Power Word: BarrierFollow

Its not as cool as thought would be.

Ya I'm very underwhelmed to say the least. Especially given the high cost.

It's not the amount of absorption, it's the way it works.
Placing a large bubble on the ground that absorbs damage for people standing inside it is nowhere near as good or cool as shielding the entire raid.
You know how people fail at avoiding AoE? This is the same damn thing only now they'll manage to avoid your bubble, die and blame you for it.

To be honest, that depends. On fights like, say, Gormak the Impaler, ranged virtually get no damage while the melee get an AOE damaging ability every once in a while. Assuming the bubble absorbs for the same amount as 'shielding the entire raid' would (which would be a fair comparison), then 'shielding the entire' raid is going to suck as a bunch of ranged people will never get any damage during that fight (and part of your PW:Barrier would be wasted). If you can place a bubble on the melee, you can probably be sure that the thing is actually completely absorbed because of the War Stomp. Especially with Cata bringing manaback, efficiency is what we'll be looking for. Gormak's perhaps a bit of a bad example, but I hope you get my drill.

That said, I think this is royally awesome. I've always loved the sparkly Death Knight bubble and am actually quite interested by this idea.

In regards to the talents... I have no idea what this is yet. This seems to be very far from final as I still expect them to simply remove a ton of "lolstatbonus" talents we usually spent 5 points in (which was the trade-off for getting mastery, as they said at Blizzcon).

It doesn't say what the radius of the bubble is though--it may be huge. If it'll easily cover a bunch of your DpS and tanks, then it could still be good.

Personally, I just wished it lasted longer. But it'll be a cool ability for turtling in BGs.

Would you say they take enough damage to use a 3 minute cooldown mana intensive ability on or would you just.. euhm.. cast Prayer of Healing or Circle of Healing or Wild Growth or whatever.
I've yet to see that ability do much of anything even on hardmode.

Name me the fights where there is a group of people close together taking serious damage.
I don't think you'll find much, and I see this as being a very niche ability that'll be great on a select few encounters but otherwise on some dusty corner of our toolbar.

One thing they could do to it, that would make it more interesting, is change it so that any splash damage based off targets inside the shield (so, say, if someone inside has a Living Bomb on them) then the explosion won't damage anyone outside of it. Could make it really interesting for PvP and useful, albeit somewhat gimmicky, on a fair number of fights if they include this kind of mechanic.

Note: AoE attacks that target an area would still hurt you, even if some of their zone is inside the barrier (and you aren't).