Ah, true. That wouldn't be so hard though, but it does point to dire cat likely not having any weapon speed modification.

Windfury weapon is a 36% proc when dualwielding, although I'm not sure why that's pertinent to a feral druid thread. As for dire cat, my best guess is that it will offer different skins and have its base damage scaled to 93.2DPS, the same as an ilvl 115 blue 2hander. They certainly won't change base weapon speeds without modifying all of our abilities to fit, although I could see inscriptions offering proportionally smaller base attack speed changes-- and being highly prized if so.

IMO the only problem for feral PVE DPS scaling is our relatively crappy white DPS. Two possible reasons: 1. there's no haste effects like S&D/flurry 2. we're single wield so the AP gain on white attacks only applies to one 'weapon'.

I'd rather have a talent simply increasing sustained white dmg than any flashy stuff further increasing our yellow dmg, cus our yellow damage is already fine.
Windfury scaling is a good start.

Are you certain that a 'Dire Cat Form' won't simply just be a cosmetic change for level 70/80 Cat Form rather than an improvement on the existing form? It just seems that there's no real need for it given that the only reason there's a Dire Bear form is so that Bear Form would retain similar AC to the class that it's aping.

EDIT: Whoops, that'll teach me to not read. I, of course, meant Armor Class, not Attack Power.

Actually, the reason behind dire bear form is the warrior/paladin switch from mail to plate at level 40. The attack power is pretty minor.

I would love to see dire catform as an alternative to catform rather than an upgrade or simple skin change. For example, they could position dire catform as the feral PvP form (maneuverability, escape from CC, snares, cheat death analogue, and so on but no rip) or as the melee group support form (innate infected wounds proc, finishing move for a 2%/combopoint groupwide haste, etc, but slower energy regen).

Something like that is what I expect as well. Boring, though. Giving dire cat an "off paw" would be a much more interesting mechanic.

An "off paw" although an interseting mechanic would mean that it would either have to be faster or the same speed as our "main paw". That would lead to some absurdly fast attacks for spell pushback in pvp as well as some very nasty reflective damage from Molten Shield and Thorns. Add the additional dual wield miss rate, I think its safe to say Blizz wil stick to the 1.0 speed single paw.

Although, now that I think about it, that could simply be addressed by changing the weapon speeds to something along the lines of dagger rogues. And that would also make +hit heavy rogue gear, far more apealing to ferals and work well with Blizz's new gear homogenization plans.

What concerns me about Dire Cat form though, if it is simply a different scaling of AP or adjustment of base weapon damage, we'd be essentially losing one of our wotlk "spell slots" to something rather inconsequential.

Not as absurdly fast as you may think. Ask a dagger rogue (if you can find one) with some haste gear what his attack speed is with slice & dice up.

Cat form has always been sort of an emulation of a dagger rogue. Adding an off paw attack with the usual dual wield damage/hit penalties would fit perfectly with this. Besides making it possible for ferals to use more of the +hit heavy rogue gear, it would give cats a bit better white damage scaling.

I'm trying to picture a cat sitting up on it's back legs and clawing with both paws at something. All I can see is a cat playing with a toy on a string. They need to add more bite or pounce type attacks instead.

Back when the stun finisher for WotLK was being called 'Gnaw', I was thinking there needed to be a followup attack called 'Nom', with a low energy cost and damage but increased damage against stunned targets. So your attack sequence would go, Pounce Mangle Shred Shred Gnaw Nom Nom Nom.

They could always make the druid lie on his back and attack with both the fore and back paws. Real cats do it all the time!

More seriously, doesn't the current Cat Form attack animation already alternate paws? The only change it'd need is so that one paw is always used for main hand attacks, while the other is used for off hand attacks.

That would actually be a pretty damn cool way to implement dire cat. And giving us "dual paw" would kind of make sense if they're still trying to make druid and rogue items the same, since it could actually lead to us having too much hit.

Having our white damage scale better thanks to a dual wield mechanic would definitely be nice, but I wonder if there would even be a point to stacking hit past yellow capped since we probably wouldn't have anything like combat potency.

It wouldn't be as useful without a specific DW-friendly mechanic as hit is for combat rogues, but it's still a cheap and effective DPS increase. It would make it easier to share gear with rogues if both of you got at least some benefit out of hit gear. Your preference would probably be similar to Mutilate rogues, which prefer agility over hit, but still use hit as their main yellow gem on gear with good socket bonuses.

However, the problem i see with using +hit heavy gear, is that our dps gear would then prove much more inneffective when it comes to tanking. Currently, OTing in dps gear isn't too bad due to the heavy stacking of agility. However, any +hit over the soft cap would prove useless in bear form. This in turn goes against Blizz's gear homogenzisation plans since there had been speculation that we'd be able to use dps leather to tank with.

Following on that, it seems likely that rather than an "off-paw" allowing druids to make use of extra hit, it is more likely that Blizzard will simply itemize most of the leather with low amounts of hit and let the rogues socket what they need (thus keeping the leather items usable for bears).

So there is still no word about a mechanic that would let cats profit from haste to a similar extend as all the other classes?

This is very disappointing, because the inferior haste scaling thanks to a 55% to 60% yellow damage ratio cats have is the main reason cats became seriously subpar dps in T6+ content. Haste already increases rage generation (via the more damage done mechanic), so why cant it be changed to also increase the speed of your energy ticks? That would fix the scaling issue.

Infected Wounds - (Tier 10) Shred, Maul and Mangle have a 20%/40%/60%/80%/100% chance to stack a disease (stacks to 5) on the target reducing movement and cast speed by 10% per stack. Lasts 12 seconds.

I believe that this will make a feral druid optimal for arena's of any bracket. Does anyone agree?

Also with the new talent Berserk - (Tier 11) 100% increased energy regeneration in Cat form. 20% increased total health in Bear form. Can't be stopped unless killed. 20 seconds.

Does anyone believe we will be able to keep up with a rogue's dps?

If a cat can keep up with a rogue's DPS, either the cat will be nerfed or the rogue will be buffed. (Will just throw that out there.)

Ferals do certainly look much stronger however, and yes, I would imagine infected wounds will be very good in arena (might be some synergy with a death knight partner there too).

I was thinking the same, maybe a slightly hybridized form which translates parts of defensive stats into offensive stats, effectively being the catform for tanks running out of tanktargets, or their catform to DPS if it might happen a new tanktarget comes up midfight.

I am reminded of what was said a while ago on the German forums - how cats would get Barkskin in forms. That never happened, but could possibly go towards the Dire Cat.

It would only make sense at the cost of a small amount of energy, also bark skin should be able to be used in bear form at the cost of some rage. I don't understand why our limits while we are shape shifted are so small. You could always wonder if Blizzard would take out Nurturing Instinct because it's such a useless talent and add something like "Feral Barkskin".

Eh, that would obviously make to much sense to them and they probably wouldn't put forth the time and effort to do such a thing.

I have to refute your point about Nurturing Instinct - I find it hugely useful even in PvE encounters.
+20% healing taken with all the AoE damage flying around in TBC raids is useful, no two ways about it.

I do believe original post was even talking about Dire Katze, though that seems to be the general german term - and it certainly was far enough back in time that I seriously doubt that was any 'real' knowledge about WotLK.