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...
Source (use the blizzard next to just read the Ghostcrawler posts)

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.