Paladin

The paladin class preview thankfully came out sooner than expected, although it was somewhat underwhelming. A paladin version of the death knight Gargoyle just seems a little boring, regardless of the three different effects of Guardian of the Ancient Kings. If anything, it should provide an awesome graphic. There's also the Healing Hands ability, which turns the paladin into a walking Healing Stream Totem. Aside from the fact that it seems rather dull -- who ever got excited over a Healing Stream Totem? -- it is counter-intuitive to use, because paladin healers don't exactly mix it up with the tanks and DPS. In PvP, a paladin healer isn't going to be in the middle of the Royal Rumble; he's going to be outside the ring, smacking folks who get too close to the rope. This means Healing Hands is going to heal ... nobody important. Chase is excited about having an AoE heal, though. Because it emanates from the paladin, it seems far more useful to protection and retribution in the midst of combat.

Paladins also get Blinding Shield which should be awesome in PvP. Because it necessitates a shield -- meaning Blizzard is deliberately keeping it away from retribution's greedy hands -- this will see a lot of use by holy and protection paladins who need a quick peel. Expect retribution paladins to pack a shield just for this spell. Protection will get a talent to make it instant cast, too, so a bit of crowd control seems to have been added to the prot tool box. The really interesting part of the preview lay in the changes to baseline abilities, as all paladins will finally get Holy Shock and Crusader Strike in a long overdue response to the paladin community's requests and criticisms on the class' playstyle.

Ironically, the holy tree mastery is called Critical Healing Effect, which seems to encourage (once again, with feeling) stacking crit. Blizzard already went down this path before and ended up nerfing the holy tree, so it remains to be seen how they'll manage to keep this mastery from breaking the spec again. Protection paladins can block for more with Block Amount, and it's so unexciting that even the ability name makes you sleepy. Finally, retribution paladins might be getting a bit of a boost with Holy Damage, which might indicate that Blizzard intends to give retribution a few more toys that play with holy damage. Those are probably just the working names for the masteries, though.

Priest

Three words: Leap. of. Faith. We can actually end the priest discussion here because the promised new ability seems about the most exciting PvP defensive ability to come out from Irvine in a while. Sure, it's just a reverse Death Grip, but that's exactly the point. It's one of the most awesome ally-peeling abilities ever and will be used and abused in Arenas to save friends who have over-extended, been Death Gripped, are being trained or focused on ... the list goes on. Dawn seemed unimpressed by the ability, but it's because she was looking at it from a raider's perspective. It's quite likely that PvP priests all over the world broke out into a Glee-like synchronized chorus of a medley of Journey songs when this was announced. Every serious PvP player knows that PvP is positional and, boy, is Leap of Faith as positional as it gets.

There's also the movement-increasing Inner Will, and everyone knows that moving faster is always better in PvP. A few announcements, such as the intent to make Shadow Word: Death more useful as an execute spell should provide an interesting twist. Overall, priests look as though they're getting a huge buff PvP-wise, with spells such as Power Word: Barrier working well in both PvP and PvE situations and since Battlegrounds are such a big part of Cataclysm, a fully-shielded group is nothing to scoff at. The various masteries only reinforce the current roles of priests now, although it will take more than HoT components in Radiance to give holy priests more viability in Arenas. Shadow priests will need more survivability, as well, considering Wrath of the Lich King let down the spec with Dispersion.

The good news is that in Cataclysm, battlegrounds will move into the foreground and arenas will take a developmental back seat. This means that we'll be seeing a lot more diversity in class and spec representation, which means that jumping into the fray as a holy priest won't invite ridicule in the new PvP environment. In fact, the large scale PvP environment might be the best place for holy priests to shine.

Rogue

Bad news. Rogues aren't single-target killers anymore. The new Redirect ability will allow rogues to swap targets without losing momentum and can even be used strategically by accumulating combo points on a decoy and then calling a switch to unleash a five combo point finishing move on a new target without any set-up. The PvP implications are staggering. Rogues can very well finish off an opponent using auto-attacks and retain combo points to use on a subsequent target, possibly unleashing, say, a full duration Kidney Shot right from the get go. That's downright nasty. The good news for prospective rogue victims? Cheap Shot and Kidney Shot will share the same diminishing returns.

Now let's talk about Smoke Bomb, an ability that creates line-of-sight complications. Capping the flag in Arathi Basin? Boom. Smoke Bomb. Opponents will no longer be able to stop flag captures with ranged attacks, and enemies will need to enter the cloud of smoke at their own risk. Attacking the enemy general? Boom. Smoke Bomb. This will prevent opponents from targeting the tank or surrounding DPS, enabling teams to cut down the boss with minimal interference. Forget Battleground objectives -- throw a Smoke Bomb, get everyone inside and start pewpewing in an untargetable cloud of delicious ninja smoke. It's so delicious Chase is still smacking his lips just thinking about it. Everyone will want a rogue in their battleground premade.

As if rogues weren't slippery enough, Blizzard is also throwing them another defensive cooldown called Combat Readiness, which addresses their biggest chink in their leather armor -- protection against fellow melee. Not only that, rogues actually get a heal ability called Recuperate. If you thought rogues were hard to kill now, wait until they get new toys in Cataclysm. As for masteries, it looks as though assassination and subtlety will remain the PvP specs because of poisons and stronger finishers while combat will generate consistent DPS which will possibly continue to confine it as a raiding spec.