Ratings

Gear scaling is always an issue at the end of every expansion, and has been for a long time -- the very concept of ratings for secondary stats like Crit, Haste, and so on was brought in to fix an issue where items that granted a flat percentage to a secondary stat remained good indefinitely.

At first glance, the removal of PVP servers might seem like Blizzard wants to reduce the role of PVP in World of Warcraft, but after getting a chance to play with War Mode I think the opposite is true.