Ghostcrawler and the bears

The developers have been communicative to an unprecedented extent (for them) during the final phases of Wrath of the Lich King's development, but several classes and specs still have concerns. One of those is Feral Druids. We've been set up to tank as well as anyone, and DPS as well as most (not with the same spec, but dual specs should make this easy to handle). However, we still have some obvious weak points. For instance, take mana in PvP. Our class's defining feature is our ability to shift between forms, but if we have a puny mana pool (as most Ferals do), we can't do this very often.

Ghostcrawler has a "Feral Q&A" thread up where he answers several questions that he's noticed people asking around the boards. Unfortunately, we're not necessarily going to like a lot of the answers, which (in this blogger's opinion) tend towards "working as intended" and "it's fine, learn to play." To be fair, he gives much more nuanced explanations, but that's the bottom line in most cases. That may be because Feral actually is fine, but I definitely think there are some valid concerns. Protector of the Pack is just goofy the way it is, as well as taking away the fun of being super-durable while out soloing. Swipe should really be 360°; every single other tank class has a 360° AoE, and we don't really have anything to compensate. And don't get me started about feral form customization (which GC says is coming eventually, but they've been saying that for years).

Edit: fine, I'm convinced about 360° Swipe. 180° is fine. But the overall point is that Bear feels a lot like Warrior with a lot of stuff taken away or nerfed, although much less so now than before.

Later in the tread, some interesting discussion on itemization pops up. As you may know, there is absolutely no leather with bonus armor in Wrath; all leather pieces just have whatever amount of armor they would have naturally. This is pretty much because they don't want as many pieces that are only useful for one spec; extra armor is next to worthless for anyone other than a bear druid. The problem of weapons and jewelry with armor on them is one that the blues are considering; at the moment, a trinket with armor is almost overpoweringly enticing for a bear, and it would be better for us to have more choices. In a similar vein, Feral Attack Power on weapons is something they're looking at (since again, FAP weapons are only useful to feral druids), with a possible eye towards basing FAP on the DPS of the weapon.

I'm glad to see they're thinking about the class moving forward, but I really wish we had something in the way of form customization on day one of Wrath.