GameGuide

Player vs. Player
Cleaves too dominant in Arenas
We think cleave teams are too dominant, especially in 2s. We don't think they are as bad in 3s, but the community is very focused on 2s at the moment.

We don't think it's as simple as melee classes doing too much damage or having too much armor. We don't even necessarily think it's "melee" because I'm not convinced shamans and druids are affected. We think it has more to do with ranged classes not always able to bring their CC or survival tools to bear against melee.

Keep in mind when you are talking about Arena comps, the issue isn't as simple as saying that X beats Y. Often it's a question of who you want on your team. To take just one example, we think that last season if you were trying to decide between a hunter and warrior, the hunter brought a lot more to the table. There was no benefit to be gained from taking a warrior instead. There were a lot of reasons for this, but one of them was that physical damage just wasn't that useful and another was that warriors could never keep on a target. Another was that DKs and paladins dominated smaller brackets. In this season you can make the argument that warriors are more attractive than hunters. One of the things that a hunter could theoretically bring — stronger CC in the form of traps — may not be useful enough compared to say the CC you could get from a mage. This has almost nothing to do with warriors beating hunters in 1v1 duel situations and everything to do with how you want to build your team.

Obviously (I hope) I am boiling down a complicated situation to a simplistic level for purposes of illustration. My point is that often, in our minds, it's rarely as simple as "If my class did more damage, my class would be at 10% Arena representation." (Source)

Plate Armor vs. Cloth
I think you are just looking at the armor number and assuming that translates to survivability. A lot of the damage done, some even from plate wearers, is not physical. Plate-wearers are by and large melee while cloth-wearers are by and large ranged. If you're a caster, not only are you doing ranged damage but you're punching right through the armor anyway. All the casters have spells that increase their mitigation far beyond the simple armor number on their cloth.

I think a lot of the arguments you see on the forums right now about melee > ranged are simplistic. The armor on plate probably has an effect, but I don't think it's the main effect. Consider the rock-paper-scissors of a generic melee class to a generic caster class. The balance is supposed to be that the caster can cause damage at range. The melee class can attempt to close to do damage, but the caster has crowd control and escape mechanisms to get away. Now consider that most of the caster crowd control and some escape mechanisms are magic, which can be dispelled, while the snares, stuns and charges from melee are often physical or can't be dispelled at all. From that POV, you could argue that dispels and Blessing of Freedom in particular, are far more destabilizing to Arena balance than just plate. (Source)

Classes
DPS Stats Itemization
The "primary" stats on dps plate are Str and Stam. The primary stats on dps leather are AP, Agi and Stam.

The reason for this is because putting Str and AP on plate feels goofy — they are virtually the same stat for plate-wearers. Putting Str, Agi and AP on plate feels bad because Agi does so little for plate-wearers.

A long-term solution is probably something more like itemizing leather with just Agi and Stam, but making sure leather-wearers get enough out of Agi that losing the AP isn't a nerf. The alternative is to make Agi a good state for plate-wearers. We traditionally haven't done that because plate-wearers "feel" like they should be strong, not agile. But that feel may have to lose to making the plate v. leater disparity itself feel better in the long run.

Again, long-term. We're not going to hotfix thousands of items. (Source)

Importance of AoE Damage in WotLK
Our older design was that warlocks and mages were the kinds of AOE. We've backed off that because it's just not a very fun niche. To be "the best" at something implies you're second best at other things. If that is not the case, then mage and warlock are just the best damage classes because they are tied for everything while also being the best at one thing. So then the design needs to become something unsatisfying like mages and locks are the best at AE, but not as good at single-target, or not as good at staying alive, or not as good on long fights. That technically gives everyone a role, but we found it wasn't a fun role for the mages and locks.

Our LK design is that single-target dps matters the most, because that's the most important to players, and things like AE, crowd-control, survivability, etc. are all "good enough" for everyone. There isn't a "best at AE" — it's just something all classes do. You don't park the rogue when you have a high AE fight and you don't park the mage when you have a high single-target fight. AE matters on almost all of the Ulduar fights to some degree, but single-target dps still probably matters more. (Source)

Death Knight (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Glyph of Icebound Fortitude Bug
The glyph was supposed to give you a stronger IBF as if you had high defense. This made it more of a PVP glyph since tanking DKs already should have high defense. Therefore the glyph was supposed to do nothing for them.

The bug was that it did increase their IBF even at high defense. This turned the glyph from a PvP glyph into a mandatory tanking glyph, and probably an overpowered one at that. I believe the hotfix has gone live already. (Source)

Druid (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Druid Weapon Upgrades in Ulduar
 We want to get out of the business of needing to offer 2 types of weapon for a single tree of one class, given that we already have to itemize Balance and Resto druids somewhat differently. It is just not our design to make two-handed tanking weapons, and we have attempted to design DKs and druids so that they don't need them.

The classes and spec have grown so divergent that even with Ulduar offering something like 800 items (which to be fair, counts 10 vs. 25 and normal vs. hard) some players still feel like we aren't filling their niche. We don't want to have to offer 1000 or more PvE items in one patch, so we need to handle things at the class level so that there is less of a need for those items.

If you want to focus on tanking as a Feral instead of dps, you should do that mostly through talents, gems, enchants and the jewelry and cloak pieces. We have fit two fairly different roles into the Feral tree and you can even hybridize them to a degree, but we want to stop short of having to itemize the druid as four classes. (Source)

Shaman (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Totem-Stomping Macros
Blizzard does not like the gameplay of totem-stopping macros and we intend to stop it. Destroying a totem should be a viable strategy but it should be a choice and require some effort on the part of the destroyer. Making a macro to have your pet attack the totem without having to …