Paladin Healing Niche

I have a very hard time believing GC did Mimi and Hodir with 2 paladin healers and it worked just fine; possible and fine are not the same word. There are very, very few fights that require multiple main tank healers as well. Why would people bring multiple paladin healers to raid? And every other healer has the tools to be an MT healer, but paladins can't AE raid heal?

An apparent "double standard" exists because the game has far fewer healing specs than damage specs. Most 25-player raids are going to have a diversity of healers so it's okay in our minds for them to have more discrete niches. While there are many fights where single-target damage is not particularly useful, there are very, very few fights that are not tanked, and therefore where single-target healing is not particularly useful. Besides, while the paladin niche may be single-target healing, when I look at raid stats, nearly all of them are managing to heal people besides the MT. I've run 10-player raids with 2 paladin healers plenty of times. It works fine.
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Freedom Nerf

They're still worried it's too good. That maybe removing some of the CC escapes can make casters feel better vs melee.

Holy and Ret paladins have in some form been on top of the current and previous Arena season. Furthermore, we think part of the reason some players, especially casters, feel like they are dying so quickly in PvP is because they can't use their crowd control abilities without them getting quickly removed. Freedom was a big part of that. It's supposed to be "Get out of jail free" card, not "you can't ever cc me" card. If that makes sense.

It is still a very potent ability, especially talented, which almost all PvP paladins do. To be honest, we're concerned the duration is still too long.
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Specialized Tanking

Requiring certain types of tanks to do certain fights may be fun for some, but is bad for the game overall.

Even if you could somehow make certain that paladins were the best at some kind of bosses (so that they didn't just become the trash tank), you are then tied to make sure every raid has a few of those types of bosses. Ulduar becomes 3 warriors bosses, 3 paladin bosses, 4 druid bosses, 4 DK bosses. If one of those bosses is perceived as more difficult, more necessary or rewarding of better loot, then the sense of inequity still exists.

Furthermore, we don't want every guild to have to keep 4 good tanks on their permanent roster and just slide them in for the right fight. While dual-spec makes that slightly easier than before, we still don't think it's fair to demand every guild keep someone on hand who can spec and gear as a Feral druid or Prot paladin.

We're fine with certain tanks having a slight advantage on some fights, because we recognize that's probably inevitable as long as the abilities are different. This is going to always be trickier for the hard modes, but again the goal is that you can have any class of tank as your main tanks.
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Very long tanking thread

About 7 posts of GC here, but nothing really new and no new promises.

...We don't think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering...
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Prot spec arena healers

I've always been a fan of obscure specs that use things in new ways.

It's slightly silly because I agree those "Protadins" are playing as healers. At the same time, we're not sure it's hurting anything and it hasn't yet become the only way to play a healing paladin. So for now, we're willing to call it a creative use of game mechanics and not a problem we need to stomp out. We'll see where it ends up in a few weeks though. Our answer may be different. :)
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Big Long Healer Posts

So, they dev see it's a problem that paladins don't want stats other than int/crit, but they don't think the the people stacking int/crit are overpowered or underpowered. I can't quite believe that anyone, even the developers, would disagree that paladins are the worst AE healing class and that Ulduar has a lot more AE damage than Naxx did. Giving paladins that ton of spellpower and crit would make us even more incredible on the tank healing, but it still doesn't let us heal several people at once.
I can design a car, but until I drive that car I don't have a very good chance of knowing just how it drives.

Oh, come on. All of these "If you'd just play my class, you'd understand" comments are a bit silly. We designed your class. We know how it works.

The issue that started all this was paladins saying "We don't want MP5 on our gear." The designers designed you assuming you'd have MP5 on your gear -- I know; I was there. If you are effective without having MP5 then it probably means you are going to be too powerful at some point because you are able to replace a less-powerful stat with a more powerful one without missing the loss of the less-powerful one.

Imagine you could prune every less-useful stat off your gear. Imagine you could trade in armor, Stamina and everything else for just spell power and crit. Do you think you'd blow away the other healers? I do. That's more extreme than giving up MP5 for more crit, but carries similar risks from a game-balance perspective.

