A piece of sky / Broke off and fell

The dust has settled in the Druid Preview thread (read: Ghostcrawler finally got tired of being yelled at for changing tree form to a Metamorphosis-like cooldown) - here are the high points that concern feral.  All, uh, two of them or so, because good god did those trees get whiny and monopolize the conversation.

Right into my soup, KERPLOP!
We may be getting haste/crit on Rip and Rake after all.

Most hots and dots, including druid ones, will benefit from haste and crit. The exceptions are things like Deep Wounds and Ignite, which are already tied to crit.

This might just apply to Resto and Balance.  I could understand if it did - it could EASILY make haste into our super-stat in the next expansion, if it not only affected autoattack, energy regen, and OOC, but rip and rake ticks as well.  That would be rather disgusting actually.

I really must state / That I usually hate
Lentil soup, but I ate / Every drop!
On the subject of cats keeping combo points on dead targets for the purpose of refreshing Roar, like Rogues will be able to to refresh S&D:

It will most likely apply to cats as well.

I don't normally get TOO bent-out-of-shape over perceived "unfairness" towards ferals, but in this case, all I can say is:  "It damn well better".  This was as I expected in my post yesterday though.

Delicious delicious / (A bit like plaster)
Interesting tidbit:

It won't be super low level, but we might switch the levels at which you get cat and bear.

This would be a win for the 10-20 grind, for sure.  It'd be zomgawesome, actually.
BUT, it would suck for running Ragefire Chasm/Deadmines/Wailing Caverns - not having bear form until 20 would lock us into DPSing, when Warriors (who get Defensive Stance at 10) and Paladins (Righteous Fury at 16) can start queuing as tanks pretty much as soon as they hit the level requirement.  They don't need to train mail armour or shields, and their bonus threat abilities are right there, not tied to an entire form.  I see them perhaps dropping bear to 16 to match paladins in that case.

On that note, we'd better get a cat form quest if they swap the levels.  It'd be weird to train cat at 10 and then have to do a quest for bear later.

Of course that means they'll just drop the bear form quest...

But so delicious, goodness sake
Finally, something substantial on feral DPS:

 The recent Mangle change is a good example. Other candidates include letting Rake last longer, changing Mangle's damage such that it's not such a gigantic dps loss not to Shred, and / or changing the bonus of Savage Roar so that it's not such a crippling dps loss if it falls off. Using Savage Roar after a target with cps on it has died will help too.

We still want the John Madden crowd to be able to try and maximize their dps. We just want players not playing at that level to not be so far behind (though behind is fine).

So basically, we might be getting 2T9 or 2T8 baseline (and I really enjoyed both of those set bonuses - 2T9 more when it aligned mangle and rake so you always hit them back-to-back, but whatever).  I'm also pleased that I predicted his savage roar comment in yesterday's post.  Maybe GC reads my blog?  Haha riiiight.

Changing mangle's damage though - not going to work.  I'm repeating myself here, but the recent glyph change that leaves them 500 DPS shy of a full JOHN FUCKING MADDEN druid is plenty - much more than that, and there just won't be enough incentive to use shred.  It HAS to do more damage to make up for requiring TWO debuffs AND position.  The PVE differential is fine as is - PVP, the problem can be alleviated in other ways.  One suggestion on the forums I really liked was just having Berserk remove the positional requirement of Shred while it's up, providing the requisite burst damage even when your target has its back to a wall or ledge.

I could have eaten a lentil-soup lake
So that was all the extra Cat cat info that GC came out with in between dodging molotov cocktails lobbed by crying trees.  I feel kind of a little gypped that resto almost completely monopolized the conversation, with barely any follow-ups for feral and basically nothing but one comment on Eclipse for poor Balance.  No confirmation on haste/crit affecting bleeds, no word on better target-switching except for the expected combo point change, but at least he acknowledges that they're trying to keep the JFM ferals happy as well as the casuals.

It's amazing the difference / A bit of sky can make
In sum..

THE SKY IS... SAGGING! REALLY! IT COULD FALL ANYTIME! I'M SERIOUS!

The druid preview leaves a lot more questions than answers for cats.

Haste
Haste affecting energy regeneration is an interesting mechanic (but we knew it was coming a long time ago) - the main question is how MUCH, as it could very EASILY become our number one stackable stat.  Right now even only affecting white damage and OOC procs, it's very close to strength and agility in ICC gear, and only really loses badly to ArP - a stat that's going away in 4.0.  If nothing else changes, for the month or so between 4.0 and Cataclysm's launch, we could well be raiding ICC gemmed for full haste.  This will have to wait for a blue post or beta before we can start really theorycrafting it, and I'm sure this is a value that will be tweaked significantly, even after Cataclysm goes live.

