The second day of BlizzCon 2009 kicked off with an open World of Warcraft Q&A panel, and Tom Chilton revealed in response to a question that "we will be doing race changes, they're just coming after faction changes."

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street said during the second class panel later in the day that you'll have to pay for the race change, just like you'll have to pay to change your faction. Throw in a barber shop and the newly announced race/class combos and it looks like players will soon have almost free rein to completely change their character whenever they wish. The only question you'll truly have to consider at the character creation screen is what class you want to level.

You can read more answers from the open Q&A after the jump.

• Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street said, "we need to get more troll players in the game."
• A new feature of the guild advancement system is that you'll be able to create guild heirlooms. You'll be able to buy new profession plans and make them within the guild to make guild heirlooms that will scale with levels.
• While armor penetration is gone, they're not removing the concept. They'll have to look again at how classes balance. For example, players may use bleeds or armor penetration talents to help kill plate-wearers.
• They will be giving troll and worgen druids unique bear and cat forms.
• A player said that Arms isn't great for PvP anymore, and Ghostcrawler disagreed. He did agree, however, that Mortal Strike needs to be the "ultimate one," or they need to create a new ability to fill that niche.
• Blacksmithers have a better experience when they can make more stuff that's good and competitive than when they're pidgeon-holed into creating a specific weapon.
• Ghostcrawler agreed it's a problem that enhancement shamans need to give up DPS and mobility to buff raids. They don't have an answer yet, but he mentioned long-range totems.
• They're talking about whether they should try to restrict armor to specific classes. Should plate-wearers only wear plate? They acknowledge it's a problem.
• A player asked about the Thrall/Garrosh relationship and Varian, and Chris Metzen said he doesn't want to spoil anything, but with the world in the state it's in after the Cataclysm, "what would you think the world's mightiest shaman would need to do?"
• Pets should scale more in patch 3.3.
• They decided to go with Night Elf mages because it's "pretty sweet." They thought it would be cool to have a subset of Night Elves going back to their roots of dabbling in the Arcane.
• Once Onyxia is scaled for level 80, the level 60 version will be gone. Cataclysm will hopefully keep some dungeons at level 60 for those who want to play them.
• They've talked about adding more character slots with the addition of the two new races, but Ghostcrawler said he hasn't met many players who have 10 legitimate characters on one server.
• There will be bigger sacks in Cataclysm. "Our sacks get bigger every expansion," Tom Chilton said.
• They want to take the top few tiers of the Subtlety tree and make them part of the rogue class. They hate for rogues to trade off damage for utility.
• There are a ton of plans to improve the phasing system. For example, you may be able to share your section of a phase quest with other players.
• A player asked if non-contested zones will be restructured to avoid ganking now that you'll be able to fly in Azeroth. The response was that players on a PvP server run the risk of getting ganked and should play on a PvE server if they don't like that style of gaming.
• They have ideas for a mentoring system that will allow you to play with friends who are at a lower level, but they're not sure when it will happen.
• There will probably be a second hero class, but not in Cataclysm.
• When asked if it would be possible to change talents on pets instead of choosing them based on species, Ghostcrawler said they're trying to decide whether they should separate cosmetics and gameplay.
• They'd like to implement an Arena observer mode.
• They recently had a meeting about the 5-second rule, and they can definitely see it going away with the changes in Spirit.

Darryl "Togikagi" Gangloff
News Reporter
ZAM.com