Healers should care about Spirit (druids and priests) and MP5 (paladins and shamans). It's fine to care about Int and crit too, but if you're ignoring Spirit and MP5 and aren't missing them, then something isn't working right.

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We nerfed a lot of regen mechanics in between T7 and T8. Players were worried about regen being too low so we made sure the stats were there. It appears that players aren't having mana problems on the normal encounters but are having to be more careful on the hard modes. So we need to get some more hard mode data.

To be clear, we think that's a problem. When the toolbox isn't large, it's important that every tool does something. The solution is just a little tricky. Nerfing HL won't go over well, but buffing FoL just risks making paladins overpowered. To fix this, which we might do, we have to tweak carefully.

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I was trying to make a point. Players were trying to argue that it's okay for them to stack crit because it can't make paladins too effective at healing. The argument is apparently that paladins are so far behind and so narrow in focus that the actual amounts by which their spells heal are irrelevant. That argument seems lacking, IMO.

I have seen plenty of healers claim they are the weakest healer. Resto shamans are saying it a lot right now. What makes you think they will agree that you are already the weakest healer?
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Damage shield damage nerf

Boo to nerfage. Feels like another PvE nerf because of PvP. =(

The bonus damage from spell power on the Druid ability Thorns has been reduced by half.

The bonus damage from spell power on the Paladin ability Retribution Aura has been reduced by half. The threat generated by that damage has been doubled per point of damage to keep the threat generation about equal to before.

More mp5 talk

This must be what blizzard devs talk about at the water cooler; very popular lately.
So, by avoiding gear with mp5 and stacking crit/haste, they're worried paladins will be overpowered? Sometimes I wonder if they realize paladins don't have any AE healing for Ulduar's massive AE fights, or maybe they just expect every raid to just bring one holy for the tank? It takes a lot of haste to be able to make a flash of light hit 5 people in one normal casting time...

We don't have a problem with paladins liking crit as a regen stat. It only gets to be a problem when the paladins refuse to ever use MP5 and get angry when it shows up on their plate. We balanced paladins around the assumption of having some MP5. If they have no MP5 then it is likely they are too powerful. The same thing would happen if we let say a mage stack all spellpower at the expense of Stamina.

As I said though, we need to see a few more guilds attempt hard modes to know how regen really stands. I agree with the players who say that people asserting that mana is infinite (for any healer) haven't tackled enough hard modes yet.
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Ret talk

More talk about wanting to change ret paladin basic rotations. I also suspect they're looking at Blessing of Freedom for nerfage.

Burst is going to be high when characters just hit max level but haven't upped their resilience yet. We don't think burst is a problem in PvP right now. We do think the Ret "rotation" is problematic. You essentially have a spec without a meaningful resource (Rets generally don't run out of mana) with attacks that are entirely cooldown-controlled, which allows them to be front-loaded. The bubble is certainly powerful along with dispels and things
like Freedom.
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Illumination wait and see

More mp5-vs-Illumination info, don't sell the farm yet.

We haven't made any changes to Illumination or Replenishment at this point in time. We need to see some of the less bleeding-edge expert guilds try hard modes, where by most accounts mana regen starts to matter very much.
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About the 4 tanking classes

Reading this the pessimistic way: we don't try to make the tanks equal, just good enough to get by is fine? The final bit I think a lot of us have already been experiencing; it seems like they've noticed if not aknowledged since they played with DKs a bit and have mentioned giving pallies another cooldown. Tricky line of keeping the classes distinct but not having clear favorites, but it should have been pretty obvious when designing some boss encounters that required cooldowns that having a tank that could do it by itself would be prefered over one needed looking after (not even going into the health/mitigation arguement on top of that).

My original point was that we don't look at boss fights in terms of making sure that every tank class gets their moment to shine. That's not the goal.

We also don't look at the four tank classes and make sure they all have survivability within 1% of each other in all situations. That's not the goal either.

I felt the need to point that out to some of the players who may have unrealistic expectations. If certain classes have an easier time, we're totally cool with that, as long as the other classes are capable of doing it (and that includes the hard modes).