Mangle
Buffing Mangle "significantly" is the only potential sky-is-falling change announced in this preview, and I'm not sure they will actually go through with it.  The reason is, as I pointed out in my first real post here even, Mangle damage is not all that bad.  For being "easier" than using Shred, all you give up even at the sharp end of raiding is something like 500 DPS out of the 10k you're doing.  In PVP the gap is even smaller because you can't be guaranteed to be able to use Shred.  They say they want to do this so that ferals will not be at a significant disadvantage if they can't shred, but that's the entire POINT of a directional requirement ON shred - the extra damage is a reward for dealing with the extra difficulty involved in using it.  If there was no reward, there would be no reason to press the button.

The only time when mangle is currently at a really significant disadvantage to shred is if you're trying to burst someone in a couple of globals, and then you're doing around 25% less damage per GCD, which could maybe let them live, and that's a distinct arena problem (and even then, arenas in Cataclysm will feature larger hit pools, and more armor mitigation on squishy classes - bursting someone in 3 globals will still probably happen, but it won't be such a major part of strategy).  A buff to Mangle damage will essentially make it an equal choice with Shred in PVE, and then people just won't bother with Shred anymore - and helloooooo faceroll rotation!  Not going to fly at ALL with most dedicated DPS ferals.  Mangle buff isn't the solution - I'm not sure what IS yet, but I'm pretty certain that this ISN'T.

Promises promises
The final change affecting cat DPS is whatever other method of making it "less punishing" if you screw up has yet to be announced.  It's a lot of hand-waving right now - they're making promises but won't reveal details just yet.  They might just reduce the amount of damage that SR accounts for and then buff base damage across the board - so you're still using roar, but it sucks less if you drop it.  Or they might have another ability refresh Roar (make it Bite!  Please!  And get rid of the "execute" mechanic!).  Or they might make Roar last longer, or they might make Rake last longer, or who knows.  The idea seems to be to keep the same number of buttons (yay), but make it easier to keep all the balls in the air (somewhere between "eh", "meh", and "boo" - I require details before I panic).

Swat
Getting a real interrupt is a mixed blessing.  Yes, it's GREAT for PVP, and it makes us more useful in small-group content when there's an interrupt requirement (if anyone remembers trying to do Romulo and Julienne without a rogue or warrior?  Or Vezax10?  Oof).  On the downside, it makes us useful when there's an interrupt requirement.  Now instead of happily pewpewing away for Vezax25 or Reliquary of Souls, we'd have to actually earn our keep - and run the risk of wiping the raid if we screw up.  While we're already trying to balance our rotation.  [Desk] hits [Forehead] for 10,000 damage (Critical)

Vrooooom
Stampeding Roar will be a fun toy, charging around with the melee group.  It's actually quite a good raid DPS increaser on a fight like Putricide.  And it will make people CRY in Warsong Gulch.  CRY I tell you.  I can't WAIT for the whiny neckbeard videos to pop up on Youtube.

Whoah man, do you see that?  Trippy, man
Depending on the numbers, we might actually end up using Wild Mushroom.  We might end up popping it on AOE groups after running out of energy swipespamming, or dump it on a boss right before combat starts, or just pop it whenever we have to run out since it's an instant cast.  Will have to see how much it hits for untalented to figure out if it's worth dropping the couple of autoattacks that would be lost.

No, I'm not cribbing off Yawning in this section
So there we go.  One big unknown, a few small ones, and some neat tidbits.  It's not catastrophic (yet), it's not super-exciting (yet), and there are a LOT of unanswered questions.  Some stuff I'm looking forward to finding out over the coming months:
How will weapon scaling work?  Will Rip/Rake/Bite scale with weapon damage, or will they just have higher AP coefficients?  Will our attack speed change with different weapons?  Will Predatory Strikes still increase weapon damage by ~15%?
Will 4T10 (rake crits) just go away, or will that become baseline or a talent?  A lot of classes are getting DOT ticks affected by crit and haste baseline, although I'm fairly sure we won't be getting any further haste benefits...  If we don't keep it, a LOT of ferals will probably be wearing 4T10 deep into tier 11 raids - it'll be tier 4 in Sunwell and tier 6 in Naxxramas all over again.  If we DO keep it, how will they fix us the next time we fail to scale?
What are they doing for our ramp-up time?  Rogues are not only getting to use CPs on dead targets to maintain S&D (I have to assume that we'll get access to this mechanic as well), but they're getting a cooldown that basically lets them take their CPs with them on a switch.  We not only have CPs, we have TWO debuffs that need to be present, and a quarter to a third of our damage comes from a 5-CP finisher that takes 22 seconds to tick off.  This doesn't add up to happy fun times on multiple minion-style targets.

So.  We'll see.  But stop @#$%ing flooding the forum with QQ, it's way too early to get upset over ANYTHING here.
And if we keep the bonus, how will they fix us the NEXT time we fail to scale?