be the case to have a trainable skill let us convert weapon damage into AP otherwise we would be double dipping. This along with an AP/Str > AC would allow the removal of feral only weapons and let us take other weapons; possibly even 1 handers with an off-hand.

I was actually more concerned about the 2 piece bonus relative to the other tank bonuses. Warrior is 10% Shield Slam damage, Paladin gets 10% more Hand of the Righteous damage, and we get 5% Lacerate damage (not sure about DK). Based on the numbers Astrylian posted a few pages back, for the damage bonus to be equivalent, Shield Slam only needs to hit for 1k or so for the Warrior bonus to be better. Does Shield Slam have a threat multiplier or a static component like Lacerate? Either way, the Lacerate bonus seems paltry at best. While I appreciate not having bonuses that we end up keeping for 3+ tiers, it'd be nice to have a little parity. Hopefully it'll change, given that a 3 second Rip bonus doesn't make a lot of sense either.

The difference between a normal heroic run without any real melee buffs, versus raid buffed, is well over 1500 AP for me on Beta (Kings, SoE, BS, UR), you are saying there should be a 4k armor difference depending on class specific buffs, which is a 10-15% migitation difference. Groundbreaking? No, but it is extremely bad design for one tank to rely on every single class specific offensive buff there is in order to have a compareable migitation to all other tanks. If druids end up like that, and thus take 10-15% more damage in heroics with a caster composition, do you really think that people who struggled with heroics in TBC, will be able to do well with that druid tank? A 5% difference is small, a 15% difference is something that should raise some eyebrows. I'm fairly confident it will be a mix of both AP -> Armor and an increased armor talent in deep feral, but we will see.

The downsides of working... I see Abradix make the same point I was going to make.

To reiterate - I am really not interested in seeing my armour fluctuate by 2k just because the Enhancement shaman didn't show up for the evening and I have no Unleashed Rage going.

Tying Armour to AP is a recipe for disaster. Last 2 minutes of the Boss Fight, the boss Frenzies (or enrages or whatever it's called) and your Enhancement Shaman bit the dust 30 seconds ago, the DPS warrior goes down just before he can refresh Battle Shout and your mitigation drops to an all-time low...
No thanks.

Similarly, unless Feral Attack Power is specifically discounted (reducing the scaling effect), it'll tie us much more closely to those weapons unless they want to rebuild the entire system by the next expansion or whenever they're aiming to get rid of that FAP thing.

So I decided to check out some armor values, and what the new bear form multiplier would have to be for this not to be a nerf.

Assumptions:
-Max armor for every slot using ilvl213 or lower gear
-Desired criteria is no armor change while wearing the same gear

Armor from the 8 leather slots: 3326
Armor from rings/trinkets/neck/cloak: 3178
Armor from weapon: 714

Total armor as it would stand, from items: 37317

Total bear multiplier to get the same armor wearing the same gear without the bear form multiplier an anything except leather.

3326*X + 3178 = 37317
X = 10.26

So everything else being left as is the bear form armor bonus multiplier will have to increase to ~926%. It should in fact probably be slightly higher to account for the fact that we would be wearing some lower ilvl items simple because they have bonus armor (hi Offering of Sacrifice).

I would expect crying of epic proportions if blizzard announced that the bear form multiplier was being increased from 370% to 926%, regardless of what was said around it.

Another option would be to introduce bonus armor on leather items again, however this would counteract the exact reasoning behind the change in the first place (gear homogenization, ease of gearing). I suppose another decent option would be to introduce bonus armor on the druid feral tier pieces only.