[Druid, general] Yeah, I heard there wuz a Cataclysm

No excuses; I've just had too much stuff going on recently. But I'm around. Fortunately, awesome bloggers galore are out there.

For starters, on cat DPS: don't use the built-in weights of wowhead for cat DPS. They overvalue mastery and undervalue agility and weapon DPS significantly. Instead, use the great results that were generated by Mew and provided by Alaron at Fluid Druid. The only thing I've done is save the filter that he used in a link - he did all the heavy lifting, and even did a gear list for cats that is mostly complete.

For your bear needs, I point you to the inconspicuous bear, who really rocks. Hasn't done a gear list yet, but a lot of it looks much like you'd expect it to - stuff with sockets and stamina for leather, stuff with lots of stamina and dodge on jewelry (though the jewelry looks competitive from both dps and tank side). A quick and dirty bear weighing can be found in the Elitist Jerks bear thread for both pre-heroics and post-heroics. As pointed out by Alaron, the important thing isn't to quibble about how close things are to each other, it's to get something in the same tier of good gear - and towards post-heroics there really aren't that many choices.

I've updated the sidebar with the quick wowhead links too.

Why dodge and not mastery? With mastery getting nerfed after 4.01, dodge rates already fairly low, crit rates WAY lower and overall things hitting you for metric butt-tons of damage, mastery doesn't work quite as well. When you can regularly absorb every non-dodged attack by 8-10k, it's great. When it works about 1/3rd the time, absorbs only 8k out of 80k, and isn't reliable? Compared to dodge, it's crap.

On leveling: well, chances are you're already 85, exalted with everyone and raiding. If you haven't started yet, I would recommend (as a druid) doing Vash'jir. It's not nearly as populated and seal form gives huge, huge benefits to a druid in the zone. However, as soon as you hit 82 get to Deepholm and do as much Therazane (specifically, this questline which opens from this one) as you can. Then get 83, do Uldum, then once you're 84 do Twilight Highlands. Don't bother completing each zone at this time; the leveling gulf is brutal, and it's much more efficient to quest in the harder places.

One of the things I'm going to work on is a set of gear that you might miss if you don't do all the quests and where to go for those. That's mostly because I like that sort of thing. If you'd like to see something else, please ask.