Feral druid role in end-game raiding.

This might be immediately obvious to some, but I think I need to explain this anyways.
The reason why feral druids are so strong in end-game raiding is not only for their tanking ability, but more because of how strong the feral talent tree is.

Warriors have been complaining about this forever, but the fact remains that the druid feral tree is so compact that the same tanking spec you use is equally viable as a cat-form dps spec!

How does this affect raids? Well, simply put, a simple gear swap can change you from rogue-wanna-be to melee-tanking-god! This is very key for people wishing to min-max their raid. Most raids, starting as early as Karazhan involve a fight which starts off with multiple mobs and some sort of need for multiple tanks, but inevitably end with a single boss.

Well, say you have 2 protection warriors, tanking a simple fight such as Attumen the Huntsmen. During the 2nd phase where there is both a rider and a horse that need to be tanked, 1 warrior can tank each, no problem. But what happens during the 3rd phase, when there is only 1 boss to tank? The 2nd protection warrior goes to DPS. Very low DPS I might add.

Ok, alternative #2, you have 1 protection warrior and 1 dps warrior. Well, honestly, either of those mobs hit for a decent enough amount that you might not want your DPS warrior in full DPS gear! In fact, he might be in tank gear, and even then, ultimately, he will be tanking a lot of damage. When he switches over during phase 3, how much DPS can he put out? More than if he were a prot warrior, but even then, probably not very impressive damage.

So this is where a feral druid truly shines. You bear form when you have to tank, then switch to cat form the rest of the fight and enjoy some very rogue-like dps!! This extends throughout every instance in the game and every boss I've ever fought so far (and I am quite progressed).

This is why when you analyze the roster of any good guild, you will see feral druids galore.. in instances like Caverns of Time: Hyjal Summit, waves and waves of trash-mobs come at you 16 at a time before finally you have a rather anti-climactic simple raid boss to kill which requires only 1-2 tanks. How can your raid handle 16 mobs at a time every 2-3 min with only 1-2 tanks? It's impossible. 4 might be the bare minimum number of tanks necessary to do it, but even my guild prefers to do it with 5. This is why druids are so great compared to DPS warriors. Even in a dps spec, your tanking abilities and ability to mitigate damage will be head and shoulders above a DPS spec'd warrior, yet as soon as you go into cat form, you can do nearly equal damage (if not more!).

To give you an idea, as a tank currently, I sport something like 34k armor, 20k hp, 52% dodge buffed, yet as soon as the boss comes, I'm 1 itemrack command away from instantly becoming a 3800ap, 44% crit, 8% hit rogue-wannabe. A warrior just cannot switch tanking to dps roles even close to that. That's not even counting the fact that every druid you bring entitles your raid to an in-combat rez and an innervate.

Every guildmaster must love feral druids, even ones who aren't feral druids themselves ;)