Paladin HP Nerf

Already the lowest hp tank and nerfing us some more. It's just retarded. After the armor change and this, I no longer have any faith in the designers to actually balance the tanks instead of listening to a small minority of big ego whiners.

We are making some adjustments to tank survivability based on what we’re seeing in Icecrown Citadel. We feel this is particularly important in preparation for upcoming Heroic attempts. This is tricky and occasionally subjective, so we might very well make more adjustments as we get even more data.

Paladin:
• Sacred Duty now provides 2 / 4% Stamina, down from 4 / 8% Stamina. The cooldown advantages of the talent remain unchanged.
Death Knight:
• Frost Presence now provides 8% Stamina, up from 6% Stamina.
• Icebound Fortitude now provides 30% base damage reduction, up from 20% damage reduction. For a geared tank with high defense, this translates to 50% damage reduction, up from 40%.

It’s important to note that we aren’t trying to single out paladins here. We like the tank balance of warriors and druids at the moment, and we have a larger sample size of warrior tanks that we can compare. Another solution would have been to buff warriors, death knights and druids and then increase boss damage accordingly. Obviously, that would have been a much larger change with greater risks and a longer delay.

Though Ardent Defender is always a possible target for changes, we like that this talent provides such a distinction between warriors and paladins. Rather than have all the tanks have the same health, armor, avoidance and cooldowns, we’d rather have four unique tanking classes rather than just superficial or artistic differences. Yes, that design is harder to balance, but we think class distinction is ultimately more interesting, which is better for the long term health of the game. The goal remains to have all four tanks be viable for any encounter, assuming sufficient gear and skill, and any differences in performance on individual encounters to be minor. “Minor” is obviously a subjective term.

Please note that the death knight change will result in a small survivability increase in PvP, which we think is appropriate. We chose it partially with that in mind.

Source

Patch 3.3.0 Fall of the Lich King

Holy

• Aura Mastery: This effect of this talent has been reduced in duration to 6 seconds.
• Infusion of Light: This talent now causes the paladin's Flash of Light spells to heal the target for 50/100% of the Flash of Light healing amount over 12 seconds.

Protection

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
• Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin's health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin's health below 20% now cancels the effect early.

Retribution

• Repentance: This crowd control effect will no longer break early from the damage done by Righteous Vengeance.

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• Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
• Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect unless the player has the Infusion of Light talent.
• Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.
• Aura Mastery: The animation for this ability will no longer be extra bright when used with Concentration Aura active.
• Beacon of Light: The effect of this ability will no longer sometimes continue past the duration of its buff. In addition, the duration when used with the Glyph of Beacon of light will now correctly be 1.5 minutes. Finally, the tooltip was corrected to indicate benefitting targets must be in the paladin's party or raid.
• Blessing of Kings: It is no longer possible to have multiple buff icons from this spell.
• Blessing of Sacrifice: Damage transferred via this ability can now be prevented by damage absorption effects.
• Blessing of Sanctuary: It is no longer possible to have multiple buff icons from this spell. In addition, the tooltip has been corrected to include 10% increased strength.
• Devotion Aura: When in a party with another paladin using a different rank of this ability, it is no longer possible to see two different Devotion Aura icons displayed as buffs.
• Divine Sacrifice: This ability now properly counts all damage transferred against its limit, instead of not counting some damage.
• Greater Blessing of Kings: It is no longer possible to have multiple buff icons from this spell.
• Greater Blessing of Sanctuary: It is no longer possible to have multiple buff icons from this spell. In addition, the tooltip has been corrected to include 10% increased strength.
• Guardian's Favor: Corrected a tooltip error in rank 1 of this ability.
• Hand of Freedom: It is no longer possible to use this ability while under the effects of the druid spell Cyclone. In addition, disconnecting while rooted will no longer sometimes trigger casting this on oneself.
• Hand of Reckoning: Tooltip clarified to indicate taunt immune targets will not take damage from this ability.
• Hand of Sacrifice: Damage transferred via this ability can now be prevented by damage absorption effects.
• Heart of the Crusader: The effect of this talent is now always removed when the target no longer has an active Judgement debuff.
• Judgements of the Just: The effect of this talent is now always removed when the target no longer has an active Judgement debuff.
• Judgement of Righteousness: The damage from this ability will no longer sometimes increase when the paladin's agility increases (only occurred with low strength and high agility).
• Judgement of Wisdom: Corrected incorrect information in the combat log tooltip.
• Retribution Aura: It is no longer possible under some circumstances for the UI to display buffs from two different ranks of this ability.
• Seal of Corruption: Tooltip corrected to list the actual amount of damage done instead of a higher number.

Source

slow for news

Seems like devs are working hard on that next patch. They keep changing LoH and Sacred Shield; who knows how they'll finish up being nerfed. They also keep saying they don't see people switching in paladins as main tanks like they saw with DKs.

