Sacred shield nerf... Annoying but managable Follow

I must admit I'm highly annoyed with the nerf to sacred shield. I had been dreading yesterday for weeks solely because of it.

However not having to spec kings, getting 3 more points of crit from ret back, etc, seems to have made up for it. At least emotionally. Sort of. Kind of.

More than anything the nerf is just obnoxious...now having to pass it around the group as needed. I haven't raided with it yet. But I found I used it way too much anyway in raids.

Opinions?

All that changed in my spec is the 2 points in IBoW went into Blessed Hands. The Sacred Shield and Infusion of Light nerfs are going to mess me all up, once I get into a raid fight that's not all vehicles.

By the time we had the 25-man group, we could only kill that first boss before raid time was up. I still won't know until Thursday.

yeah, the IoL change didn't really bother me much. I use the proc for an instant FoL 9 times out of 10 anyway. but the SS nerf.... i almost dual spec'd my pally ret/prot just cause this pissed me off.... i used SS constantly on all tanks, myself and others depending on the situation. it was great for damage mitigation. but i guess blizz is just showing once again that while they've tried to make sure noone else felt like they were pigeon-holed into one thing, they still want healing pallies to single target heal only. i guess as long as we stay the best at that one thing it's tolerable, but it certainly keeps us as the least flexible healer imo. oh well, we still have BoL for "group" utility i guess... that'll have to work for now

I think it's one of the famous PVP nerfs for PVE that everyone denies ever happening, but here it is.

IoL could be seen both ways, but I think it was a little more of a PVP nerf then a PVE intended one. I think you could make the argument it was OP in PVE as well, but lets just say if paladins didn't have insane representation in top rated 2v2s this season, I don't think the IoL nerf would have happened (ie: strictly as a PVE nerf). They definately wouldn't have touched sacred shield.

hmm, if it's a mandatory buff on tanks it'd be nice to have the flexibility to keep it up on all of the tanks. as it is i can only keep it up on one of them. i'll deal with it cause i have to, but in ulduar with increased raid and especially tank damage it'd be nice to have the flexibility to have this on several people. it is what it is though. i kind of wonder how much they can nerf us before we can't even keep up with the disc priests at single target healing. before 3.1 it was a close call. now we got slight nerfs and they got buffed. i kinda feel like there's very little reason to bring a holy pally if you have all blessings covered with prot/ret pallies. the ONLY thing i feel like we have that gives us any kind of situational advantage is BoL which does mean that with 2 tanks taking heavy damage we can put out some awesome 2 target healing... but that's about it. and to be honest, i've found that to be somewhat situational in the past.

honestly, i see blizz's point that between disc bubbles and pally SS even their hard content like ulduar could be somewhat trivialized because noone would feel like they were taking damage even though that was only because of active intervention on the part of the healers. however, i feel like a better solution would have been to make priest bubbles and pally SS not stack. this would have meant one or the other could mitigate a little damage, but you'd never get double the mitigation. but blizz did it their way, and i suppose i'll deal with it whenever i have to heal :( fortunately my guild is starting to tell me they want me to dps more cause they've realized how much being mainly a healer on my ret pally has frustrated me... i likely won't have to deal with this personally too much except the rare time i may have to heal when another healer has to leave mid raid and we don't feel like taking the time to get another...