Elemental
Spell damage
Spell Crit
Elemental Overload

Those are your three Mastery bonuses. Any or all of them can be adjusted to balance the spec. My guess is that in general, the first two will be the go-to bonuses for balance tweaks; the third will probably be adjusted only if the spec's benefit from the Mastery stat on gear is way off kilter.

Adjusting the third bonus is dangerous, because that is the one tied to mastery rating on gear. If we make that stat too good, then you might want mastery at the expense of crit or haste and get offended if there isn't tons of mastery on your tier sets.

Adjusting the first two passives, especially the first one, which is just damage for Elemental, is a lot safer. It's not a huge deal if Elemental gets 0.25 % damage per talent point spend and Enhancement gets 0.21 % damage per talent point spent as long as the end result of dps is pretty close.*

* - "pretty close" will be defined by players as "nobody should ever beat me, irrespective of encounter, gear or my own personal button mashing routine." :)

Hey, I heard on the Internet that more people will read my post if I exaggerate and try to get folks riled up. Does that really work?

We're not killing off Arenas, nor do we regret introducing them. (Rob said in an interview once that we regretted *how* we introduced them. Big difference.)

Part of the problem with how we introduced Arena was we offered extremely powerful rewards that were available relatively easily. Everyone I know participated in Arena at the start of BC. Were they having fun? Several of them weren't. But they figured the had to do it to stay competitive. In fact, in BC the PvP rewards were so easy and required such little time per week to get that they threatened to divert a lot of players from raiding to get epics.

Flash forward to Lich King. We made it harder, in that it took more actual wins, to earn great PvP rewards. At the same time, we made raiding much more accessible. This got a lot of the players who didn't want to participate in Arenas out of there. But it wasn't enough. We still had a lot of players who liked PvP and / or didn't enjoy raiding who still felt like Arenas were there only avenue to great gear. Unfortunately, if they weren't that good, or if they picked a spec that wasn't that good, or they picked a comp that wasn't that good, then they were just spinning their wheels since we no longer offered them great rewards for just losing matches each week.

The idea behind rated BGs is to be able to offer the best PvP rewards through both Arenas or BGs. If you love BGs but don't like Arenas, you can still get great rewards. If you love Arenas, hopefully the experience will be even better for you because the guys who don't like Arenas will be off doing something else. If you like both Arenas and BGs, great, you have more choices in what you do that week. If you like PvP but still lose a lot, yes you're still going to be a season behind the guys who win a lot. We'll reward you gear just for participating, but if you want th best gear, you still need to win.

We figured no matter who was last they were going to feel victimized. You shouldn't try and interpret too much by the order of the previews though. The fact is we're just not as far along on paladins as we are the other classes. We find it easier to work on a few classes at a time rather than say work on one class on Monday then a different class on Tuesday and keep rotating through them. We didn't pick paladin last because we hate them or because they need the most work or the least work or anything. It's pretty much totally random.

We haven't torn up the paladin talent trees in earnest yet, so the preview will likely be heavy on design intent and light on details. One of the changes we'll continue to emphasize with Retribution is trading more defenses for offense. A defensive dps spec just doesn't work really well in WoW.

Vanilla had it's bright spots and great memories for sure. Striving to get that helm from Scholomance (grats to those who got it), downing those big bosses that were hugely intimating (especially for MMO n00bs), and watching people die in circles for hours in Hillsbrad. These were some grand moments and they were undoubtedly fun, but they were also kind of "all or nothing" things that were very frustrating for me and my guildies when they didn't happen as we wanted them to. (/shakes fist at Scholo)

I have found that I played in a bit of a different way in TBC and WotLK by either raiding a lot or playing a lot of alts (sometimes both but not consistently). What is fun for me in the game has changed but has allowed more things to be achievable and therefore I ended up playing more as I was getting more things done. Yes, I also like achievements and have checked off a lot of things from that list.