Just tested this on the PTR; putting Thorns on yourself in caster gear increases damage from Thorns when you switch back to feral gear. This works for HOTs as well (which surprises me; last I had checked, HOT values changed if you changed gear).

That said, unless you've picked up a lot of great caster gear and have spent the thousands of gold to enchant and gem it, you're much better off having a boomkin hit you with Thorns; in fact, you're better off having a tree hit you with Thorns.

Another nerf, more so for PVP than for PVE. (though I start to wonder how blizzard is planing to raise Druid representation in PVP with all those "no-effect on PVP" or "nerf to PVP" changes)

True, a boomkin / tree would (hopefully) have more SP than your offset, but it is nice to know that in a 5 man, or even a 10 if you don't have other druids, that you can significantly up the damage. I believe thorns scales at ~13% of SP, so that is a healthy addition of damage.

That actually sounds more like a change intended to be a nerf to PT in PvE - 30% less damage taken while stunned is a pretty big advantage for a tank on a fight where you expect to be stunned a lot. The current implementation of Primal Tenacity might as well read "We cannot implement any fight where stunning the tank is an important element," since such a fight would favor druids heavily.

Thorns scales at 7% -- WoWWiki as original source, but also tested in-game today. Spire of Sunset (461 SP) increased Thorns from 73 per hit to 105 per hit.

That said, this is actually a chunk of DPS on trash--this boosts the casting druid's effective damage by 168 per hit at 2400 SP, without trinket procs/uses. Placed on a tank, that's about 420 DPS vs. a pack of five (assuming attack speed 2.0). That's 84 DPS vs. most bosses. Brambles is therefore worth about 90 DPS (30 per talent point) vs. a boss with no adds. I'd have to ask a boomkin if that increases the value of Brambles enough to take it.

So, what's better: carrying around a set of caster gear just to cast thorns on yourself every hour, or hoping the boomkin/tree remembers to do it every 10 minutes?

Finding a guild where you don't have to ask that question.

I always recommend ZOMGBuffs to folks in my guild who have trouble remembering to buff. Especially with a 10 minute buff like Thorns, it helps immensely.

I have a DogTag on my raid frames that knows if someone's a tank, and shows T in green when they're thorns'd (yellow if it's about to run out, red if it's gone). Same for Mark and my Aura. Some of my druids are quite perplexed when I tell them they need to refresh their buffs and I'm not even in the instance (on standby in the raid).

I guess that although the R&T change is a small nerf to PvE DPS on static fights where we have enough spare combo points to use FB, it does allow for some scaling again. I'm at 55%+ crit in DPS gear when raidbuffed now, and after I regem everything to agility I suspect that I would be close to 60% with the potential to go higher in Ulduar gear, and as such the 50% crit chance effect was excessive anyway. For druids in BiS DPS gear this is probably a 15% or so loss of FB crit rate rather than 25% as it might appear at first glance.

On the thorns change I'm glad I have collected a decent set of balance offspec gear, although prebuffing in that gear might become a litle tiresome. Time to get the 1 hour thorns minor glyph I think.

Except we're not seeing a change to Stoicism, Iron Will, or Icebound Fortitude. Other tanks have stun reduction capabilities, so instead of making any fight with a stun favoring druids (which I'd debate in the presence of IF) they'll not be able to implement any fight where stunning the tank is an important element without completely alienating Druids, much like Fear effects did from release through Hyjal. If they took all of these abilities away, Druids would still be the weakest of the Tanks in any stun situation given our relative lack of defense (+Miss%) compared to the other tanks. Though I am forgetting Barkskin, which assuming it could always be up for stuns, would represent a <7% reduction in damage taken in comparison to the 5.6% miss (which is of varying average DR) of other tanks. As it stands, this is a PvP nerf to one of the least represented classes (0 in the tournament), and a potential PvE nerf that would violate Blizzard's "take the player not the class" stance