We still care what people have to say. What I think people miss sometimes is that the drama gets to be noise. Really good forums (and these do approach that point on occasion) have a lot of meat and very few posts that are lacking in content. Sadly, they often get there only be mercilessly purging posts that don't contribute much, but that may be what it takes.
Efficiency is very important to me, because visiting the forums is not my real job. It's important to me, but I have a lot of other things to do during the day. Drama threads just get in the way of that sometimes. I can be as verbose as the next person, but really I think our society values brevity. Everyone is too busy to read something long, and they certainly don't have the time or inclination to poke through a big old haystack for a few gleaming needles.
/soapbox off
The problem we were trying to solve with Feral was that they could only be 75% of a rogue and 75% of a Prot warrior (to be fair, the warrior part sometimes got to be 102%, but the rogue part never did). We wanted to let people who liked the melee hybrid playstyle keep doing that, while also having true dps and tanking Ferals.
The problem we were trying to solve with Balance was in some ways easier and harder. Balance just needed to get a spot in the group. Balance needed reasonable CC in 5-player instances and good dps, AE, buff capacity and mana-efficiency to be a credible caster. Making sure raids didn't need all 10 or 25 spots devoted to stacking buffs helps open up space as well.
Resto druids are pretty amazing on Live and have a pretty good healer niche. What we wanted to do with them is expand on their healing a little so they had more group-heal capacity and more spells to cast besides rolling Lifebloom.
With regard to PvP, we want to try and get some of the under-represented classes and specs in there more, but that's a much, much harder problem. PvP balance is enormously sensitive to certain small changes and to the presence and absence of certain abilities. We try to avoid just handing out the mandatory abilities to everyone (hello Mortal Strike) for fear that we end up with 10 classes that are just art differences. It's a non-trivial problem to solve, complicated by the fact that testing it is hard and requires not only skilled participants, but also for the rest of the game to be in a really stable state. We've changed the game so much, that I can almost promise that PvP is going to be very different. How, exactly, I'm not sure anyone could say yet. I gaurantee that we've broken something for good or ill for at least a couple of classes, because that's the reality of the situation. Hopefully we can be more proactive about fixing problems when they arise.
See there? Inefficient use of space. But thanks for the opportunity to try and get all those thoughts in one place.
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