Cataclysm Updates, Blue Posts

Beta Testing
No Addons in Beta
The current plan is to allow for them eventually, but that's contingent upon many factors. We're still doing a lot of work on the default user interface and want to make sure that can be tested with as few variables as possible. Trying to allow for third-party addons when it's quite likely some fairly major changes will be coming with each patch just makes testing and reviewing bug reports that much more difficult.

Once we feel there's much more polish on the core features of the UI, we'll consider allowing addons to be used again. (Source)

Dev Notes in Talent Trees
Yeah, we probably should have removed those notes. What was happening is that developers would want to do a dungeon or BG test or something and occasionally picked classes that at the moments had their guts ripped out. For example, there might not be enough talents in the tree to get down to the bottom talent. We tried annotating the talent trees so people would have an idea of what they were getting into. A "60% complete" talent tree would suggest that they might still see a lot of broken stuff. I wouldn't give those numbers a second thought as an alpha / beta participant.

Warlock talent trees still have a long way to go. (Source)

Cataclysm Beta Scam Mails
There are indeed phishing emails in circulation right now that mimic World of Warcraft: Cataclysm closed beta invites, and players should always remain cautious when responding to or clicking on links contained within emails that appear to be sent from Blizzard Entertainment.

That said, players who are selected to participate in the beta will receive a notification email. While the email itself isn't necessary for beta access, it does contain more detailed instructions for installation, common troubleshooting steps and helpful reminders, and customer support contact information—useful bits of data to have. So, be sure to double-check that you're not reading real email from Blizzard Entertainment before clicking that "delete" button. (If you're unsure how to tell a legitimate email from a phishing email, here's a good guide to reference: http://us.blizzard.com/support/article/25133).

You are definitely correct, though, Elbeghast. Players who are invited to the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm closed beta will be able to tell by visiting their Battle.net Account Management page and checking the available licenses under the "Manage My Games" section. (Source)

Closed Beta and Random Invitations
The fact is we can't invite every paying customer into the beta test process. It wouldn't make for a good environment to collect feedback or get focused testing, not to mention the number of test realms we'd need to run.

Yes, some people are granted access to the beta through promotional opportunities, because they're a part of our fansite program, etc. These invites still make up an incredibly small percentage of the total number of people invited this week. Also, it's been a couple of days since beta started. We will be inviting thousands of people just about every week -- provided we have the room for more testers -- to join the Cataclysm beta.

It simply isn't reasonable to expect that, because one individual pays to play the game, they should be given immediate access to test the upcoming expansion. That is not the purpose of a beta test. Aside from the few promotional opportunities we have had where people could score beta keys, we do not invite the player base at-large as though it's included with everyone's subscription fees. We make it fair and randomly invite as many people as possible as often as possible.

To clarify, Bobby Kotick is not a developer or producer for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, or any other Blizzard game. He is the CEO of Activision Blizzard, our video games publisher. (Source)

Classes
Threat Decay
If you tanked pre-LK, maintaining threat as a tank was a pretty big deal. The best tanks were the ones who could generate threat quickly and keep it high, allowing the raid to go to 100% quickly. We lost that a little in LK, and part of the reason was Tricks and Misdirect. Those abilities can keep a tank's threat high enough to where the risk of pulling off of the tank is very low.

But is that fun for the tank? If threat never matters, then the tank is left with trying to stay alive (which comes down to managing cooldowns) and perhaps moving the boss or other encounter-specific mechanics (which to be fair, we do a lot more of these days). The problem with staying alive as a goal is that it's pretty binary. The tank can't really work to "stay alive better than last time" in the same way dps can try to maximize their dps or healers can try to keep everyone up without running OOM. Threat gives tanks something to work on. It gives you a reason to hit that Shield Slam at the right moment rather than being lazy and mostly autoattacking.

Having said all that, we don't want threat to constantly feel like a throttle and we don't want tanking to feel horribly frustrating. We want you to be able to manage your own threat as a tank and we'll give you the tools to do that, but then you actually need to do that. Having a slow threat decay makes sure that your job is never done -- that you can't get so far ahead of everyone that hitting Shield Slam at the right time becomes irrelevant for the rest of the fight. If you are already an awesome tank you probably won't notice a difference.

[...] You won't suddenly notice a massive drop because "decay kicked in." But you'll never be able to get so far ahead of everyone else that there is no possibility of them catching up even if you do nothing. As I said, if you hit all your buttons now, you won't notice a difference, but there might be a more noticeable difference between good tanks and bad tanks. (Source)

Vengeance
Vengeance isn't to make threat irrelevant. Vengeance is to solve a very specific problem, which is that if threat is balanced in the first tier, it won't be balanced in the last tier because dps specs gain a lot more dps stats from their dps gear than tanks gain dps stats from their tank gear. As an alternative, we considered just not making tanking gear, but we didn't like how that would feel. (Source)

Hunter
Hunter Pets in Cataclysm
We're in the middle of converting the stables over to the new model.

New model:

You have 5 active pets and 20 (or more) stable slots. You can summon an active pet whenever you want, out of combat. This replaces the remote stable spell. In other words, if you have a crab, a bear and a wolf, you can swap from wolf to bear in between encounters.

You must visit a stable master to change which are the active pets though. There are a lot of stable slots, so you can catch Spirit Beasts or rare spawns or whatever you want, even if you don't think you will use them often. (Source)