What should I focus on as a protadin nowadays?

[Unclejanus]

I recently decided to play WoW once again after a break that has been lasting since march 09. Logging in to my paladin I noticed quite a few changes to the game that I was't aware of (I broke all contact with the game when I quit). Now struggling to get back on track in terms of knowledge I could really use instructions on what is important to a paladin today.

Some of the things I haven't quite understod yet are: The talk about mastery and reforge since these two things didn't exist the last time i played, the sudden importance of block and how to reach block cap (aswell as why I should do it) and how to become unhitable.

As you can see there are a few things I really would appreciate to know more of in order for me to evolve. Hope someone can help me. Thanks for reading btw!

[xenogriff]

Mastery is a bonus you get depending on the spec you get - when you open your talent trees and select View summary, usually the last item is the mastery bonus - for a prot paladin, your block chance goes up with mastery

Reforging is the ability to take 40% of a secondary stat on a piece of gear- spirit, crit, hit, expertise, haste, mastery (main stats will be str, sta, agi, int) - and convert that 40% into another secondary stat that is not on your gear.

eg : a piece of armor has 100 parry, you can convert 40 parry into 40 mastery and retain 60 parry on your gear.

basically reforging is jsut a way to configure your gear to suit your stats.

stats that you will be looking at are hit (246 rating for cap unless you are a dranei) and expertise (26 expertise - note this is not rating) for threat.
try to maintain ~20% dodge and ~20% parry - depending on gear then try to get your mastery up to get to block cap - one thing to note is that block cap will be hard to reach without having access to ilvl 264/277 gear
rest of the time you will be looking at stamina for a larger health pool

hope this helps a little