It's only being retired from vendors, and will no longer be required to purchase the next set of gear.
When will we be able to see the new pvp pa path on PTS?
You are increasing stats for rank 13 and lower to ensure a more competitive battles in the future against high rank and low ranks. Does that mean the actual stats between rank 13 and rank 40 are minor? So we won't see rank 40's trampling over rank 13's like we see with rank 1 and 8 now?
40s will still have a significant advantage over bolstered players. It will be similar to the difference between a Rank 4 and 8 in the current system. We have some changes rolling out that should ensure more ranked matches occur, which should reduce the overall amount of unranked matches. They'll still occur, just less frequently.
As Elrar posted earlier in the week, queue times are a huge concern we're focusing on. We're have a solution in place that we're really happy with, and hope to have it out to Live servers in the near future.