So it looks like the Q & A was used....

Q u o t e:
as a smoke screen.

So you have a Class Q & A, then completely ignore 99% of what the community addressed. I understand this is not the last patch, but why not address at least a few of the issues for each class/spec instead of actually creating new issues to resolve?

Is any class or spec happy with any of these changes?

This kind of response doesn't surprise me at all. When you ask a community as large as our for questions, you are going to get several hundred. No matter which ones we chose to answer, there were going to be players who thought we picked the wrong ones. Those players would then come to the forums to protest, because typically its the folks who are upset or concerned about something who post.

When we sat down to really analyze the kinds of questions we get on the forums, they are often of two varieties. The first is very specific. Say, in the case of the mage that they have mana problems when they can't use Evocate, or in the case of the shaman that Chain Heal is too situational. Those are the kinds of things we can usually address directly in the forums (though obviously we can't answer everything).

The second category of questions are what I would call more philosophical. Players want to know our intent and long-term goals. These are things like if we think totem-stomping macros are acceptable, or whether dps casters should ever run out of mana. I found that I was answering those kinds of questions only to have them come up again the next week without the answers having really changed. The Q&As were designed more to handle these kinds of questions. Consider for example that we knew most of the Q&As would come out after the patch notes, so questions such as "How are you going to buff is in 3.2?" wouldn't be appropriate.

Q u o t e:
The fact is that most of the mages that are disappointed with the Q&A are so because you didnt answer any of the questions you chose to. You answered with fluff that we already knew/have been told before.

We answered the questions that were asked a lot. It comes off as a little unfair when you say that we should have answered the important questions from the important mages.

Q u o t e:
WHY is it that mages are the most RNG dependent class in the entire game, where "good" dps is based 100% on luck vs skill given similar gear and encounter? Likewise, what are you doing to fix this issue?

Here is a great case in point. It has been answered many times. There are good mages and bad mages. There are mages who will always do better than other mages in the same raid with the same gear. That isn't RNG. It's knowing how to play the class.

Q u o t e:
I normally agree wih what you say GC and I think you do a very difficult job very well and it can't be easy. However in this case, I will disagree with the intent of your statement. If you go and re-read the mage Q&A again you should be able to see howquestions were flat out not answered or just had the original question reworded and thrown back at it. I don't have problems with the questions but the the quality and style of answers were abysmal and would make politicians proud.

I answered those questions along with my team. I know what they said. We tried to specify when we thought something was a problem or not. When we disagreed with a problem, we tried to state why. When we had a specific solution, we offered it. We don't provide many solutions like that because players tend to throw them back at us when they don't immediately show up (do a quick scan for the latest round of "we were promised" threads.)

I'm sorry you aren't satisfied with the class Q&A, but the fact of the matter is that the community as a whole will almost never be satisfied with the levels of communication we can offer, since you are so many and we are so few. We will continue to explore new ways to communicate. If the Q&As don't accomplish what we want, then we aren't likely to do them again. I think overall we do a pretty good job of having developers speak directly to players, which isn't all that common in this industry for a game of this size.