#0 - March 1, 2010, 9:45 p.m.
Mastery is not a stat.
It is not on gear. It is not something you can enchant your gloves with.
What mastery is is the cleaning up of your talent trees.
Boring +damage talents, known currently as "passive talents" are going to hopefully be primarily culled from your trees.
While Hybrids generally receive some additional benefit from range talents, like chance to hit, or less spell damage taken, it's actually pretty big for pure classes.
If a talent like Ruin for a warlock simply required that you invest 5 points into Improved Shadow Bolt, then that Warlock could pick up some pushback resistance, for instance, or maybe some utility like Demonic Empowerment.
I know what I just said wouldn't really make sense to a lock (due to talent tree structure), but if you can imagine that you could theoretically have pushback resistance across all of your spells and maximum range on them all passively, then you would start to get my drift here.
Or if you look at fire mages, what if your fireball went from 3.5 seconds to 3.0 just by sticking points into the fire tree that was, say, increased radius on Flamestrike?
This is what mastery is going to do......at least as far as has been indicated.
So please, read this and spread the word.
Now if you will miss those passive talents, go read up on the cryptic path of the titans and archaelogy statements by the devs......some of your potency is no-doubt getting wrapped into there.......which should, at the very least, make gearing and gear customization more flexible to picking up say, pure haste or crit gems......
