4.0.1 AMPed

Back in the Spring of this year I started building a feral tanking set for my druid and made it her secondary spec. Though as things have gone, I haven't had much use for it since the healing ranks in our guild are pretty thin. However, that's going to prevent me from staying with feral for a secondary spec now that Patch 4.0.1 was released.
 http://www.wowhead.com/item=50001 or known among other feral druids, the Sack of Awesome).
Tonight I'll learn/set up a feral talent build as my secondary spec. I've done some considerable reading from the The Big Bear Butt (well in reading I mean his thoughts on the new feral builds, even though I love the personal stories) and Kalon over at ThinkTank. It seems that if there was one of the four druid styles that got AMPed, it was the feral tanking tree.

Feral tanks already held their own in tanking before this patch and I felt pretty secure tanking as a druid (though I lack some faith in my abilities to tank, but that's not the class's fault). Anyway, after reading the 2 bloggers above, it appears that feral tanks didn't lose much (if anything at all) in terms of survivability. But they did pick up some nice threat generation tools/talents that should inflict more damage than before (see Vengeance) as well as mitigating damage (see Savage Defense). Getting and keeping threat has always been my problem. I felt I had to get a leg up in pulls and continually tag every mob otherwise someone in the party was going to die. And dead party/raid members get upset pretty quick when the tank fails. But really the big problem was the damage being thrown around by DPS since tier gear is easy to obtain with emblems (now Justice Points).

So threat is great, but what about survivability? The good news here is that ferals now have a "shield wall" sorta. Survival Instincts reduces damage taken by 60% and lasts for 12 seconds. Not too shabby for a 5 minute cooldown. Frenzied Regeneration now increases health by 30% (or up to 30% if you're below that) and if you glyph for it, it won't eat up your rage.

As for gear, Kalon states that the additional armor on leather is gone. So the stats to look for on armor for a feral is to look mainly for those that will help with mitigation (namely stamina, agility, dodge, and mastery). This means that we'll still have a dilemma with rogues when some hot leather item drops like Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder, http://www.wowhead.com/item=50001 (or known among other feral druids, the Sack of Awesome).