Ghost Crawler explains 4.2 changes (sort of)

Mr Ghost has popped up in a developer blog, explaining what's going on with the Druid changes in 4.2. Here is the scoop:

We changed the values of Agility for plate-wearers and Strength for leather-wearers to reinforce which type of armor you should be using and so we wouldn’t have to spend diminishing returns trying to balance tanks wearing non-traditional armor sets.

Damn my Hyjal cloak has strength on it, so come 4.2 I'll need to pony up for the valor cloak instead. Still, this will then be costing Justice Points.

We boosted Feral damage to compensate for their losing the attack power from Strength. Net DPS shouldn’t change much overall, though burst may be slightly higher. (We didn’t want to buff bleeds since that was a problem before in PvP.)

Well that is nice, although this doesn't change the fact I need to swap out my tanking cloak.

We cut back on the power of Innervates from Feral and Balance druids because we felt they were contributing to too much healer mana.

This actually means Feral innervate is useless. At the moment it is quite laughable really but I do try to cast it during movement phases (Artramedes Air phase comes to mind) on a healer who is squealing for mana. Now I might not bother!

We changed several Balance druid mechanics to cut down on the damage they could do while moving in both PvP and PvE and to cut back on some of their strength in multi-dot fights in PvE. Furthermore, we felt like druids were spending too much time at one end or the other of the Eclipse bar by using dots rather than moving the bar back and forth as intended.

This is accursed because being over powered is fun. From what I read on Wow Insider, this change may not affect Moonkin "gaming" eclipse too much anyway, but we shall see. 

We toned down bear damage, because they were going to do more DPS than other tanks while tanking. Other changes were made to keep bears from neglecting certain core abilities.

Toning down damage is fair enough, threat is really what I am interested in, although beating DPS on the damage meters shows they are slacking, not you are an awesome tank. Is the "certain core abilities" Maul? The attack power scaling on Maul is now 19% but Thrash is 9%, so will Maul be useful again? I must admit, I've been using Thrash instead of Maul and I get more threat, even on a single target, so this change will be interesting.

We redesigned Restoration’s mastery because it was devalued in situations where druids did a lot of raid healing by HoT-ing different targets, especially in 25-player raids.

Huh. Me no heal, not sure about that one!