But on topic, here's our third mastery:
"Deep Healing: Your direct heals will do more healing when the target's health is lower. This will scale to damage (e.g. someone at 29% health would receive more healing than someone at 30%) rather than have arbitrary break points."
And after a bit of digging on WoWWiki, here's Eyonix on the mastery stuff in general:
"The third bonus will be the most interesting, as it will provide an effect completely unique to that tree -- meaning there will be 30 different bonuses of this nature in the game. This third bonus is the one that will benefit from the Mastery rating found on high-level (level 80 to 85) gear."
The important thing here is that shaman will always have some Mastery Rating from wearing mail (assuming you're wearing at least some and not pinching priest/tree gear exclusively, you naughty shaman), but that otherwise we should have some flexibility with regards to how much we acquire. Assembling a Mastery Rating-less gear set will probably be tricky or impossible (especially for ten-man raiders, assuming the current second-class citizen status obtains in Cataclysm), but with luck there will be adequate wiggle room that we can exchange most of our MR for additional haste, crit or spirit.
I really quite like the concept of Deep Healing. In a world where people don't have near-binary health, it plays into healing in ways I enjoy. 'Saving the day' with a massive heal on low-health targets is a nice feeling, and with Healing Rain and a bit of Chain Heal spam I can see our throughput being potentially monstrous after heavy raid damage. It'll help on tank healing, too, assuming tanks will not spend much time at 100% health.
One key thing is that it makes recovering from a bad health situation something shaman are intrinsically good at. I like this. I pick up Healing Focus today not because it helps when things go smoothly (it's generally useless then) but because it sometimes assists in turning around a raid when things go pear-shaped, and the mastery bonus seems to speak to the same philosophy.
It also discourages topping off of people who are not in danger. This is a good thing, to my mind. Let the HoTs and random smart heals do that, and not only will you save mana (I hear it matters in this crazy world, or something) but your heals will land for more when you do decide to heal someone. Bumping someone up from 95% will feel less satisfying than a beefier heal on someone who needs it more, and this kind of psychological feedback may be significant in mitigating the culture shock of returning to triage and mana management as constant parts of the healing play style.
All this said, who knows if Mastery Rating will be 'worth it'. Deep Healing is optimising for the worst case, which is not a place most theorycraft is done. Picking up additional crit or haste provides extra throughput all the time, and these ratings are supposedly going to be much harder to cap for all specs. Mana regen in general is going to be savaged; most or all spirit-boosting buffs are going away, including the current MP5 counterparts. Replenishment is being nerfed. The five second rule is going to be dead, replaced with in-combat and out-of-combat regen rates according to rumour... maybe stacking spirit and intellect will be vital. Can we even gem for Mastery Rating?
I'd like to hope it'll be an interesting choice. I love my current haste > all setup because it feels more responsive and fun to play. Bigger heals on nearly-dead folk doesn't appeal as much on a moment-to-moment level, compared to crazyfast casting. With other healers and the intrinsic randomness of raid damage, it's a factor beyond our control much like critical heals are, but it's also a reliable throughput increase when needed which crits are most certainly not, individually.
Like everyone else, I await details and numbers with bated breath. But so far, I'm voting 'maybe' to our Mastery.
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