The Warrior and Druid Q&As were released last week, but members of the World of Warcraft community team have posted some answers to follow-up questions for both classes due to player feedback.

Warriors now have answers to two more questions that focus on Heroic Strike and the gear dependency. The team doesn't like the way Heroic Strike works or they way rage generation works, but hasn't changed either yet.

Druids get answers to six more questions about topics such as shred, bear and cat charge, Warstomp, interrupts and stuns. As far as Balance and Feral is concerned in PvP, the team feels they're underperforming but hasn't buffed them because Druids have a great PvP spec and they don't want to give everyone the ability to chain CC or escape mechanisms.

You can read both the Warrior and Druid Q&A additions below.

Druid

Q: Players feel that the effect of Feral Cat Charge isn’t as good as the Feral Bear Charge yet the cat charge has double the cooldown. What is the reasoning behind the cooldown difference of these two abilities?
A: Feral Charge Bear mirrors warrior Charge (15 sec), while Feral Charge Cat mirrors Shadowstep (30 sec). They are really different abilities. We just had to put them on a shared cooldown to keep the druid from using them back to back.


Q: Are we satisfied with the damage that Shred does without a bleed/mangle effect on the target compared to how much it does with the bleed effect?
A: Shred ultimately needs the bleed requirement and the positional requirements met to make it work optimally. We buffed Mangle to make it a better button in PvP when you can’t get the most out of Shred. But Shred still does great damage when you can use it.

Q: What is the reasoning behind leaving the positional requirement for Shred in the game after removing this requirement from the Rogue ability Mutilate?
A: The analog to Shred is Backstab, which is positional. We like the positional requirement because without it, Shred is just a damage ability, and we think the positional requirement is one of those skill cap issues that lets good Ferals do more damage than mediocre Ferals. Really though, the underlying issue here is that we are happy with Feral damage in PvP. Also remember the secondary benefit of positional requirements, which is that the enemy often needs to keep in movement to keep you from getting behind them.

We don’t think Ferals need to do more damage to be good in PvP. What they need to do is be able to survive (while in cat – they do okay in bear), and the fact that if you’re looking for a melee partner, one who brings Mortal Strike might be more attractive.


Q: Players felt we are not giving much attention to balance and feral druid PvP concerns when their arena success is very limited. Can you give us a more definitive answer on how we feel about these specs in PvP?
A: We wish there were more teams with Feral and Balance druids on them, and wish we saw more Feral and Balance gladiators. In short, we think they are underperforming. The reason we haven’t showered those two specs in PvP buffs are because: A) Druids have a great PvP spec they can use, while hunters and perhaps warlocks and shamans have none. B) A lot of the specs that are underperforming are doing so because they don’t have the ability to chain CC or multiple escape mechanisms. We don’t want to give those to every class. We’d rather change the PvP environment to where those aren’t all necessary. We also want to de-emphasize the 2 vs. 2 bracket and emphasize BGs a lot more so that the entire PvP experience doesn’t come down to the synergy you have with other classes. And again, it’s not necessarily that their abilities don’t cut it – it’s that when you’re putting a team together, a mage or rogue might be more attractive.


Q: What is the reasoning behind allowing Warstomp to be useable in Tree of Life and Moonkin forms (assuming this is correct) but Bear and Cat forms have to shift out to use it?
A: You need to be in a humanoid form to do abilities like Warstomp. Tree of Life and Moonkin (and also things like Shadowform) are considered humanoid. They are bipedal for instance. This is a data construct more than a strict balance reason.


Q: With the changes on the PTR, what forms of interrupts and what forms of stuns do we plan for druids to have in patch 3.2?
A: Maim and Bash are interrupts on monsters. Feral Charge is an interrupt on monsters and players. Maim, Bash and Pounce are all stuns and never interrupt players. The stun itself will often stop the spell, but may not in the case of a Blinking mage.

Warrior

Community Team: Some players feel that, while tanking, having to continually hit Heroic Strike to match your weapon’s swing can become somewhat tedious.

Q: Do we currently have any plans to change Heroic Strike to make it no longer necessary to hit that button on every weapon swing?

A: Yes, we really don’t like way Heroic Strike works. On-next-swing attacks just don’t feel right and for tanks especially you can convert every white attack into a Heroic Strike. Unfortunately, they do the job, which is why we haven’t changed it yet. It’s job is to let warriors bleed off excess rage by converting it to damage and / or threat. It’s possible to fix this in other ways, such as perhaps the hit consuming more rage the more you have Execute-style.

Community Team: It appears that many players who enjoy the Warrior class for its damage aspects continue to feel that, without best in-slot items, their class’s performance is very truncated.


Q: Is this an issue that we have seen in the Warrior class? If so, do we have any plans to accommodate those players who do not have best in-slot items, while still keeping those with the very best equipment from being too powerful?


A:This really just gets back to the way rage works, which is that damage leads to rage so you have to pick a point at which you balance warriors. High damage and high rage? Low damage and low rage? The way to fix it is to normalize rage even more so that you always get X rage per second regardless of gear. But once you always get X rage per second you essentially just have rogue energy. So, as with the previous question, we don’t like the way it is working and want to change it but we don’t have a perfect substitute in the can just yet.