Feral AoE and Interrupt Concerns

AoE:

Cats and to a lesser extent Bears suffer from some of the lowest AoE damage and there are quite a few fights already where both burst and sustained AoE damage are required (Maloriak, Halfuss).

Cats have only one multi-target tool, Swipe, which is ineffective and expensive. Two abilities already in place for Bear could be brought over and given additional functionality to solve this problem. I believe the question of Bear threat could be addressed within the same abilities.

Suggestion 1: Give Infected Wounds a damage component and make Infected Wounds spread to targets in range by Thrash (through a Glyph or Talent). Give Cats a version of Thrash, but with a longer cooldown and increased damage. This not only solves an issue of damage/threat, but gives Bears a way to debuff large groups of mobs similar to DKs and Warriors.

Suggestion 2: Give Thrash (Cat Form) the glyphed or talented ability to spread Rake to all targets effected by Thrash. Give Thrash (Bear Form) the ability to spread Lacerate to all targets effected by Thrash. Damage modifiers on the spread bleeds could be tweaked to bring the damage in-line with other melee AoE damage.


Interrupts:

On the question of interrupts Skull Bash (Cat Form) is inferior to all other forms of melee interrupt. The charge component seems to be the reasoning behind keeping it awful. There are a few very simple fixes through glyphs or outright changes that would bring it in line.

Simply reducing the energy cost to 15 would be enough to bring it in line. An interesting glyph such as Glyph of Kick could also be introduced to refund energy on a successful Skull Bash, therefore making the increased cost something skill can avoid.


AoE and interrupts are where I feel weakest when raiding current content and if we don't scale to be gods of single target DPS (which we likely will not) then I can see many Ferals being replaced in their DPS roles due to the lack of utility. <em/> <em/>
While I agree that cat AoE isn't exactly stellar, you can't make IF spread on an AoE without removing the snare component.
That could be part of the Glyph/Talent tradeoff on the Cat version. I'd have no problem with that change. The idea is to have options rather than a single ineffectual and expensive button to spam.

For Bears I could see the spread Infected Wounds having the snare component reduced dramatically. This would make Bears viable in fights that currently only Prot Warriors dominate such as Nefarian adds. The duration on the snare could be reduced as well, so you would be forced to reapply much in the way Shockwave currently works to control adds.
just make a claw or thrash spread the mangle / rake / pouncs debuffs amongst all the mobs hit by it and refresh the same on the primary targeted mob without it affecting infected wounds at all.