Warlords of Draenor is making big changes to WoW's number game
When World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor hits, players will be adjusting to more than just a new continent and gussied-up character models. With the expansion, Blizzard is looking to squish stats across the board, bring racial traits into parity with each other, prune excess abilities among the classes, and nerf a bunch of the game's crowd control skills.
The stat-squishing in particular is something that the developers address at length in a new "watercooler" post: "It's important to understand that this isn't a nerf -- in effect, you'll still be just as powerful, but the numbers that you see will be easier to comprehend. This also won't reduce your ability to solo old content. In fact, to provide some additional peace of mind, we're implementing further scaling of your power against lower-level targets so that earlier content will be even more accessible than it is now."
The post goes into detail about the reasoning behind the changes and how the devs expect each of them to improve WoW as a whole, so give it a read if Warlords of Draenor is on your wish list this year.
