"We're waiting for cataclysm"...

Q u o t e:
I don't actually see Blues saying that in very many places.

I see players saying that kind of thing a lot, but we're not the devs.

Now, there are some changes they shouldn't implement before a 4.0 patch (ie. focus for hunters, overhauling entire talent trees, adding new abilities, changing warlock soul shard mechanics), because they need the other changes coming in the expansion to support those things.

Yep, all of this. I’ve actually tried to address this a couple of times recently. There are some things we’re excited about in Cataclysm and we want to share them. I’m also trying to just be open and honest sometimes about the likelihood of being able to overhaul something in the near term. I’ve realized though that talking about Cataclysm at all frustrates some players because they think that means we don’t care anymore about the current content, which is just not true.

Q u o t e:
Well, I think about things like the lack of a rogue sub tree, a frost DK tree, things like that... Why not dink around with it a little bit and see how it goes?

I don’t think anyone on our side has ever said we won’t. Getting rid of armor pen, sure, that’s a Cataclysm thing. Tweaking existing specs is on the table until Cataclysm goes out the door.

Q u o t e:
There's something to be said for having a static playing environment. I mean some classes have to re-gem, re-gear, or re-spec anytime there are class changes and that's obnoxious, especially for those who don't come on the forums or some other site to see the changes coming in advance.

This is very true too. For every player who is horribly impatient for a change to be made TODAY, there are plenty of others who don’t want to have to relearn their rotation or change their glyphs or talent builds (let alone completely shift from one tree to another). It’s tough for us to make both extremes happy.

Q u o t e:
Cataclysm is a 5-level cap raise so that Blizzard can drag out this MMO as long as they can get away with making money at it (and I don't blame them... that's just good business).

I'm not interested in being a worgen or a goblin.

No, Cata won't "fix" it... just other problems will arise with the changes, and people will find new things to complain about and new things will be broken.

The prospect of the expansion just doesn't bring much of anything to catch my interest. I think the game has lived out it's purpose with me. It has been largely a good run.

There is a lot of new content in Cataclysm. There are new zones, new dungeons and new BGs. We are changing a lot of class and combat mechanics. The level limit is something we’ve struggled with a lot. In the end, we thought that giving players lots of new quests without giving them quite so many new abilities and talent points might be good for the game overall. Imagine the theoretical character with 120 levels. Do you really want twice as many abilities and talent points as you have now? Is that even manageable? At some point we need to explore how to offer new content to players without just giving them more action bars.

It sounds a little like you might be looking for something completely different from WoW and then lamenting that WoW isn’t that game. But if you love WoW, you're going to love Cataclysm. If you are nostalgic for the original content in WoW, then you are particularly going to love Cataclysm. But there is something in it for everyone.

Q u o t e:
Ghost, what about people like me who miss the vanilla days? Will Cat have the old vanilla feel?

That depends on what "old vanilla feel" means to you. We're certainly trying to hit the nostalgia button for people. We're not going back to resist gear farming, paladins that can only heal, bats causing 10-min long diseases or quests that send you back and forth across the world only to dead end.

Q u o t e:
GC, I think the main complaint that I have, is that Cataclysm "feels" more like re-hashed content than something new

There are 6 new zones (8 if you count the new racial zones) to explore, with their respective dungeons. On top of that we're also redoing a great many of the existing zones and their quests. So we are updating some old content in addition to supplying new content. If you call updating "rehashing" well, okay, but I'm not sure how else we're going to make the old polygonal trees look as good as the Grizzly Hills trees or make all those ice scream scoopy mountains in the Barrens look as good as Storm Peaks. If the zone update was the entire expansion that would be one thing, but it's almost bonus content.

We're bringing back some old enemies, but that's a pretty common practice in any kind of serialized fiction. Players have a stronger connection to old enemies than to constantly introduce new ones (though you need some of that too). Ragnaros is back. Molten Core isn't. There are plenty of new villains too.