Epic

Q u o t e:
In my opinion epic gear should be hard to get, one can say "fight an epic battle" for it, else it isnt epic.

Well, hopefully this comes as good news. We're actually working on restoring the epic feeling to epic items in Cataclysm. Epic loot should be epic, and something to be very proud of. Our plan is to try and get the Heroic -> Blue Gear and Raid -> Purple Gear balance back.

This is further proof that not everything Deathwing does is entirely a bad thing. =)

Q u o t e:
This seems like a void statement.

The problem was never the heroics, the problem was that raids no longer take effort and are no longer challenging, meaning that every man and his dog get epics without putting any work into it. What make epics feel epic in vanilla was that you knew that person had gone through some (for then) hard content in order to get it, couppled of course with the rarity.

Thus, Epics will never get their "value" back as long as raids are tuned "easy" and constantly nerfed to accomodate the lowest common denominator of the raiding community that doesnt want to learn to raid but simply demands the rewards be given to them without having to wipe for it (yes, look at how many wipes it takes for people to claim an encounter is too hard, sorry but requiring 2 nights of wipes is not demanding too much for a new boss, and much less 2 hours of tries!) .

so, unless blizzard want to change its raiding philosophy, and make heroics more like TBC where they were "raiding for the small group of friend" rather than wotlk where there was no difficulty difference between normals and heroics, the plan you outlined is without any value.

One thing that might work, if you insist on keeping easy as the standard difficulty for raiding, is to make the "common" raid drops blue, whereas the "rare" drops are listed as epic. To clarify, normal drops would include normal mode bosses, while "rare" drops could qualify as loot from heroic raid bosses and low drop chance items such as most trinkets. It both cuts down the massive number of epic items about, while also giving the "hard" feel back to epics without over the board tuning changes to encounters. and it doesnt require more effort than painting the names of the items in another colour.

Simply making them raid exclusive is not enough, as normal raids are the 5 mans of current wow.

So it seems a step in what you consider the "right" direction is perhaps just not enough for you. If so, fair enough; you're entitled to your opinion. But we have the data on who's getting epics from raids and who's getting them purely from heroics for instance and we're happy with our new plans for balancing the distribution of epic gear in Cataclysm and with the number of people that will be affected by this change.

Of course, plans are never set in stone and we're not at this time announcing details concerning other routes to procure epics -- if indeed there even are any other methods of obtaining them, but it is currently our intention that raids will be the main source of the purple gear that seemed so much more epic in the original iteration of the game especially.

Raid difficulty is quite a different thing and when we have more details we wish to share on that topic, we will of course endeavour to do so.

Q u o t e:
What will you be doing to vendor gear and what will be the quality available?[/i]

As we mentioned back in the Twitter developer chat we had back in February, we are still having an emblem system in Cataclysm and a noticeable change between it and the current system is that there is intended to be generally less types of emblems in total. In fact we are looking at maintaining just two tiers of emblems, the current tier and the previous tier.

The current tier will most likely be of a quality higher than the gear available using the emblem from the previous tier, as it is now (though of course this may be subjective depending on the exact class and spec). However, what comparisons can be made between the quality of emblem gear and that which is obtained in raids are details that we are not quite ready to reveal. Sorry, but we need to keep some of these details for the future.