This is just to remind everybody that Arena Season 6 is scheduled to end tonight.

Please visit the following thread for details: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19110027050&sid=1

The following Arena Season will not begin for at least one week after the current season ends. During this time between seasons, all rated matches will be turned off and only skirmishes will be available. When Arena Season 7 begins, all team ratings, personal rating, and arena points will be wiped, but matchmaking rating and honor points will remain.

Race and Faction Changes ETA
Cataclysm was just announced so it will be awhile before we have systems fully decided upon for it, especially since the paid faction change service isn't even out yet. That said I wouldn't be surprised if there were some restrictions to avoid people making level 80s of the new races on day 1, nothing is set in stone though so we will have to wait and see. (Source)

Reforging
Imagine reforging could work like enchanting, where there are specific recipes that everyone knows. Example: "Converts Spirit into 50% equivalent hit rating on gloves."

I'm not saying it would work like this, but something along those lines would be pretty comparable to existing features. (Source)

Titan's Path
Philosophically, it works like this. Leveling up is fun. You get new gear constantly, and every time you ding, you get new stats, new ranks of spells and possibly new spells. You improve every single hour you play, if not more frequently.

When you hit max level, this really slows down. If you raid or PvP you might get a new item once a week if you're lucky, and aside from gear, rewards are very infrequent.

The idea behind the paths is to offer max-level character progression over time that isn't tied to gear.

The feature is much more robust than this, but at a very conceptual level imagine that at level 85 you got a new talent point every week just for logging in. The rewards are slower than during the leveling period, but they are rewards that exist independent of gear. However on the other hand, you don't feel the need to race through them (in fact you can't) if you are focused on getting to max level and they don't bloat your spellbook with as many abilities as gaining actual whole levels (though they will add a few). Over time, the actual discussions about how to build a character will likely change and evolve in interesting ways. The new point might give you a reason to log in on non-raid nights or even if you've gotten a little burned out on raiding.

The mantra is "gated, not grindy." They will require you to do something, but they are also designed with the idea that you can't kill yourself trying to blast through them as fast as possible. (Source)

Why not one slide per class at Blizzcon?
For last year's Blizzcon we did a slide per class, but that meant the amount of detail we could offer was almost trivial (and particularly annoying for hybrids). There is no way to offer as much detail as players are looking for unless we have the DK panel, etc.

[...] I'm not sure the 10 minute summary of 10 classes would have worked well. Last year for instance we had one slide on priests and only really covered Mind Sear, so all of the healing priests were like "What about us?"

The class panel has always been popular, so they started offering it twice even before I got to Blizzard. There are probably other ways to do it though. Maybe you make the class panel really long the first time and make the second one just about Q&A. You have to think that we're going to have even more information to cover (and questions to answer) once Diablo and SC have shipped so maybe it will be even harder to justify doing a class panel twice.

If we hadn't covered items, then we could have done more classes. But the item changes were just as important. We could have put items with dungeons or systems, but those were busy too. Basically, we had a ton of info to share and only 2 days.

Handling questions asked on the floor is just as tricky as handling those asked on the forums. They may not be important to you, but they could be very important to the gal or guy asking the question. It doesn't seem fair to tell some people their issues aren't worthy before they even get to ask.

I don't have any great answers for how to handle it, but as with everything we do, we'll keep striving to improve it. (Source)

Reasons behind the item stats changes in Cataclysm
I find many of these arguments to be elitist. This is not a "catering to the casuals" issue. This is an issue that even some of our most educated and math-savy players could not make gear decisions without the help of external tools. We're much less concerned about more casual players because the specific choice of upgrade will mean less for them (skill outweighs the contribution of stats for all but the absolute best players) and they often choose pieces based on things like art over stats.

I'm talking about very hardcore raiders who no longer could eyeball a piece of gear with any degree of authority. I might believe that some very few of you are so proficient with the math as to be able to eyeball the stats, but I think you are vastly overestimating the number of players who can or do. Remember, the formula to convert armor penetration into damage was so complicated that we had to take the unusual step of actually spelling out how it was calculated.

With this change will you still have to make hard choices about upgrading? Absolutely. Will there still be quasi-religious debates about which neck is best in slot for a given spec? Of course. Will you still need to understand the mechanics to make the best choice for your character? We think so. One of our overall design philosophies for WoW (and Blizzard) is to be simple but have a lot of depth. Some people mistake needless complexity for depth.

Meanwhile, we think there is a lot of benefit of getting rid of problematic stats like defense and accomplishing things like letting casters improve by focusing on throughput over mana pool. (Source)