GC posted a slight hint about it last week so this isn't shocking.
There is no reason for Druids not to be able to use them now that they share the same stats as Hunters... and Staves aren't really much use to Paladins, DKs, Warriors etc..

I don't think the reasoning was ever stat sharing. We've always used the same stats as hunter except FAP. I think it was more lore based decision in the beginning.

If you ever looked at the original manual for WoW it said that Druids could use Spears (the original name for Polearms). I would assume it was lore-driven, but it's possible it was for other reasons (druids stacking melee stats and going round hitting people to death?)

Yep, looks that way -- black ice seems to be the only viable consideration (as mentioned on the previous page) for people who have access to the existing staves. So the shortlist for people who generally have access to 25-man gear and down appears to be: Journey's End, The Undeath Carrier, Staff of the Plaguehound, Inevitable Defeat, Black Ice & The Jawbone unless I missed something.

Wowhead Item Comparison

Anyone looking to take advantage of the Darkmoon Card: Greatness for dps/pvp purposes will be rejoicing about the possibility of finally having a larger pool of weapons to choose from in order to get their Str up past their Agi in pvp/dps gear.

Shortlist for that seems to be Journey's End and Inevitable Defeat, or the craftable Titanium 2H Mace if you don't have access to Naxx10/25.

And is it just me or is The Undeath Carrier the clear winner in the Agi/Sta dept for tanking? At work right now, so my research capabilities are limited, but the limited amount of dodge and miniscule amount of armour on other options seem outweighed by the double dip of Agi/Sta?

Polearms were originally two separate weapon classes of spear and halberd. It was done to keep with the D&D theme of druid don't use metal, in other words sharp pointy sticks are ok but sticks with big a big axe head at the end were a no-no. However due to there being a total of like three spears in the entire game (and very few halberds) they scrapped the whole distinction and just said polearm.

And Strength, which is why all the Feral staves are being changed from having Strength to AP in the patch. Speaking of which ..

[Journey's End] is having its Strength changed to AP in the patch.

And yea it should be fully obvious what kalbear just said. Despite the armor multipliers not affecting the weapon slot, [Origin of Nightmares] remains the best mitigation weapon because it has more defensive stats than the other options. It's the same for neck/rings/cloak, [Boundless Ambition], [Keystone Great-Ring]/[Gatekeeper] and [Cloak of the Shadowed Sun] all remain best in slot, because even though the bonus armor isn't getting multiplied, it's still another defensive stat that the other options don't have. The only place a serious shift is happening is trinkets.

I'm reading around that Blizzard may try increasing Swipe's threat by about 50% to help out our relatively poor and fiddle AOE tanking mechanics, is there any druid boffins out there that can confirm what I suspect about swipe outclassing lacerate on single target tanking easier with this change? I don't know about anyone else but I think Blizzard should consider doing something interesting with the bleed aspect of Lacerate rather than it being an afterthought of the static threat generating main attack.

swipe has had its threat boosted by 50% to see if it helps with druid aoe tanking or not. anyone notice an obvious help or is it still something you have to use every single gcd?

I dont feel they need to adjust lacerate even if swipe is bumped up an 50% threat. Lacerate is till good threat, and its bleed is not insignificant (mine in full tank gear ticks in the low 800's) and easy/cheap to refresh. The only thing that really changes is that swipe jumps up a position in the threat rotation. You'll still want lacerate up and constantly ticking.

Brute, I did some math in another thread, and for fairly low values of AP and crit that does not appear to be the case. The lacerate stack can't compete with swipe on a per swipe basis.

I think that not having to do any lacerates except in 5-mans and the occasional odd 10-man is a poor decision. Swipe shouldn't be both the best single-target threat generator and the best multi-target threat generator.

But you're right - I did misunderstand what you meant.

You can plug those values into Rawr right now if you're ok doing some item editting.

For me personally, it seems that (based on a 4500dps, 13600ap, 48% crit, non-expertise and non-hitcap raid buffed model), [Black Ice] ends up being 6.3% better than [The Undeath Carrier].

