Paladins are pretty solid overall. Still, we had a few issues to address:
- We wanted to make less attractive talents more attractive.
- Holy was too dominant in PvP.
- Retribution wasn’t performing as well in PvP.
We focused a lot on addressing the performance of Holy Paladins in PvP for Mists of Pandaria, and it worked . . . a little too well. They have some offensive utility now and a variety of strong heals. To bring them back into line, we’re making two changes: Blinding Light will now have a cast time, but only for Holy. We also changed a PvP gear bonus to affect Flash of Light instead of Word of Glory. Shifting more PvP healing to a cast-time spell opens up the risk of interrupts and also requires the Paladin to stand still on occasion. Addressing representation through balance adjustments is always tricky – healers are always in demand for 3v3 Arena teams, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see Retribution Paladins become as common as Holy Paladins. However, we did want to give Retribution a little more oomph. The main change here is to lower the cooldown on Avenging Wrath to two minutes for Retribution only. Since this is an ability raiding Paladins have today through a set bonus, we just made it a core change. We also made Retribution’s Flash of Light stronger and allow them to benefit more from PvP Power’s conversion to healing. It makes sense that even DPS Paladins have good healing potential, so long as Retribution continues to primarily fill the role of a damage-dealer and can’t fully step into the role of a dedicated healer in PvP. Smaller Retribution buffs include letting them benefit from Glyph of Blessed Life and Templar’s Verdict to a greater extent, and adding a snare to Hammer of Light.
Protection received few changes; we like how they are doing overall. One small change was to make Grand Crusader benefit from dodges and parries as well, so that Paladins would benefit more from stats that were going to appear on their tanking gear anyway.