One bit of advice I give new feral druids: hotkey your form shifts. It's very useful to be able to quickly switch to bear or cat in a fight. It's also fun to shift to crow quickly. Before I hotkeyed forms I used to think of my feral form as a big permanent decision, %26quot;ok I'll be in bear form this fight%26quot;. Now that switching forms is like just another spell, I do it a lot more fluidly. I use ZXCV for the shifts.
I'm just now experimenting with using macros to make form shifting more reliable. The problem with the default buttons is they're toggles. Press the bear button and you shift to bear. Unless you are a bear, in which case you shift to caster form. Which can be a real disaster when you're tanking. So for now I'm trying the following simple macros:
/cast !Dire Bear Form
/cast !Cat Form
/cancelform
These macros shift you into bear form, cat form, and caster form. They always put you into that form, they don't toggle. The cat form macro also acts as a powershift macro, if that's your thing. I'll see how this goes; I'm still used to the toggle behaviour, now I have to train myself to press a new button when I want to be an elf. I was surprised how often I do that even with auto-form-shifting on spell casts.
PS: does anyone have an addon that helps them manage macros? The default Blizzard UI is awful. Looking for something that helps pick icons more easily and generally manage a macro library.