You're making assumptions when explaining what "Role playing" is; I've never thought that in order for something to be an RPG, it had to have numbers and stats. I've enjoyed many games like Devil May Cry and the Zelda series; Action-adventure games where you are playing a character without a typical RPG stat system, no but you do find ways of improving your character as you progress through the game by getting new weapons and learning new abilities. I understand the idea and I enjoy the gameplay a lot.
I really think you should play the game before you argue that the player is merely 'watching the game'; There is nothing automatic about any of it except for a basic melee attack, and if you go around trying to use that constantly, you'll get your ass kicked. You have to decide when and in what order to use your other abilities, and factors such as mana/energy, cooldown time, and which ability is better at a certain situation come into play. Do I take the chanceI blast this Kodo with some damage to try to kill it before it kills my partner? Or do I heal my partner first to guarantee his survival? The former would probably generate enough aggro to distract the beast to attack me, but I might be low on mana when I need to heal myself, while the latter might drain enough mana that I won't be able to cast any damaging spells against the beast, thus prolonging the battle. And the game was made so the macros cannot be abused; one attack per macro, preventing long chains of attacks/ability uses to basically bot your way through the game.
Also, the 'stats' in World of Warcraft aren't like the stats in most normal games; When you level, you don't get a certain number of stat points to allocate into strength, agility, energy, etc. You do gain stat points, but it's an automatic thing that increases depending on your class. There is a stat-type thing along the lines of weapon and magic proficiencies; The more I use a stave to attack things, the more skill I gain for that weapon, and so on for different weapons and types of spells. The talent system will give you points that you can use to increase something specific about your character, like mana regeneration, but that's about as close to choosing stats as it gets.
