We have already announced or suggested all of these changes would be forthcoming in the next minor content patch. I thought I would list them all in one place for ease of use.
Divine Shield: Penalty changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% instead of a attack speed penalty.
1) Divine Protection no longer causes an attack penalty. Divine Shield's penalty was changed to 50% less damage done by the paladin.
2) Sacred Duty: This Protection talent no longer affects the attack penalty of Divine Shield and Divine Protection, but grants additional bonus Stamina.
3) Avenging Wrath, Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Hand of Protection have a shared, 30-second cooldown. The Forbearance effect is no longer triggered by Avenging Wrath.
4) Judgement of Wisdom now returns a percentage of base mana instead of a percentage of max mana.
5) All mana drain effects now return a percentage of max enemy mana (making mana drains less punishing to paladins and other characters without large mana pools.)
6) Judgements of the Pure: This Holy talent now increases the damage done by Seals and Judgements.
7) All paladins receive a single-target taunt (name TBD) as a base ability.
[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]
My thoughts:
The Divine Shield penalty will have much more of an impact in PVP where burst matters. In PVE, it won't affect our speed, which is a good thing.
Avenging Wrath on a 30s shared cooldown and no Forbearance is good. To be honest, I think the 50% reduction in damage from the bubble would make up for the Paladins popping wings while protected. A hit of 8% of mana for a 20% burst balances with a 50% reduction in damage. Of course, any Ret paladin worth his raid slot would also have Sanctified Wrath which reduces AW cooldown by 60s, so I think this is a good change.
The changes to JoW mean we will continue to be mana starved in chain pulls of undead where we are maximizing damage.
The taunt is good. More precision in pulls is always A Good Thing™.
From Ghostcrawler:
I made some clarifications to my initial post.
You can use Hand of Protection during the internal cooldown, just not on yourself. The idea is to prevent the paladin from being able to combo damage immunity. We want you to still be able to use it on others.
The change to Judgements of the Pure is in addition to its current haste effects.
The taunt is called Hand of Judgement. It has a 30 yard range and 8 sec cooldown. It does a bit of Holy damage so that you can break sheep or freezing traps to pull mobs.
The change to Judgement of Wisdom was so Protection and Ret paladins (and Feral druids and whoever else) didn't feel like they were supposed to stack Int for mana, since there is none on their gear. We picked a number that shouldn't be a nerf to most Holy paladins, though it will mean that it won't keep scaling as your Int climbs, so I imagine it will be called a nerf anyway. :) We'll keep an eye on this -- perhaps adding an effect to a Holy talent or something to increase the return.
* Glyph of Flash of Light - Your Flash of Light has an additional 5% critical strike chance. (Old - Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 140% of its inital effect over 12 sec.)
* Glyph of Holy Light - Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 20 yards of the initial target. (Up from 10 Yards)
* Glyph of Hammer of Wrath - Reduces the cost of Hammer of Wrath by 100%. (Old - Increases the range on Hammer of Wrath by 5 yards.)
Quote from: Kellanon on Mon, 2008-12-15 : 15:11
* Glyph of Hammer of Wrath - Reduces the cost of Hammer of Wrath by 100%. (Old - Increases the range on Hammer of Wrath by 5 yards.)
That's huge!
Agreed - the last %age of a boss kill when you are firing that off every chance you get is a huge mana drain. Going from 12% to no cost is huge indeed.