No Innate Stats in Paragon 2.0

Alright, so. Let's get everything into one place. :)

Paragon 2.0 is a work-in-progress.
All points below are as of current design.
Details are subject to change before Paragon 2.0 goes live.
More information will be made available as development continues.

- With Paragon 2.0, we're making three significant changes to the Paragon system. The first is that we're removing the cap on Paragon levels. Players can now earn as many Paragon levels as they please.

- The second is that Paragon levels are now account-wide per game type. Game type = game mode (i.e. Normal and Hardcore). All Normal characters on an account will share a Paragon level. Similarly, all Hardcore characters on an account will share a Paragon level. Following Paragon 2.0 going live, any Paragon experience you gain on your Normal or Hardcore characters will contribute to your account’s Normal Shared Paragon level or Hardcore Shared Paragon level, respectively.

- The third change is that we've removed the innate bonuses granted by Paragon levels, and players will now earn Paragon Points every time they level up. These points can then be spent to boost up various stats in four different categories: Core Stats, Offensive, Defensive, and Adventure.

- What category a Paragon Point can be spent in will be determined by what Paragon level you earn. Paragon level 1 gives you a point to spend in "Core Stat," Paragon level 2 gives you a point to in "Offensive," Paragon level 3 gives you a point to spend in "Defensive," and Paragon level 4 gives you a point to spend in "Utility" (or "Adventure"). Each Paragon level past that follows the same pattern.

- All categories other than Core Stats (DEX, INT, STR, VIT) have a cap on the number of points that can be allocated to them, which also means there is a cap to the total number of points that 3 of the 4 categories can have. At present, this means if you reach Shared Paragon 800, you will have maxed the number of points that can be allocated to the Offensive, Defensive, and Utility categories and all future Paragon levels you earn will grant you a point in the Core Stat category instead.

- Your account's Paragon Point pool is not shared between your characters. Instead, characters on your account will each get their own set of Paragon Points to spend independently (e.g. you can spend your Paragon Points differently for each character). To provide an example, if your account's Normal Shared Paragon level is 100, all Normal characters on your account will each get 100 Paragon Points to distribute as you see fit.

- Players can respec their Paragon Points. We've not yet finalized whether or not respeccing Paragon Points will incur a cost, or what the respec cost might be if we decide to implement one.

- When Paragon 2.0 goes live, we'll being adding up all the Paragon experience on each of your characters, and we'll be using that combined total (the total amount of Paragon experience you have, not the total number of Paragon levels) to determine your Shared Paragon level. Again, this will be broken down by game type.

- The leveling curve for Paragon 2.0 has not yet been finalized, so we are unable to provide a direct conversion of current Paragon levels > Shared Paragon levels at this time.

- After Paragon 2.0 goes live, if you are level 60 and do not have the expansion enabled on your account, you will continue to earn Paragon experience in the new system. This is because you are still technically at the level cap. However, if you are level 60 and decide to enable the expansion on your account, you will stop earning Paragon experience. This is because the expansion increases the level cap to 70. Once you reach level 70, you will start to accrue Paragon experience again from where you left off. (So, basically: Only max-level characters will be able to earn Paragon experience. If you don't have the expansion, max-level = 60. If you have the expansion, max-level = 70.)

- Under Paragon 2.0, if a character dies or is deleted, the amount of Paragon experience it contributed to your Shared Paragon level will not be lost. This is a benefit of having Paragon experience stored at the account level, rather than at the character level.

- Whether or not currently-dead characters will contribute to your account's Hardcore Shared Paragon level once Paragon 2.0 rolls out has not been decided. We know that this is impacting the way some Hardcore enthusiasts are choosing to play right now, so once we've made a decision we'll be sure to let you know. (Note, however, that even if we do make a decision in the near future, things may still change all the way up until Paragon 2.0 goes live based on testing and feedback.)

- All characters will be able to contribute to Shared Paragon levels equally. There are no bonuses or burdens for Paragon leveling multiple characters of the same class.

- We don't have any information about new Paragon portraits at this time.

- Travis Day offers more development insight into Paragon 2.0 here, here, and here.

Feedback is absolutely welcome!

That's super thoughtful of you! :) It's also a very question good question.

I'm afraid I can't give you an answer just yet, though. We're still working out all the technical details for the shut down, so we don't have all the answers right now. But we will, and we'll be sharing them with all of you once they're available -- likely within the same FAQ thread we posted alongside the announcement (it's a sticky at the top of this forum) as well as more front-page blog posts. We know these details are important, and our goal is to ensure that this transition goes as smoothly as possible. That requires keeping the community informed of what will happen to things like posted auctions, items or currency in the Completed Tab, Battle.net Balance, and ancillary things like auction house gift cards and cash out options. This is partly why we wanted to give players such advanced notice, as it'll allow enough time for all the appropriate preparations to be made (both on your end and on ours).

TL;DR: We don't know yet. But once we do, you'll know too.

(I already noted this in another thread, but it I think it bears repeating here. Sorry for the duped text!)

edited for clarity

This is pretty much spot on. The decision of whether or not to remove the auction houses was indeed heavily belabored. We notified the community as soon as we arrived at our decision, though, rather than keeping it under wraps, which means there are still some technical details (and a few gameplay ones, too) that need to be figured out. We'll be making sure to keep players updated throughout this entire process, taking care to address questions like Zayta presented as soon as the information is available.