Now, if one class is too good at too many bosses, or we see guilds start to replace their MTs because another tank makes the fight so much easier, then that is something of which we take notice. I'm trying to frame it in those terms so that some player don't feel compelled to respond with "It's already happening in my guild," (because then the rest of the thread just becomes an unscientific tally of who uses what class for their MT) and other players respond with "Oh, great, QQ got us nerfed again."
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Block failing, mp5-vs-spirit

A little something for each paladin spec here. More on block falling by the wayside, Armor Pen sounding like it won't change for a while, and mp5-vs-spirit seems to be at a forefront but they aren't ready to commit to a large change. I really hope they don't change pally/shaman to use spirit like druid/priest; it's nice to have some distinct classes.

I know this is in the damage forum, but we totally agree about block. It has not kept up as a mitigation stat.

I also agree Armor Pen is confusing. You can't look at a piece with Armor Pen vs. say AP and have a feel for whether it's an upgrade or not. If you see haste or crit, you have some idea of what that will do for you. Armor Pen may just be damage in a slightly confusing package.

Long-term we could totally see merging MP5 and Spirit into one stat (with all of the class changes that would entail) but we're not ready to pull the trigger on anything like that yet.
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mp5 vs illumination

I personally don't find mp5 worthless, but I don't think anyone can really argue that it's close to as good as crit. Perhaps if they adjusted the point value of mp5 on gear? If they can make Illumination work off spirit, why not make it work off mp5? Whatever they do, it's going to involve some item changes.

"MP5, with current allocation percentages, is worthless for holy paladins."

Yes, that is exactly what I said. You are saying you’ll just use the shaman gear. Why? Because you don’t care about the mana regen. Why? Because your mana regen is so good based on things like Illumination that mana regen stats are not attractive. That doesn’t mean we stop putting regen stats on plate. That means we nerf Illumination. An even better solution would be to get rid of MP5 and make Illumination return mana based on your spirit. Now not only do you want a regen stat, but you want the same stat that other healers want.
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Block slipped

It seems like the developers maybe be figuring out that block isn't as useful as they thought it was:

Traditionally, bosses hit almost entirely through physical damage and then occasionally threw in a big magical hit. The magical hits were scary because they couldn't be blocked and went through armor, so the only things you could do about them was burn a cooldown or heal like crazy. Fortunately the magical attacks cannot crit so at least the damage, while large, could be predictable.

Block was a fine stat back when bosses could do Crushing Blows. In their absence, it does feel like it has slipped as a source of mitigation. We (the developers and the community) were worried at the launch of Lich King that block would make warriors the best tanks, paladins second, and everyone else far behind. In retrospect we should have been more focused on the cooldowns and number of hits a tank could take in a row.
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Patch 3.1.2 live

Well, yay for trying to fix totem/wis stacking. Boo to removing paladin-uniqueness vs demons.

Blessing of Wisdom and Greater Blessing of Wisdom: Now grant 92 mana per 5 seconds to prevent being overwritten by Mana Spring Totem.

Exorcism: Can no longer be used on player-controlled creatures.

Divine Sacrifice: Damage done to the Paladin while this is active will no longer cause the effect to break early, and if it is dispelled or cancelled early, the damage counter will reset correctly the next time the spell is cast.

Plate DPS stats vs Leather DPS stats

Seems like the dev team is unsure of where they want dps classes to match up and differ on gear:

The "primary" stats on dps plate are Str and Stam.

The primary stats on dps leather are AP, Agi and Stam. The reason for this is because putting Str and AP on plate feels goofy -- they are virtually the same stat for plate-wearers. Putting Str, Agi and AP on plate feels bad because Agi does so little for plate-wearers.

A long-term solution is probably something more like itemizing leather with just Agi and Stam, but making sure leather-wearers get enough out of Agi that losing the AP isn't a nerf. The alternative is to make Agi a good state for plate-wearers. We traditionally haven't done that because plate-wearers "feel" like they should be strong, not agile. But that feel may have to lose to making the plate v. leater disparity itself feel better in the long run.

Again, long-term. We're not going to hotfix thousands of items.
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Odd though, I seem to remember them changing thousands of item stats before...

Another Tanking Cooldown

Well, they "recognize" we need another tanking cooldown to compete with the big boys:

We're not going to give paladins a warmed over version of Last Stand. We do recognize that they need another cooldown. Our plan is for something slightly different.
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