Yeah, I know I posted today already... but I really wanted to discuss this, uh... bonus?

Vengeance is basically a talent that will give you 10% of your HP as Attack Power in Bear Form when people are beating on you. It starts really small, but eventually stacks up to a gigantic amount of AP. Here is what I'm talking about, I have something like 40k hp in Bear Form in PvP, so that means that getting beat on a bit in Bear Form would give me 4k AP in Bear Form in level 80 gear.

"Who cares... 4k AP is important in Bear Form because why?" - You

Look, smart-ass, AP is everything to Bears. Every single thing we have is based off of our Attack Power in our tanking form. It is important because of how we scale as opposed to Protection Pallies/Warriors and Blood DKs. Okay, here's an example:

Savage Defense has been updated in Cataclysm to proc 50% of the time on a critical strike to absorb 75% of your attack power. In addition, our Mastery Bonus further increases this amount by 32%.

Example (Level 80, 4k Attack Power):
Getting beat on to fully stack Vengeance gets us to about 8k attack power, which means a ~7900 absorption on the next attack. WOOF, right?

Not to mention that on beta, with 4k attack power, Mangle is hitting/critting for 2k/4k and Maul is 2.5/5k. With essentially DOUBLE attack power those hits are more like 5k/10k... wait... wait wat?

That's right... your damage output in Bear Form when people are beating on you makes you INSANE damage output. Feral is going to be stronger in PvP in Cataclysm simply because targeting the Feral is going to be a bad idea once the Bear shows up. If a Feral goes to Bear Form and everyone keeps attacking him, he's going to drop HUGE hits on people and take less damage. It's going to be silly... particularly when you factor in level 85 gear and HP pools that are HUGE.

See, Prot-specs in general are not going to be as vicious as Feral. The main thing here is that if you see a Prot Warrior/Pally/BDK, you are largely going to ignore them because their damage will be negligible unless you are attacking them. However, if you see a Feral Druid, the dynamic is different. If you don't attack them, then they will have free reign to Shred you to pieces, but if you attack them, they can turtle up in Bear Form and build up TONS of damage WHILE they're getting super-defensive.

I'm looking at a talent build something like this for PvP:
http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#0ZfrGfozrzrfzbh

One thing worth noting is that FFF now applies 3 stacks on one cast, giving your target 12% less armor and keeping them from stealthing. This is going to play really interestingly, but we do not yet know if Cat Form is still going to have access to FFF or not. The assumption is that it will, but who knows. Another thing to notice here is that I have picked up basically all the damage-dealing-centric talents except for Primal Madness and Master Shapeshifter, and let's face it, MSS is extremely lackluster in its current form and Primal Madness is still too kludgey to use effectively (you end up losing energy in basically every scenario... good for burst, terrible for sustained). I guess one could make the argument that I am not picking up Improved Feral Charge and that is a dps-talent, but it's so difficult to use effectively when FCC rarely takes you to your target, so I don't even consider it, usually. Pulverize might be a decent dps button under all these scenarios, but a patch or two ago, they nerfed the damage because full Vengeance'd Pulvs with 5x Lacs were hitting for 20k... now they're closer in line with Mangle/Maul but with a 6x the ramp-up time.

It is also unclear as to how Vengeance is supposed to work with abilities which increase HP pools. For instance, let's say I'm at the 10% HP mark on bonus AP from Vengeance, then I hit Survival Instincts and get 30% more HP - does Vengeance start stacking up again? If it does, then you're talking about a HUGE amount of AP in Bear Form which could lead to some pretty hilarious damage output.