Mists of Pandaria approaches

Mists of Pandaria is going to go live in a matter of weeks.  This marks version 5 of World of Warcraft.

I came across the patch notes published several weeks ago for 5.0.4 which went live of the PTR (public test realm) at that time.

Some of the improvements which I had not seen announced before are positively wonderful:

abilities learned automatically now so class trainers only needed when you are doing something special like re-spec (hopefully, this does away with buying spells)
looting becomes AoE so when you loot one dead mob, you in effect loot all dead mobs nearby that you have looting rights upon (some tanks are really surprised when they leave a snail trail of dead mobs across a room and run out that the healer needs to run back and forth again to loot said mobs but soon no more)
ranged weapons are becoming more powerful (great for me because I have a lot of warlocks, mages, and priests who use wands and hunters who use bows)

But there is some really bad news too:

ranged weapon & relic slots of been removed; there is simply a weapon slot (what???)
prime glyphs are gone (what??? what about all the ones I just bought or paid to learn to make on my inscriber?)

At this point I am a little less than thrilled that he live date for WoW 5.0 client is so near and that MoP will be going live not long after that.

On the one hand, I have more max level characters than I did when any previous release debuted.  But on the other, I have not checked out the PTR or the release notes about WoW 5.  From what I have learned this week, I will need to do a little reading or asking around to figure out what things I need to do to prepare in game for the WoW 5 live date.

Old Chinese proverb:  May you live in interesting times.
Or was that a curse?