@jacob: Ret hasn't been able to bubbleheal effectively since Wrath. They can heal for about 40k and use up their entire mana bar; you could bandage yourself at the same time for about the same amount.

Ret's problem, shared by many low-control specs, is that high level pvp is always dominated by specs that can exert significant control over the match; ret is an inherently reactive spec, like fury. Arms does well because it can do a much better job dictating the other team's actions, and the (needed) buff to MS will enhance this.

My main point isn't about ret, though I would love to see a ret column where we could discuss why that spec has been so hard to balance for pvp. Rather, I was trying to explore why Arms is so hard to balance in PvE. I think it comes down to the developer's fear that if Arms ever overtakes Fury there will be no reason for anyone to spec Fury. Having one as the de facto pve spec and the other for pvp gives each a niche, even if the developers don't explicitly admit that's what they are doing.

In theory, making a lot of utility cross-spec in 5.0 could make it so that you could design a Fury pvp build as well as an Arms pve build, but I am still skeptical. I think that it will be very hard to get away from having one spec that lends itself better to pvp, and then you almost have to give the other pve by default.

I guess the other side of the argument is that maybe having a de facto pvp/pve split isn't such a bad thing. It gives players access to an "expert" spec for both kinds of gameplay. However, that leads to balance questions, QQ from other classes... In a nutshell, I don't envy Ghostcrawler his job when he has to resolve these sorts of issues.