People who followed the WWI may remember Tom Chilton, aka Kalgan making reference to a Dire Cat form when answering a question about new models for Druid forms.
Chilton said that “Dire Cat form” would have its own model, and Dire Bear form may receive a separate model from the normal Bear form. Since then, Druids have been eagerly awaiting more news about this massive change, but their hopes were dashed today, when Blizzard Class Designer Koraa said that the new form wasn’t going to happen any time soon:
[blue=http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8202533456&pageNo=1&sid=2000#8]We have no plans to implement a “Dire Cat” form at this time. “Dire Bear” exists for the sole purpose of upgrading the Feral Druid’s armor value to match the Warrior/Paladin etc. (Druids get no shield)
We do, however, intend to allow Druids to be able to use items and enchants with procs in forms, which I believe will work in the next beta build (don’t hold me to it though)...
...I think what Kalgan meant was that we intend to do different texture variances for Druid forms, including Cat form. Which is true, though not sure how soon we’re going to get that. They may come from a repeatable quest, or through inscription.
Regarding the “Feral Range Bug,” that really is not a bug. Have a Warrior, Rogue or any melee class play without using a snare and you’ll encounter the same issue. The issue is that the server and client are not sync. When you try to do damage to the target, while your client shows him on your screen, the server disagree’s and gives you an error. Snares help alleviate the problem, which is what we’re giving Feral Druids in the form of “Infected Wounds” for the expansion. [/blue]
So Druids, looks like it’ll be a while before we see anything like the image below, which was submitted for a Blizzard competition in 2006. Shame :(
Well… I guess I’ll be the first to say… Friggin bullcrap! I mean, yeah, I understand that they need time to do this and everything, even though we all know they have tons of people making models and putting stuff into essentially a "Beta WoW" server to test it out for themselves, but still…
I don’t see why we aren’t going to get a Dire Cat Form "Any time soon". Since that means at the least 1 year, since it’s like the riding crop thing, they said they were going to put it in the game "soon" and now it’s in WotLK.
As far as I see it, there would be nothing wrong with adding a Dire Cat Form as long as it was a slight upgrade, and not Overpowered. I’m sure Blizzard could get it into the game by the time WotLK gets out and have it at a nice area…