Some paladin changesFollow

News is about a week old now, but I hadn't seen it mentioned here and not everyone follows the O-boards.

The important changes are the new single-target ranged taunt, called Hand of Judgment, and the change to AW. Popping wings no longer causes Forbearance, but triggers a thirty-second cooldown on your bubble. Also, the 50% attack speed reduction when bubbled has been changed to a 50% reduction in all damage. This kind sucks for ret PvP, since it means you can't demolish someone while invulnerable. DS is basically just to buy time for heals now. But it's not all bad: for tankadins, we finally get a single-target taunt, which is trainable and not talented, and Sacred Duty is getting its stamina bonus buffed to compensate for its now-redundant attack speed effect.

This is great news for tanks, since now we can use AW again, and more stamina is always good. Plus, HoJ being trainable means that all three specs get a ranged pull for soloing. Which is great for tagging mobs while you're farming, I guess.

I want to believe that they'll address Ret's issues, but it looks like the same thing as in TBC. "Paladin changes coming..." which excites the entire Ret community until patch day. "What.. the... hell? NERFS to Ret?"

I'm happy with the Protection changes. It will likely put us back up to the same DPS levels as Protection Warrior (if we use all of our abilities). It should be noted that a hot-dog of a Protection Paladin can easily generate 1000-1300 DPS @ level 80 now. It takes a much better played Warrior to do the same, but they are currently surpassing us by a small but noticable margin in the "well played tank" category for DPS.

It'll actually be interesting to see. Tanks of all kinds can currently compete for rankings with mediocre-played DPSers @ 80. Maybe it'll inspire them to learn a little more about their class when the tank is out DPSing them after this patch :D

Out multi-target taunt has always been problem for trading mobs with other tanks. I particularly remember the Lynx in ZA, you'd end up taunting both bosses onto you at the same time when you only mean to taunt the one off the other tank.

This means I'll need to re-work my action bars. There's too much junk on them.

Is the haste bonus still going to be there? I really hope so. If they remove the haste bonus, then this will become a completely useless talent.

Edited, Dec 1st 2008 11:07am by YJMark

ty Maulgak. I did not see that follow up post.

whew :)