From what I read. They are basically "gem" slots on your toon (not equipment). You get 6 slots (Inscriptionists get 7). 2 greater, 2 lesser (intermediate??) and 2 minor. They are permanent though you can replace them. Just like gems.

This was changed a little ways back. But powershifting remained viable because instant-reshift was enabled at the same time (I think).

As he said.

For istance with the new talent and energy mechanics, powershifting when needed (this is how the program works basically) I reach (with the stats wrote down in my previous post) about 3200 dps. Without powershifting at all I reach only 2400 dps. That's basically a 33% increase in dps (all yellow).

They've started a thread on the beta forums about which bosses are immune to IW and which aren't. So it looks like both sources were correct (some bosses are currently immune to IW).

With these changes wouldn't Wolfshead Helm - Items - WOWDB possibly be better than lvl 80 epics?

I think that may hinge on when furor and wolfshead give you energy. On Live they lag behind by about a sec. I'll get on beta in a few min and edit in here how that actually works.

EDIT: Wow, this is pretty cool:

A) Wolfshead seems to have been heavily nerfed, though I can't exactly tell how. I saw it work a couple times, but its effect either now has a long cooldown, or only a small chance of working, or else how much energy you get from it scales down with level, or something. With how fast energy flies by now, and no addon to track this, I couldn't tell for sure; it may have been giving an extra 5 energy on shifts or something, but it certainly wasn't a noticeable difference to me.

B) There's still a ~1sec lag on Furor... but it only seems to be on switching to cat form from fully being in caster form. Just using a powershift macro in cat form, it seemed to be instant. My energy never hit 0 when shifting in cat form. And it doesn't lose the energy you regen during the powershift latency anymore, either. You tell it to powershift, with a 300ms ping, and 300ms later, you've got 43 energy, it looked like to me.

C) Furor rage is broken in this build... I think. Shifting into bear gives you 1 rage, whether with just Furor, or with Wolfshead too. However, I think it may still be counting the rage, server-side, or something, because several times I'd powershift and then get hit by some tiny attack from a non-elite 70 and it would jump me up to like 25 rage. Not sure about this, whatever the case is, it's not working right, so best to just wait for them to fix it.

D) I was testing this up in Skettis. The fluid energy regen is really really awesome. I was able to kill the Skettis Forestragers (the big tree guys, I farm them on live for herbs all the time) using 29energy mangles combined with Tigersfury and 2 powershifts, and had a mangle/powershift on every single GCD, as each GCD ended. I used berserk on one too, and could barely use my energy fast enough.

The old version was 4% for the attack speed (datamined), only the tooltip said 10%.

The thinking is almost certainly that with 10 man raid progression to the bitter end, it just does not work to have only one class capable of applying a significant attack speed debuff unless you want to make that one class essential in all 10 man raids, and that's plain bad design since, with 10 classes to choose from, a significant number of 10 man raids will run with one or two classes missing, and making a single class a point failure would really hurt many raids over time. If it is changed to 3% per application now, that puts warriors at 20%, paladins at 20%, and death knights and druids at 15%, guaranteeing that no matter which tank you are using, you will have access to a significant attack speed debuff on boss fights.

Now, infected wounds being what it is (a disease), it would be unsurprising to see some bosses immune to it at least on launch of the expansion, same way that (logically, we'll all admit), several bosses were immune to bleeding effects at the start of TBC, only have to have said immunity removed when it became clear just how much it was hurting us.

I specced feral last night for the first time in beta, and it was kind of absurd. I'm wearing all T6/BT gear, basically a mix of stam and agi for casual tanking (I don't have a feral dps set), and was killing level 70-71 mobs within a single energy bar. I think I topped out at a 7.6k FB crit. It was pretty crazy.

I'm 95% certain that the Challenging Shout cooldown reduction to 3min has been there for 2 weeks, just the major news sites never said anything about it til now. I did Utgard last week, and used it frivolously, enjoying the short cooldown.

Don't get too excited. There are reports on the beta forums that armor values are currently bugged at zero and resulting in much higher-than-normal physical damage.

I was wondering about SotF, would it be possible to leave one point out? I reckon we still get some defence from items as rings, necklaces and cloaks? putting that one point in infected wounds should be enough to get a stack up and running. it would save some precious talent points.