It looks like it's designed to be identical to Fan of Knives. The area of effect is slightly different, but aside from that it'll likely be the same. It gives us comparable trash utility to Rogues, that's all.

Check your numbers. It's been shown on multiple occasions that losing bonus armor for rings/trinkets/etc but gaining it from SotF will be a buff to all bears that aren't in the best +armor 25-man Naxx gear (notably [Defender's Code], among other things), and a slight loss for them. If anything, it's exactly the opposite of what you're saying--a buff for most of us, a slight nerf for the way over-geared.

Flowing Cloak of Command, Enraged Feral Staff, Badge, Offerining, Amulet of Wills, Nerubian Ring, Iceforge Battle Ring in my case. 5-heroics, nothing more. Even if I would reduce the equipment to nothing from heroic instances, for example the Enraged Feral Staff with the Kirin Tor Staff of Shrouded Mysteries and the armor ring from the juwel crafter it would still be 1k to 2k armor loss.

And yes, i assume that every serious bear druid will have something like the torta neck or the ring of earthen might. I do not assume a bear druid in green "of the monkey" leather as a standard setup for heroic and raid instances.

Just an example for the most basic tanking equipment for every serious bear in LK, before the bears enter any heroic or raid instance:

Head: Headguard of Retaliation
Neck: Torta Oversized Chocker
Shoulder: Trollwoven
Back: Flowing Cloak of Command
Wrist: Drake Champion
Hand: Preserved History
Waist: Trollwoven
Leg: Mind expanding
Feet: Jormscale
Ring1: Iceforged battle ring
Ring2: earthen might
Trinket1: Badge
Trinket2: Commendation
Weapon: Shrouded Mystery

Armor pre patch (without any buffs): 29 100 Armor
Armor post patch (without any buffs): 28 400 Armor

Almost 1k with the most basic of normal tanking gear. And with every armor trinket, weapon etc it gets worse.

Only rogues have the option to spec into Blade Flurry for addiitonal mutli-target damage as well as having more than double our energy return, making for a superior set of aoe DPS tools. If anything I'll likely cat swipe twice with a 1 point SR then go bear to finish the pull.

"Remove Curse and Abolish Poison can now be used in Moonkin form."

Apparently blizz forgot that remove curse already could, but the abolish poison change is a huge buff to moonkin pvp (And useful for boss encounters where poison cleansing is at a premium).

What am I missing here. If you have 30000 maximum health and pop SI at any time, you gain 10000 HP for 20 seconds (old). Now if you have 30000 maximum health, and pop SI when you're at 10000 HP and in threat of dieing... you gain 3000 HP(new?).

How exactly is this a buff?

And regarding SoTF addition, I don't see a reduction in armor anywhere. Is this a buff to overall bear armor, or a compensation for something else that I haven't seen yet?

Gigantic buff for soloing, too. Too bad I already finished Zul'Drak...

The armor changes are a nerf if your bonus armor is >= 45% of your total armor, which a top of the line naxx druid was. If you are in full Wrath blues then it should be a buff, however if you are still using some TBC tier/PVP gear then it may very well be a nerf for you as well.

Not as far as I can see; unless I have made a mistake in counting the armour on the gear you list, you appear to have a total of 3242 base armour and 2107 bonus armour on the items(Flowing is base 140, bonus 364 as far as I know), which means that currently the armour on the items should be providing (3242+2107)*1.1*4.7 = 27650 armour, while they would provide (3242*1.1*1.66*4.7)+2107 = 29930 armour post-patch for a gain of 2280 armour.

(And if you choose to dump the [Flowing Cloak of Command]in favour of [Durable Nerubhide Cape] at that point, you'd lose 354 armour and 26 defense rating and gain 4 str, 36 sta, 49 dodge rating, and 21 expertise - a favourable tradeoff from a tanking perspective)

If you replace the [Commendation of Kael'thas] with the [Offering of Sacrifice], that would give you 2657 bonus armour instead of 2107, for 30497 armour now and 30480 armour post-patch for a loss of 17 armour.

If you do that and throw in the [Enraged Feral Staff] for another 385 bonus armour we get 32487 pre-patch and 30865 post-patch for a loss of 1622 armour.

What is the difference in our calculations that gives you so significantly different results from mine and allows you to construct scenarios where you can lose 2-3k armour without having anything from Naxxramas? If there's an error in my calculations, I'd dearly love to know it - which base and bonus values have you been using when you got that result?

Absent such an error, everything I've seen suggests that those with under approximately 30k armour from armour sources at the moment are unlikely to feel it as a nerf, and that it is entirely possible to have armour items in all relevant slots without losing the 2-3k armour you wrote about first unless you are pretty close to best in slot equipped, and that, as such, it is very likely that there'll be considerably more "normal bears" that feel it is a buff than there'll be who feel it is a nerf.

It's 45 energy, since it's affected by ferocity. Taking into account the extra 120 energy per minute from tiger's fury, and the extra 3.5 cat swipes a minute from OOC, that works out to 19.5 swipes a minute by my calculations, or roughly 2 bear swipes for every cat swipe.

You have to consider that cat swipe will be doing significantly more damage than double the damage bear swipe does. Cats have more AP than bears, cat swipe will do 260% weapon damage, you can have savage roar up, you can use tiger's fury, cat specced druids get extra crit damage. Because of this I think cat swipe will be a better option than bear swipe. I figure it to do a bit over 50% more DPS than bear swipe for my gear as a tank specced druid, although some of that is won back by bear maul (if rage is available) vs cat auto attack. Not incredibly blow it out of the water better like some may have hoped for, but still better.

The armor change does seem like a buff over all. In my feral gear (offspec feral, so a few badge pieces and a few items that i'we got from 25naxx that nobody else needed combined with heroic/rep gear) i have 37k armor at the moment. According to my math i'd have around 35k after the patch, which in itself currently is a slight decrease. The change will however allow me to switch what then becomes negligible amounts of armor (offering of sacrifice being the most obvious one) to pieces that give a lot more avoidance or stamina.