Start fight with full bar, DPS, use KotJ, etc. Shift out to cast a heal or two. Bear-->FC, shift to cat (now with a full bar) do more DPS. Maybe I've just gotten use to the way it is now as a Feral PvP'r and see this change (along with other changes in the Feral tree) as giving me 10x the power I had before. Of course, maybe this just puts me more in-line with other classes? I don't know. And frankly, I never really cared before since I just do BG PvP to kill time (not to "win").

I think the mana cost of switching in and out in forms will make abuse of this mechanic somewhat unfeasible, especially looking at the fact that the gear we'll be wearing in WotLK won't have Intellect on it.

Sorry for double posting, but I just found this on Emmerald's forums. It's a very interesting observation, should these energy regen changes stick:

Apparently enhancement shamans are being steered towards using spells such as lightning bolt and lava burst in their standard dps rotation. It could be that they eventually intend for us to do the same.

I'm sorry, but there is no way our mana pool will handle that kind of rotation for a medium duration fight. I do not think this is a feasible rotation.

"Indoors" will still exist for the purpose of disallowing mount usage. The changes we Druids saw are more of a practicality than a sweeping change to the game's indoor/outdoor mechanics. We gained a new CC against melee targets and Feral Swiftness is more of a convenience than anything else.

And frankly, as a feral I would hope our white damage would be more effective than our spell damage.

We wouldn't need to constantly be casting and shifting. Thanks to the buffed Tiger's Fury and OOC we'll be able to sustain ourselves without shifting for longer periods of time. However, if the new energy system sticks around I think we'd have to at least consider the possibility of throwing in a Moonfire every so often. After all, currently with 0 spell damage Moonfire will do over 900 armor-ignoring damage and cost only a global cooldown, much more than we could get in that time span from white attacks.

Hopefully that's not the case. Right now I can get crits of normal attacks in the 600-700 range. I would really hope that I could get more than that in the lvl 80 gear/stats case. And this isn't just a white attack we'd be missing; we'd be able to also do at least one yellow attack in that time as well. We're talking this scenario, right?

0.0 Shift to caster, cast moonfire
1.5 shift to cat
3.0 can do actions

vs. 0.0 shift to cat, gain 40 energy
1.5 can do actions
3.0 still in cat, doing actions

That's a GCD worth of yellow attacks, 1.5 more white attacks vs a moonfire. There will be no lost energy; both take 3.0 seconds of time and will regen 3.0 seconds of energy in that time (so 30 energy). The only time that scenario b is worse than scenario a is if after 1.5 seconds, 40 energy + 1.5 seconds worth of regen is not enough to do a yellow attack.

Honestly, I think it would be better to simply shift twice in 3.0 seconds and gain 110 total energy instead of do anything like moonfire; while you'll waste 10 energy you'll be able to do a lot more with that than you would a moonfire shot.

Besides, Moonfire and Wrath use mana, which is even more precious, now that we can convert mana to energy so much more efficiently. What this does do, however, is not penalized our energy so hard when we NEED to shift out and cast a spell (like Innervate, Rebirth, an emergency heal, etc.)

Energy regen in other forms is a huge improvement. Another use that comes to my mind is using Bear Mangle to keep the debuff up without taking energy from a Shred cycle.

If this is intended behavior I expect Furor to change or be replaced, perhaps with the old swiftshiting (mana cost reduction on quickly returning to form).

The problem with that is that for the same mana as a powershift, for a mangle. I like the thought of weaving other skills/spells into cat rotations, but it all ends up costing mana. I don't have the exact number for mana cost of shifting at 80, but it looks like it's going to be like 1000 or so mana, with natural shapeshifter. Using that number as ballpark, you're looking at 40 energy per 1000 mana, or 1050 mana per 42 energy (shred), and an average shred (averaging crits out) of ~4000, that ends up being ~3.81 damage per mana from shred. Moonfire, for example, (using the same base mana assumption that makes shifting cost 1000) would cost 857, and do an average of 1263 damagge, or 1.47 damage per mana from moonfire. And most importantly, the DPM of shred scales with our gear. The DPM of moonfire doesn't. I like these ideas, lets keep trying them, I'm just saying that with what we currently know, they're definitely DPS losses.

It's interesting to think that powershifting may be so good now, that mana may end up effectively being the limiting power source of cats, such that we may end up doing things like prioritizing BoWisdom over BoMight, or socketing for mana/manaregen, so that we can just remove all waiting from our rotations. With enough powershifting, something like 1Roar-5Bite-5Rip in a 16sec cycle may be even eventually possible.


EDIT:
Our PvP gear very well may be placeholder, and/or that very well may be intended for warriors/DKs, not bears.