T10 paladin graphics

MMO champ has datamined what they believe to be the T10 look for paladins. Looks pretty unfinished to me. Shoulders look more like something for a shaman set. Would be interesting if holy got a skirt and prot/ret got pants (robe look for all casters).

http://www.mmo-champion.com/news-2/patch-3-3-ptr-notes-update-1020/

Patch 3.2.2 Live

Nerfs to talents. Trying to make people use Command, sometimes. And some item fixes.

- Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%.
- Seal of Corruption and Seal of Vengeance: These seals will now only use the debuff stacks generated by the attacking paladin to determine the damage done by the seal and by the judgement.
- Ardent Defender: This talent now reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.
- Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now grants 10% strength in addition to its current effects. Also, the strength and stamina bonuses from this blessing will no longer be lost when Blessing of Kings is removed.
- Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.
- Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin's strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin's stamina.
- Seal of Command: This ability now chains to strike up to 2 additional targets when it is triggered by an attack that can only strike a single target.

- Libram of Obstruction: The buff to block value from this relic is now exclusive with the buff to block value from Libram of the Sacred Shield; it is impossible to have both buffs at once.
- Libram of the Sacred Shield: The block value buff from this relic has been increased to match its item level.
- Paladin Tier-9 DPS 2-Piece Set Bonus: Now grants the correct chance for Righteous Vengeance ticks to be critical strikes.

- Hand of Freedom: This ability now correctly removes the snaring component of Infected Wounds and Frostfire Bolt.
Source

Holy Wrath nerf

I wondered why in the world they would bring 3 holy paladins to heal something...

We just deployed a hotfix to modify Holy Wrath so this spell has the same diminishing return mechanics that other player stun spells and abilities currently have. This will prevent Undead creatures that we wish to be susceptible to stun from being permanently stunned if you include enough Paladins in your raid who then rotate their Holy Wrath casts.

This will affect the difficulty of Anub'arak, but we didn't want the "right way" to defeat this fight to involve bringing five Paladins who glyphed their Holy Wrath spell.
Source

Apparently they used it to keep adds stunlocked down. And I'm betting having several divine sacrifices didn't hurt either.

About Healing and Tanking

If we just chilled out tank damage, then healing would be a lot easier. While I know it's popular in this forum to claim that we only want to make life hard for the healers, I think in reality many of you would get bored or risk losing your spot when the raid didn't need as many healers.

A better answer, in our opinion, is to increase tank health and have bosses hit hard but not as often. The end result would hopefully be that it took several big heals to bring a tank back up rather than a single Holy Light crit. Currently overhealing isn't particularly scary because mana is cheap and the risk of the tank (or anyone dying) on a given GCD is very real.

If you currently put say 3 healers on the tank that isn't because it requires that much healing per second to keep the tank alive. Instead, it's because with 3 healers hopefully someone will be always casting and can land a heal after big hit one but before big hit two, which would kill the tank. If a few hots or shields get stomped on along the way, oh well.

Ideally, you put 3 healers on the tank because it takes 3 big heals to get the tank back up. If you don't coordinate well or use a big heal when a medium heal would do, then you'd risk too much overhealing and ultimately running out of mana. You'd need to heal smart as well as just healing fast and big, which is what the current design really encourages.

I predict health pools of all players will go way up in Cataclysm relative to player damage and healing. Everything (meaning PvP too) would be slowed down just a little so that making the right choice would sometimes trump making the fast choice.

I'll also add that many players think 10-player raid healing is currently more fun than in 25s because you are often splitting duties with just one other person -- "You heal the tank. I'll heal the raid." In 25s you get more of that whack-a-mole feeling where you're competing just as much with other players to heal someone first and nothing feels very organized or efficient.
Source

While I agree that giving tanks more hp in this current environment is would be a good thing, there's a lot here that I very much disagree with.

First off, you can design healing to not be as hard and still use a lot of healers. This is entirely a failing of the development team, and pretty much a cop-out.

Forcing players to use healing strategies where "hopefully" someone lands a heal at the right time is horrible. The current system encourages spamming the *@#$ out of the tank, it does not encourage smart healing. Divine plea with a 50% heal reduction is bad; clearly they don't see how the vast majority of paladin healers use it. Beacon of Light is bad for the game; it very much encourages spamming and not smart play. Problems with healer mana stem from requiring stupid amounts of healing in order to keep people alive with luck rather than smart healing. AE just for AE sake and rediculously hard hitting bosses are new bad gimmicks; WoW didn't always have these on every boss. In my mind, this is more fun than heal-chain/rotations and smart healers still play better, but it could and should be designed better (and perhaps the current state of it's design now is a product of PvP influence?). It would be nice to even see a system where it was possible to see a boss that hits very fast for medium damage for variety.

10-mans are more fun to heal because the damage isn't as ridiculous, though it's also much easier to stack 3 healers for stupid healing fights and still meet dps requirements. Also, anyone saying "more fun" means that they have run both 10 and 25 which means that they are probably over-geared for a 10-man. I feel very strongly that our current 10-mans give out far too high itemlevel of gear in relation to the 25 man progression.