Be prepared for a massive wall of text. This discussion is pretty intensive as well so it’s worth the read if you play a druid.
ETA for Feral model customization / Feral mana issues
It is very, very dangerous for us to pre-announce features. Players tend to be remarkably unforgiving if features get cut or priorities get rearranged. That’s why we are always going to give you a vague answer on when we’re going to implement a major new feature. Despite your personal intentions, we’ll get a lot more flak for ZOMG BREAKING PROMISES than for not making enough promises up front.
The Feral mana issue is different. That is a game design problem not an art bandwidth problem. We have a lot of ideas on how to change Feral mana if we decide we have to. We aren’t immediately going to implement every change that players ask for though, for what I assume are obvious reasons. (src)
Feral Druids
On Savage Roar, if the issue is giving it the “Dash treatment” so that when you go back to cat it’s still there if the duration hasn’t expired, then that seems like something we can do.
On the armor trinkets, my answer was not that armor isn’t an amazing stat for bears — it is. The question was basically something like “I’m going to only look at armor on trinkets and never trade them out,” and my answer was that I doubt many bears will take that approach. I understand the strategy in BC was to attempt to max out armor. That may still be desirable or it may not be, largely depending on the encounters. Stacking armor is smart. Stacking armor at the expense of all other stats is not smart. You’re going to have to decide when to make those choices as all tanks do.
On the PvP mana issue at 80, I want to understand something. When you say the amount of mana you spend to shift and heal at 80 is proportionately more than at 70, is that because you have some Int on your gear now? We’re not trying to be stubborn about this. One of the trickier parts of this job is discerning between when players are complaining because a mechanic legitimately (in our minds) doesn’t work, or when they just don’t like that we took their class in a different direction than they would have taken the class (or to be fair, when they are asking for buffs just because they want their character to be more powerful). (P.S. Getting snippy or exasperated, even if it’s just to demonstrate your passion for the change, is never going to convince us as much as objective logic and cold, hard numbers.)
Heart of the Wild was designed in part so that you healing wasn’t terrible when you threw on some healing gear to get through an encounter. It wasn’t supposed to be the solution to Feral mana.
On wearing PvP gear to tank, I still don’t find those arguments very strong. I just picked one piece at random but I think the same is true with many of them. If you are only looking at Stamina, yes, you can find PvP pieces with more. You could wear green “of the whale” or whatever to have huge amounts of Stamina too, but most players don’t do that. I realize maintaining threat is trivial at level 70. I don’t think it will be that easy at 80. Consider that we did just buff boss armor, which is a nerf to bear threat. We also designed Naxx to be pretty easy in part because early Karazhan was not. But that doesn’t mean you’ll waltz through all the Lich King raid content. As a secondary (or tertiary or whatever I’m on now) point, also remember that we did buff tank damage. Part of that is because we want tanks to contribute damage. The days of tanks stacking nothing but effective health and relying on the rest of the group for dps are over. You might find an enrage timer that you can’t hit because your tank’s dps is so paltry.
TLDR: Are there some PvP pieces that might be useful to wear in your tanking set? Sure. Are all bear tanks going to PvP to get that gear and ignore PvE drops? I kind of doubt that. You are giving up a lot of stats to get marginally better Stamina and in some cases Agi. Resilience is completely useless for bears outside of PvP (where it will help with mana drains etc.) (src)
Your web is great, I learned something
about WOW here.