As many predicted Feral nerfs were too severe. In typical Blizzard fashion they handed out seemingly knee-jerk reaction nerfs due to the mass crying from the non-feral community. Any sensible Feral player was ready to admit that while cyclone (and other CC we had) needed fixing they took it too far by making it too clunky to use, and woe betide anyone that tries to cast anything at all vs. a Warrior right now. [Warriors (again, as predicted) are swarming the ladders in true to form OP fashion as Feral did last season. They have excellent damage and burst, great mobility, far too many anti-caster abilities and incredible survivability right now. The one thing they don't really bring is CC. ]
Unfortunately, as the Feral community is significantly small(er) than other class communities, many excellent suggestions fell on deaf ears, and other classes that did hear simply stuck their fingers in their ears and cried nerf without bothering to engage in argument. While we can sympathise with specs like WW Monk & Enhance, this is about Feral and currently there's no reason to bring a Feral to any arena situation because everything that a Feral will do, a Warrior will do better. The only thing Feral brought over Warrior was CC, and seeing as cyclone is near impossible to get off vs any 1500+ team, there's no reason to bring one to the table.
What's irksome is that one justification they gave for nerfing all the CC was that they're planning on removing a lot of instant CC from the game. However, there hasn't been any changes to other classes, let alone the folly of giving a melee class a cast time CC.
However, instead of lamenting about the situation I think that a few things could change for the better with only minor effect on Feral balance. Here are some options were we can choose ONE:
1. Allow cyclone to be cast in form while the PS buff is active. The buff is still dispellable. (and training the feral was a perfectly viable strategy last season as well, it it's pretty much foolproof this season).
2. Increase cyclone to 30yd range for feral. The cast time would be the same and Feral expends a lot of mana when casting any spells and healing, so an increase in range only would have a minimal, albeit nice QoL effect.
3. Allow hibernate to be used on humanoids and made instant via the PS buff. This is the least desirable change as it's another instant CC, however it would be dispellable and breaks instantly on damage.
4. Allow Nature's Swiftness to be baseline. Once a min instant CC would be hardly game-breaking. This is a really good option (Submitted by Whitepaw - thanks)