Good night for my guild last night; two progression kills. We took out Reliquary of Souls on our first really focussed night and then had a first kill of Mother Shahraz for dessert. The Mother fight isn't that interesting, but RoS is quite a workout for a feral druid. I still don't quite know what I should be doing there.
Reliquary of Souls is the fight where Blizzard says %26quot;druids aren't warriors or rogues%26quot;. The encounter requires special rogue and warrior abilities that we just can't do. In Phase 1 you really need rogues with Evasion to tank the enrage parts. In phase 2 you really need a warrior main tank to spell reflect the Essence of Desire's Deaden ability back on her. Phase 2 also requires that the Spirit Shock be interrupted and, as always, the druid spell interrupts don't work on raid mobs. And while a druid can tank phase 3, the Essence of Anger's Soul Scream ability does a mana-burn like thing on your rage bar so that a bear's amazing rage generation is actually a liability.
So for RoS I mostly end up just doing straight up cat DPS. Even so, there's a few druid tricks that are helpful.
First off, before you encounter the boss you have to run a little gauntlet of light hitting mobs. They're no big deal but it helps to have a feral druid tank them (bear form, cat gear). In phase 1 we make pretty good fixate tanks; switch to bear when you get fixated and dodge enough attacks and you can hold at least two rounds of fixate. And once phase 1 is over Rebirth is a big help; inevitably someone died during the fixate phase and you can fix it. I used the battle rez pretty much every other attempt.
Going into phase 2 is like a bit of relaxation; there's really nothing we can do but a cat DPS rotation. The fight is a DPS race, though, so go all out. One mistake to avoid; don't shift out of cat form to drink a health potion towards the end of phase 2 because you may well not have enough mana to shift back to cat form. And watch your own health, 50% of the damage you're doing is reflected back on you. If you get a couple crits in a row you may want to slow down a bit. At least LotP helps your whole party heal itself.
Phase 3 is where you can get clever as a bear. At the very start of phase 3 our warrior MT got initial aggro. Then I taunted off him, then he taunted back off me, giving us both the Seethe debuff. Seethe gives its victim 2x (or 3x?) threat, just perfect for the main tank to build a threat lead. Just be sure you're standing on the MT in bear form when you do the taunt handoff, then don't attack until Seethe wears off. Even being careful I got myself killed at the start of phase 3 a couple of times, need to work on that. That rage-burn (Soul Scream) is really nasty, I wonder if I'd be safer in cat form?
Reliquary of Souls is quite a crazy fight, Blizzard clearly put a lot of time into creating unique game mechanics for an unusual encounter. Sadly some of those mechanics really require warriors or rogues and there's not a lot of call for druid cleverness in this fight. But we can't always be the hero, and between Leader of the Pack and Rebirth we have plenty of reason to be in the raid.
(As for Mother Shahraz, that fight is just a straight tank-and-spank. I went DPS, and honestly the hardest thing was having the shadow resist gear. Offtanking's even simpler; you're just standing there to split the Saber Lash. If you get the Fatal Attraction then just use Dash and run the hell away from everyone. Other than that stand there and shred her and you win.)