Mastery details!

[Rakshata]

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/23614404 ... eview.html

Holy Priest

For each talent point spent in the Holy tree, the priest also gets:
Healing – Improves your healing by X%.
Meditation – Improves your mana regeneration from Spirit in combat. This would likely replace the existing Meditation talent from the Discipline tree, which many Holy priests consider to be a "must-have." Regeneration will also probably be determined by whether you are in or out of combat, and not the "five-second rule.
Radiance – Adds a heal-over-time effect to direct heals, such as Flash Heal. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.
Discipline Priest

For each talent point spent in the Discipline tree, the priest also gets:
Healing – Improves your healing by X%.
Meditation – Improves your mana regeneration from Spirit in combat. This would likely replace the existing Meditation talent.
Absorption – Improves the amount of damage absorbed by spells such as Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.
Frost Death Knight

For each talent point spent in the Frost tree, the death knight also gets:
Damage – Improves your melee and spell damage by X%.
Haste – Improves your melee Haste by Y%. This might allow us to remove some of the Haste in the Icy Talons line of talents.
Runic Power – Improves the rate of runic power generated by abilities. While all death knights want runic power, Frost death knights would generally have more runic power than Blood or Unholy death knights (who would receive a different benefit from their respective trees). An Unholy death knight who sub-specs into Frost would still be able to benefit from this bonus, though because they're investing fewer talent points, they'd benefit to a smaller degree. Mastery on gear would boost this bonus, and no other talent tree would grant it.

That Holy Priest mastery bonus is hot(lol pun)

[Mellax]

The DK (and also Feral Druid) Mastery stuff is going to be tricky. With DKs, the fact that all 3 trees (at least currently) are supposedly designed as viable tanking AND dps trees definitely looks like it will be limiting any Mastery bonuses to DPS/TPS rather than mitigation (which it's at least rumored that Prot Wars/Pallies will get bonuses from via Mastery). While more DPS/TPS while tanking is fun, there's massive potential scaling issues with DK tanks (and Feral, which have somewhat different issues due to current tree set-ups) vs. the Prot tree classes (which would be able to have DPS/Mitigation Mastery scaling).

While baking more flat mitigation into Frost Presence/Bear Form could work, it would be a non-scaling amount vs. the potential for prots to start out weaker then scale beyond DK/Bear levels as tiers progress. There are obviously ways around this (one of which is making all tank-capable trees only have mastery provide DPS/TPS increases rather than mitigation, but initial wordings would seem to make this not the case), especially since we don't know yet just how massive the talent tree changes are going to be, but this is going to be difficult for Blizzard to balance. Also, with current Druid trees, pretty much every spec goes at least some points (minimum of 11 generally for OoC) into resto, the mastery bonuses to healing are going to be wasted on 3 out of 4 roles.

It'll be very interesting to see how Blizzard is going to shift all the talent trees around for Cata, as this will have a HUGE impact on how Mastery will play out for all the tanking classes. While I'd hate to see DKs go to the model of Tank tree/DPS tree/PvP tree (since it would probably kill off Unholy tanking), I don't see how Mastery will work compared to other tanking classes in order to make it on an even footing with classes that would scale their mitigation via an extra gear stat vs. a flat, baked-in presence/form amount. With the scaling issues made apparent by large tier-level jumps in WotLK, gear scaling mitigation is almost always more powerful in the long-term than a flat amount.

Gonna be a LOT more changes and things revealed about Mastery, but since Blizz has done so much work in WotLK to get tanks reasonably balanced, I'd hate to see the Cata revamp return to old issues. Here's to hoping!

[Capmorgan]

Come on Mel, we are returning to old world content, shouldn't we go back to old world raid setups!

Pallies/Priests/Druids get your healing gear!
Warriors get your tanking gear!
Mages get your tables ready (outside of the instance please!)

Not quite sure what we are supposed to do with shaman and DKs......hrm

[Bahn]

Shaman are going to go back to being horde only dontcha know...

Dk's are gonna be gone, since the lich king is dead! no more lick king, no more phenomenal cosmic power!!!!!!!!

I keed....

