Mex

Something that Gurg and Beef both mentioned has really hit me, cause it's something I've never really considered before. The number of possible spells / actions / things to do that druids / priests have vs pallies / shamans, which is what really separates the good from the bad and allows the good to be very, very, very effective. I think that should be something that Blizzard aims for with ALL classes - giving them a huge variety of choices in terms of abilities to use. I really dislike the idea of "idiot classes", like the stereotype of rogues being SS mashers, warriors equipping stormherald and automatically having all their arena teams raised to 2000, etc etc. Now of course this isn't exactly the reality, but some classes are a lot less involved that others.

I think a rework of blessings / seals to force paladins to juggle them a lot could be really effective. Having certain seals sync with certain blessings, offensive and defensive blessings, much shorter durations and mana costs (although this would have to be reconciled somehow with PvE), a whole new range of blessings and seals, to make sure that every single GCD the pally is thinking "do I buff my warrior's damage output, give myself protection from spell lock, give my shaman protection from CC, slow that druid, debuff that rogue's attack power, or heal?" Anyhow, none of the above has been thought through, it's just to give an example of the general idea I'm pushing - giving pallies more things to decide between than FoL, HL, or move away from mana burn. It would obviously require a huge rework though, WotLK maybe.

The same thing could be done with shaman totems. When I first played shaman in open beta and then early retail (back when they were stupidly powerful, frostshock spam + windfury = win), I never really got into the whole idea of totems. They always felt really cumbersome to me. An increase in totem utility would be great to see, maybe even something fun like being able to drop the totem anywhere in a 30/40 yard range (hello 40 yard aoe snare!).

Anyhow, to me that really feels like the crux of the issue - having 3 or 4 abilities in arena, compared to a dozen. When I play my pally, I'm constantly spending the time that I'm not healing trying to get the best possible position to be ready to stun the enemy healer, avoid mana burns, or heal my teammate. That's all I do is run around, spamming cleanse, pausing for a FoL sometimes.

Ignore the specifics of what I've suggested, it's just examples to highlight what I think is the need for more options for pallies and shamans. I know that both of those classes are a lot more vulnerable to spell locks than druids / priests, but I do think that that's really just part of the game, and something that should be remedied with PvP trinket removing silence / spell locks, or DR on them, etc, rather than making all healers too similar.

Oh, and Blizzard balancing for 5v5 primarily doesn't mean they don't consider 2s and 3s. There have been numerous changes made to attempt to better balance these brackets, but the core design elements of the game were centred around 5 man teams, for PvE and then that kinda moved into PvP balance too. I think a change in focus to 3v3 would require too much overhaul (mostly in terms of mana longevity etc). I would like to see more 3v3 and 2v2 changes made, and more aggressive balancing for those brackets, and at times even at the risk of slightly disrupting the 5v5 game balance, but ultimately I think a complete shift is unworkable.

And finally, I've heard 2 explanations for 2345. The first being that those were the keys the shaman needed to win, purge, em, ns, cl (does that mean 1 is autoattack though?!?). The second was that 2345 was the "countdown" (or countup?) to the target switch, where warrior would intercept a new target and MS, and then as soon as it hit 50% shaman would NSEMCL, and mage would shatter combo. Both strike me as being kinda dumb, but 2345 is fairly universally recognised now so I'm inclined to go with it!