Somewhat lackluster changes were announced to the Paladin class earlier today. Many were expecting a sweeping overhaul of the class, making their trees more different and more dynamic. However, Blizzard has opted to leave them relatively unchanged.
The main changes are coming to the Holy Paladin. Their mana regeneration will now be based on spirit, bucking a trend as old as World of Warcraft where Paladins avoided spirit in favor of large mana pools, and more recentlywow gold massively stacked Intelligence in order to benefit more from replenishment effects. Paladins will now possibly be free to stack spell power or haste like most of the other healing classes do.
Healing Hands seems kind of boring. If it does in fact turn out to be a slightly jacked up version of healing stream totem, then it is going to be far from game breaking. It does a little bit to address the lack of raid healing abilites of Holy Paladins, but probably not enough.
Blinding Shield is a cute gimmick ability and we'll have to see how it actually works in order to pass judgement on how effective it is. If it actually literally 'blinds' opponents in an area of effect, as in Rogue blind then it will be hilariously overpowered. There is just not enough information on how it works or what the blind effect will constitute to tell what this ability will be useful for.
Guardian of Ancient Kings is a limited duration summoned angel that behaves differently depending on your spec. As this ability will be baseline I don't expect it to be gamebreaking, it will probably be something along the lines of the Priest's Shadowfiend pet which is powerful but not overpowered.
Divine Shield will have a lower duration which I'm sure will please all the players that don't happen to play Paladins. In my opinion Divine shield is the main reason why Paladins have been so difficult for Blizzard to balance, and the mainwow gold reason why they often seem one dimensional. It is such a powerful ability that balancing around it and the myriad of other ultra-powerful cooldowns that Paladins possess demands that they not get too many other abilities.
Really not much to see here with these changes, I expect that Paladins are going to be furious with the lack of imagination that went into their changes versus many of the other classes. Retribution Paladins particularly got very little here.
Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.
Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.
Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.
Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.
Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.
This concludes this Cataclysm preview for the paladin class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.
We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.
We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be morecheap wow gold expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. It’s intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.
Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.
Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.
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