Originally Posted by Snowy
This thread is quite interesting, and really it's the culmination of stratagies and gear. When you have little gear (on both teams!) Paladins (and Shamans to a lesser extent) are durable sturdy healers, whereas Druids and Priests are rather flimsy and are easy targets to drop. But once you're in full S2+honor gear, those "flimsy" healers are a tough nut to crack combined with their talents. I don't think anyone, including Blizzard, could have realistically forseen this evolution, and all of these healers are balanced rather nicely in PvE to boot.
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It was forseeable. I started leveling my priest to drop paladin when they were still considered to be "best arena healer period", before the paladin nerf patch (the nerf patch was just the nail in the coffin for me). People who played armor priests (hakkar heart armor trinket i love you so much ;-* i miss you honey) back at 60 should have easily seen this coming. A 1000-2000 armor increase is night and day difference. I'd argue that priests are the most gear dependent class in the game in pvp. When the season 2 gear was revealed and myself and our arena team saw the bonus armor on it, our reaction was "wow, do they realize what they're doing? hope they tested it and tuned the values appropriately!".
The recent priest buffs are exactly what Calantus said: they wanted to buff disc, not priests. I believe the goal was to make it lateral to holy (or very slightly better, to get entrenched players to try it seriously), but they just didn't get the tuning exactly right and it ended up a little more powerful than it should've been. I expect nerfs, or buffs to others to counterbalance it.
Originally Posted by Snowy
So what it really distills down to is this: How do we give the Paladin and Shaman more flexibility and options in PvP like Druids and Priests have?
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This is exactly what needs to happen. I won't bother theorycrafting abilities or changes specifically, but hopefully they will recognize this needs to happen and go with it. My stance on paladins has always been that they need to be given more utility, then nerf the power of whatever other aspect of the class needs nerfing to bring them in line (on the whole) after they gain the new abilities. I felt the same way about druids - I wanted them to remove the GCD from shifting and remove the mana cost of shifting completely, then nerf whatever needs to be nerfed to bring them in line; I felt it would make the class feel much more fluid and interesting to play (I refused to play a druid until the GCD removal patch for that specific reason, at least they did part of what I wanted and I didn't get bored before level 25 this time when I started a druid alt).