The Daily Blues

Almost all of the responses about rage as it applies to warriors also apply to druids. Maul is changing to be an instant attack that hits a lot harder when you have a lot of rage. There is no reason to assume that means bear threat must suddenly drop. It might if we made no other changes, but we won't do that.

The only big difference off the top of my head is that druids have a higher crit rate than warriors when tanking, so they may generate more rage when tanking. But there are ways to adjust for that, such as e.g. letting warriors get more rage when they block.

We've said before that we think bears don't quite have enough to do while tanking, especially given a talent tree that asks a lot of its players while doing dps. That's something we'd like to fix for Cataclysm.

We're just not sure yet on DW Blood tanking or 2H Frost dps. Certainly our main focus will be to make sure 2H Blood tanking and DW Frost dps work, but we're not likely to crack down on alternate uses of those specs. We're not sure that a Blood DW style could work without talents that allow for strikes with both weapons, but we'll see. It should be a fun beta. :)

I think they are more along the lines of this:
Anytime the character goes afk they start to lose gold at a rate of 1 gold for every 10 seconds.

So are Shaman losing Purge, or will they have Purge (which removes buffs) as a base ability and Cleanse Spirit (which removes curses and for resto magic buffs *and* debuffs) alongside it?

This is something we're still working on. We will still have abilities that remove 2 effects. One design is that all shaman have Cleanse Spirit (curse) and Purge (magic on enemies), and then Restoration can talent to allow Cleanse Spirit to also remove magic. Another is that shaman have one button that does all the dispelling to free up key-binds. The point we were trying to clarify above is that the ability to remove curses is a base shaman ability.

This has always seemed a bit strange to me. I would think that Druid's nature based abilities would be a natural to remove diseases (as opposed to Curses).

It's dangerous territory trying to defend game changes (or arguing against game changes) for lore reasons. While we take the lore very seriously, it's a slippery thing that can be used to justify opposite points of view. For example, in our minds the mystical, yet perhaps provincial nature of druids and shaman make them well-suited for focusing on healing afflictions of the spirit (curses). Meanwhile, priests and paladins have a connection to urbanized society and advanced medicine (relative to a medieval / Renaissance / fantasy time period anyway), and are therefore more qualified to heal afflictions of the body (disease). Druids have a strong connection to animals and plants, so perhaps understanding the nature of toxins and venom makes sense. While shaman have an affinity for elements and spirits, you can stretch that too far and say that because they are tribal healers they should be capable of removing any malady that might strike down their people. It's all very malleable stuff. We're also not above evolving the lore when we think it's absolutely necessary.