I try to not make it a habit to knock on Blizzard but right now I’m hoping pretty strongly that they just made a typo. Druids using polearms is just plain dumb.
Hunters could always use staves from the start, so it makes sense to better the itemization for both hunters and druids (moreso druids) by switching all staves with feral attack power. But allowing polearms to be wielded by Druids is crazy. Like there isn’t enough competition already with hunters traditionally using them, Death Knight, Paladin, Warriors as well being able to use them. I just don’t get it. (source)
Druids
- Feral Attack Power: All weapons now have the potential to grant feral
attack power based on their dps (as compared to the best superior-
quality weapons available at level 60). Players will see their
existing feral weapons grant roughly the same attack power as they
did before (+/- 2 or so), but many new weapons will be options for
the feral druid. Some feral weapons have had strength converted to
attack power to be more appealing to other classes able to equip
them. All druids will see the amount of feral attack power granted
by an item in the item tooltip, if it grants any, but other players
will not see that information.
- Remove Curse and Abolish Poison can now be used in Moonkin form.
- Genesis: Now works with Tranquility and Hurricane.
- Growl: Range increased to 30 yards.
- King of the Jungle – The Bear effect is now physical, and thus cannot
be dispelled.
- Nature’s Grace – Now also effects Revive.
- Polearms: Now trainable by Druids.
- Primal Tenacity: Now reduces the cost of Bear Form, Cat Form, and
Dire Bear Form by 17/33/50% in addition to its previous effects.
- Protector of the Pack: No longer changes value based on party size.
- Savage Roar: The buff now persists outside of Cat Form but only
provides its benefits while in Cat Form.
- Starfall: Instead of canceling shapeshifting, now cancels on
shapeshifting into an animal form.
- Survival of the Fittest: This talent now grants 22/44/66% bonus armor
in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form in addition to all of its previous
effects.
- Swipe: Swipe (Cat) has now been added at level 71, dealing 260%
weapon damage, costs 50 energy with no cooldown. All talents
affecting the Bear Form version affect the Cat Form one as well.
- Wild Growth now has a 6 second cooldown.
Druids, way back when wow was still in beta, were able to use the Spear class, but not the polearm class. Before the games actual release, they combined the two weapons classes into just Polearms. The WoW manual stated, because it had been intended, that druids could train in polearms. All this is, is them finally fixing a bug after 4 years =)
Not to mention, Spears were originally a Druid weapon in Dungeons and Dragons, though yes, this isn’t D&D, but alot of games nowadays use that as source.