Seriously, DK's may be losing their "tank" status. That is not unheard of. They will still have plate, and probably some tank like talents, but they never said DK's would tank in cata... I would not go all "the sky is falling" yet, just be aware that some roles may be changing.

[Mellax]

I'm aware things might be changing drastically (part of the reason I'm looking to go druid come Cata - option for everything is there from ranged dps to melee dps to tanking to healing without having to reroll or level an alt) and I'm also aware that there's a LOT that we still don't know about talents, "vision", mastery, etc. that could answer all of these issues satisfactorily.

I doubt DKs will suddenly not be able to tank come Cata. If anything, they'd most likely limit DK tanking to one tree and have that tree's mastery focus be similar to the prot tree masteries of Warrs/Pallies. Which is fine! I just only like Unholy tanking/DPS and if that isn't the tree that becomes the "tank" tree, then /sadface for me and my druid levels to 85. The devs have hinted that they DO have a solution to this, but are restricted from talking about it (most likely because it has to do with the new trees rather than masteries for DKs/Druids), so I'm definitely in wait-and-see mode. I'd just like to tank as Unholy if I can. If not, Bear Time!

[Leviathan]

I'm wouldn't be so certain the roles will be changing overall. I see this as a possibility of defining of roles. Rather than all tanks seeking, basically, the same stats, perhaps this is a way of making each tank class feel more unique. Each class will have their own strengths and weaknesses to a larger extent then they do currently. Obviously, I'm not terribly knowledgeable in WoW, let alone for tanking but this could be something to break up the monotony I feel is going to plague WoW once Cata hits. I'm in wait-and-see mode myself as I have read both exciting and disappointing things about Cata so here's to hoping it will rock my socks. *crosses fingers*

[Sycum]

I dunno, they've clearly stated they don't like making gear for just one class/spec (hello feral durid!). It clogs the drop tables and really pisses people off when they don't run with that particular setup. If each tank class 'wants' something unique, that means they either get what they want on gear (but that means 4x as much tank loot to be sharded) or there's just a common ground on loot and inevitably somebody's gonna be butthurt that T12 only had gear designed for the other tanks. Unless they find a way to make the same stats do completely different things for different classes, I don't see there being *too* much individuality among the tank types.

[Mellax]

Don't forget about the Reforging option - that can help a lot with the "This has crappy stat X - I'd rather have stat Y" problem. Granted, you take a 50% stat loss in the process (IE +30 Parry can become +15 Dodge), but that definitely will help with the Plate tank itemization issues. They already made great strides towards homogenizing gear for the 3 plate tanks (Str/Stam/Dodge/Parry/Hit/Exp and Armor to an extent) and the Reforging option will help with specific gear stat issues.

Right now, I can't think of a stat that one plate tank wants that none of the others want. While the classes might weigh each stat differently, the days of prot pallies needing Int or SP on gear are long gone. As for Tier gear, I would assume that the current token system would stay in place, and thus continue to allow the devs to tailor tier gear for specific classes while leaving more generic, more evenly balanced non-tier gear that all 3 plate classes would be able to use as additional drops. Especially since these non-tier pieces can be reforged (too much hit? no problem - make it exp!) that would make it so that the devs can make fewer overall plate drops that can be tailored via reforging to not just specific class needs, but specific character needs as well.

Honestly, I'm not really worried about itemization in Cata. I'm more interested in seeing how Mastery will work with DKs (seems like the Prots will be decent overall with non-prot trees giving tps boosts and prot giving mitigation boosts) and whether they'll be able to maintain the "all 3 trees can tank" goal they worked (semi) diligently on in WotLK.

[Bahn]

Careful about thinking reforging will be the holy grail of cata. They have stated that you cannot make any stat into any stat. You will have to work within parameters.

[Mellax]

True enough Bahn - I believe they were mostly looking at non-stat stuff like Crit/Exp/Hit/Haste etc. - I know they stated you couldn't change things into, say, Stam. However, they've been pretty good on non-tier stuff with itemizing basic stats. I've always been happy with off-tier drops other than the Crit/Haste/Parry/Dodge/Hit/Exp stuff - being able to adjust that specific to what synergizes with my spec & masteries is pretty cool to me and would seem to eliminate a lot of the loot-table mess that could be coming.