The stock out of the box UI supports keybindings. It also supports multiple bars and macros.

Correct, but they are advanced features. You and I are way too smart, yet there are plenty of casual idiot players in WoW. The game has work for dumb monkeys as well as mensa players.

Just to clarify, Maim is not nerfed. It's not just that it breaks after a certain amount of bleed damage, it just breaks after a certain amount of TOTAL damage. Direct attacks do *not* break it. You can get a bunch of bleeds up, maim, keep autoattacking, shred, and it stays maimed.

<wipes egg of his monkey face>

Ooops! I forgot pounce and ravage. Dang that's quit a few buttons for 1 form.

Quickly switching gears so you will forget about my past transgressions, how are you going to deal with the influx in new skills in the Xpac and their impact on your UI?

For bear, there is just Berserk and i have plenty of space for it, plus it will be rarely used due to the long CD, so i bury it somewhere "out-of-reach".

For cat i see Feral charge, Tiger's fury (not on my bar today), Savage Roar and Berserk. I don't see myself using cat form FC all that often as it is primarily a PvP skill and Berserk has 5m CD so I can bury it. But a new finishing move and the, now required, TF! Not sure i have that many keys within reach! ugh! WTB n52 for left-handers.

As for cat dps scaling, it looks like we are starting to go into the right direction, but not fast enough.

The changed scaling on OOC will improve the value of haste, but with a base 12 energy per second regen (including KotJ), the 3.5 free attacks per minute being worth around 2 energy per second, it amounts to just 1/7th of our yellow damage made scaleable by haste. The gap with rogues is larger though (They tend to get 65% to 70% white damage to our 45% to 50% in TBC), so it would be welcome if haste would reduce the cooldown on Tigers Fury as well, to effectively double the yellow damage improved by haste.

After all, with the change to WF totem to provide melee haste instead of a main hand weapon buff, Rogues will benefit from freshly hasted off-hand attacks as well, meaning they still get a 1.75 1.2 / 1.95 = 7.7% buff to their white damage compared to our 20% buff to white damage, so its contribution to closing the scaling gap is smaller than hoped, and should be addressed somewhere else.

The change in crit chance scaling for Agility is partly welcome as far it will ensure that agility is no longer the outstanding stat to stack (Agility being better for crit than crit rating was bad design), but instead of giving us 5% extra base crit to compensate for the loss, it would have been nicer to up the scaling on agility a bit to 33 1/3 agility per crit from 40 agi / crit. While keeping with the same effect with 1000 agi (live 40% crit, both versions 30%), it would not introduce another non-scaling factor.

As for our new finisher, I am afraid it will be expensive to keep up. We have no equivalent to the 45% extra duration Rogues have on SnD, we have no combo points given from finishers, so it looks to be put into a rotation alternating with Rip. Something like SR, M, S, S, S, wait energy R, M, S, S, S wait energy, which would expect you to give two 5pt finishers for a total cost of 25+30+2*34+6*42 = 375 energy. Take out the 100 energy you can wait on, you would need to regen (375-100)/21 = 13 energy per second, which can be achieved with our new OoC and TF energy return, with some part of the cycle without Savage Roar up, depending on your crit rate and luck with OoC procs.

The new glyphs for mangle and rip duration should help there (unless you already factored that in).

Don't forget about powershifting! With the change to energy regen, Powershifting will become significantly more powerful for energy management than it already is today. That should bridge the gap, I think.

It leaves you facing toward the way you jumped to get to the point just behind the target. Not a big deal if you mouse look, you've got time to change facing while flying through the air.

They can go on your stealth bar, not your cat bar, so they don't count. Anyway, limiting to 12 seems rather arbitrary, I doubt there's many non-druid players with only 12 abilities they could possibly want to use at a time. It seems inevitable that if they're going to add new abilities every expansion eventually something in the default UI has to give (maybe the secondary non-paged bars turned on by default?)

As far as scaling goes, obviously the energy mechanic brings a natural comparison to rogues. But if Ghostcrawler's post is to be believed and the intent is to have a more cat vs bear build, making cat ferals DPS who can tank a bit, shouldn't the comparison be to fury or arms warriors?

Most of the posts here seem related to concerns about dps scaling, arena viability, etc. Personally, I'm more concerned about something else I've noticed:

1) The very real possiblity druid tanks won't scale well due to a) a limited number of stats we care about b) caps for one (maybe 2?) of those stats, c) a lack of itemization / gear availability.
2) A general lack of good tanking gear itemization / availability.

As I see it, we got two big changes to survivability:
- No crushing blows (benefits us more than other tanks).
- No need for defense stat. This would be a huge boon if we could turn all of that item budget into armor, agi or sta, but...

The latter is nice, but it actually worsens problem 1. It gives us an advantage early on, when other tanks are playing catch up on armor and crit immunity. In TBC we wanted defense to crit immunity then armor, sta and agi (dodge and expertise aren't awful). Now we just want armor, sta, and agi (dodge rating and expertise aren't awful). Once we cap armor (very possible, at least for trash), we only care about sta and agi. It's very difficult for us to scale with only 2 stats. Agi may even need to cap (I personally think dodge + miss + parry needs to max at some reasonable number). And, it's hard to itemize gear for a class that only wants 2 stats. It's worse when no other class wants those 2 stats together. Gems and enchants will help a tad, but other tanks have gems and enchants anyway, so...

Making these stats scale better doesn't fix the problem. It just makes us more likely to start OP'd and scale poorly when these few stats cap.

For gear, what gear are we supposed to tank in? Rogue gear has no extra armor or stamina. Tank rings, cloaks, trinkets, and necks will likely include defense, str, parry, block. So druids either tank in sub-optimal gear or be limited to gear designed specifically for ferals (tier gear and other items that would otherwise rot?)

I'd like to see how they plan to give bear tanks gear availability and continuous scaling. Personally, I think we need to have 1-2 more stats that benefit our survivability, even if that means armor and agi are slightly less valuable for bears.

BC wasn't exactly dripping with tank gear in earlier content but it did have some such as the ring from ramparts and the chest piece from Hellfire which both lasted me a long time. I expect we'll see some added itemisation early in WOTLK so that Druids entering Northrend with 10k armour can get enough survivability to do the job. That or a mechanic change reducing the need for specialist pieces.