Cats Only! Predatory Instincts gets choosy.
Did 30% AOE damage reduction sound too good to be true to you too? The developers thought so, and even though the tooltip still reads Cat Form, Bear Form, or Dire Bear Form, the talent “Predatory Instincts” will now only affect Druids in Cat Form. This accompanies the Dire Bear form armor nerf, down to 370% from 400%. Now, supposedly, this will end up balancing Bear Druids and “bring us in line” with the rest of the tanking classes, but there’s been murmuring that we’re back to being “mana sponges.” On October 3rd, Ghostcrawler stated: 
I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but….
Predatory Instincts is a huge nerf. You just haven’t seen it yet. It only works in cat form.
I hinted that this might happen before, but as it was, a druid was going to be the only tank people took for dragons like Malygos. That would have been particularly true for any encounter that was supposed to be a resist fight, because the druid could skip a lot of the resist gear. Your health pool should still make sure you handle those fights sufficiently.
Sorry. I know the nerfs aren’t fun after having gotten a few buffs, but despite some early concerns, we ended up with bears far and away as the best tanks at handling damage. I’m sure you would want us to do the same thing if death knights were that far above the other tanks.
For now, I’m trying to remain optimistic (especially since we’ve somehow picked up a Paladin-esque 20 yard Growl) and came up with a new tanking build last night. This build (0/60/11) assumes a Protection Warrior in the raid group. More commentary to follow.
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Yeah - as suspected, PI got hit pretty hard. I suppose the good thing is that we can now completely disregard it as a talent choice, thus simplifying our build, somewhat.
That build is very similar to one I was toying with this morning.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet, and as I’m not 80 in beta, I don’t really have any way to test it beyond trolling the EJ forums (which is focused primarily on kitten DPS rotations, currently). But you’re right; it really helped me narrow down build choices.
I think I’m pretty much set on using that (until other changes occur) unless we end up running without a Warrior (in which case I may need to pick up FA and/or IW).
At the moment I’m not too concerned about the “mana sponge” issue. It’s an important factor, but I don’t think as important as it once was.
I can only speak from theory based off of my BC experience, but with the removal of downranking may healers are going to be facing a significant increase in overhealing. The ability to elegantly match healing to damage intake is effectively going away.
As a result, a fair amount of the “mana sponge” problem is going to be covered by what would have been overhealing anyway. It’s possible that the difference is such that it goes beyond that level and becomes problematic, but I’m optimistic that the difference won’t be as palpable as it would have been in BC.
As with resto droods Ghostcrawler says:
Your tears are like candy… nom nom nom =)