Originally Posted by
Felade
Idk about Resto Shaman's mastery being super powerful (maybe, but they still look pretty low on raidbots to me, which may just be due to other mechanics like CH range and such), and we've got basically the same thing in Twist of Fate. Druid Mastery takes a bit of micromanaging. The 5 second buff is game changing (it lets Druids keep up Harmony as long as they keep Swiftmend on CD) but I don't know if it is overpowered or not. Good Druids will already have a 100% uptime on Harmony now, and Swiftmend means they only have to cast a direct heal every 25 seconds now. Basically, they are getting 1 more free GCD they can spend on Rejuv from this change. They'll still have to stop and cast a ST heal to take advantage of OCC procs. I don't think that will significantly increase their healing or mobility (they are pretty much 100% moble now anyway).
Holy Paladins, like Priests, have a Mastery that doesn't benefit all of its spells. Absorbs are always really strong for healing though.
Priests...Disc's mastery can be odd. It is decent enough on live where you can afford to be more liberal with shields and POH's, but it might be an issue in MoP with overall weak regen. Holy's Mastery does tend to go to waste a lot. I don't know if burst healing is/should necessarily be our signature effect. Our signature should be flexibility (although Chakra throttles this pretty heavily). Monks are basically getting saddled with Lightwell speheres, though. Be thankful that's not you.
Its okay if our Mastery is terrible if our overall healing is balanced. Haste isn't all that amazing for us either though (not like it is for Druids anyway) and Crit is never attractive for healer. That's more problematic. If no secondary stat is very good for us we won't scale well.
All of these problems, including Chakra, don't matter as much if they balance our healing a bit better. Hopefully, the 10% mana cost reduction has done that. They haven't really done that in Cata (they just put a band-aid on the problem with Divine Hymn buffs).
Basically, Holy isn't a very well-designed spec, but if they at least balance our throughput and mana costs, that's not a big deal. Blizzard employs humans, and they aren't going to be able to make every spec play different without having a few that play more smoothly than others. Making sure specs are different is more important to them than the comfort level of high-end players of any particular spec.