[Journey's End] is 11.2% better than [Black Ice], and 17.3% better than [The Undeath Carrier].

I don't know enough about Hunter modeling however to see how attractive an option [Journey's End] will be to them.

[Journey's End] will be roughly on par with [Betrayer of Humanity].
I.e. best two-hander
However will still be slightly behind running two 1-handers from KT (because of enchants)
(Note: Most of the other staves are sub-par because of Expertise/Armor)

And there will be plenty of smart guilds who won't let the hunter not touch Betrayer because of all the Plater wearers where it is BIS.

Swipe is not the best single-target threat generator. Maul is, followed by Mangle. Swipe and Lacerate are competing for third place.

I agree that it would be a more elegant design to want to keep a Lacerate stack going, but that will require adjusting Lacerate, and then probably all the other threat generators in order to rebalance bear threat. For a quick&easy change, getting 50% more threat on Swipe in exchange for using more on single-target (where you will now also have more threat) is pretty sweat.

I think the point is kinda being missed. Single target threat hasn't been an issue since 3.xx. I still expect to be keeping a full stack of lacerate going simply due to the higher dps it offers (not to mention in 5-mans where there might be no other bleed effects to increase my maul dmg).

You can't forget Beace's point, though: if Swipe spam becomes superior threat compared with keeping up Lacerate, you still have to answer the question, "Does it matter?" If Swipe spam is 100 TPS better, but you're still 1000 TPS ahead of the highest DPS, the threat difference is minimal and you care about the DPS difference between Swipe spam and keeping up the Lacerate DoT. Once it hits a full stack, the Lacerate bleed is very high damage per time cost (1 GCD every 15 seconds), and you would do more damage with that GCD than you would with a Swipe against that target. Given how blues have been commenting regularly since the overhaul of tank mechanics that they want tank DPS to matter, it's reasonable to say that they're okay with giving us a high DPS but slightly less TPS ability to use in situations where we can spare the threat to add to DPS on the boss.

Right now most bears could keep up threat on a boss using maul alone. So no, threat doesn't matter hugely. It still is a bad design if lacerate's primary use is for DPS and not single target TPS; at the very least it's very counter intuitive that an ability that 'generates a high amount of threat' generates less threat than an ability without that statement. It's even less intuitive that that ability would result in the highest damage than using a damage-only ability.

Well lacerate also has the minor benefit of causing threat when you are not hitting the boss and is the only bleed bears have to bump maul threat up (assuming you don't have a rogue, kitty or DPS warrior).

As people have stated, tps isn't really a concern and if you are going all out on threat then now it seems swipe spamming is the way to go. The point has been made that the bleed effect of lacerate generates good DPS and will tick away on situations where you for some reason go out of range of your target.

Thus my point again, if the bleed effect is now the most important component of lacerate, why not run with it and forget the 'generates a large amount of threat' and work on the synergy druids are getting with blood.

I did some tests on the PTR, and I can confirm that Predatory Strikes does not affect the AP that got converted from str when they changed feral weapons. Therefore the conversion is in fact a nerf for us, since we can't benefit from SotF or Kings for that AP. I'm guessing that blizz won't change this, since the talent was obviously intended to only affect FAP since feral weapons always had str instead of AP in the past.

The weapon I used to test this is [Origin of Nightmares], which gives 2085 FAP and 154 AP. In cat form, equipping OoN increases my AP by 3039 on the PTR. Considering the 100 agi it has, I had to reverse engineer the total AP formula, and came up with this:

(2085 FAP)*1.2*1.1 + 100agi*1.1*1.06 + 154AP*1.1 = 3038.2 AP

The FAP gets multiplied by 1.2 from PI and 1.1 from HotW, the agi gets multiplied by 1.06 from SotF and 1.1 by HotW, and the AP only gets multiplied by 1.1 from HotW.

That sounds like a bug which should be reported if druid DPS was balanced around the existence of that talent before.