All paladins auras had their range extended from 30 yards to 40 yards.
Holy

• Sacred Shield now cannot be on more than one target at any one time.
• Infusion of Light no longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead.

Protection

• Hand of Sacrifice now lasts 12 sec or until the caster has transfered 100% of their maximum health.
• Targets affected by Divine Shield, Hand of Protection or Divine Protection can no longer be affected by any of these spell for 2 minutes. (Down from 3 minutes)
• Divine Sacrifice *New Talent* (Tier 3) – 30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin (up to a maximum of 150% of the Paladin’s health). Instant, 2 min cooldown.

Edit: There is a badass new tanking enchant coming down the pike as well -

Enchanting

• Enchant Weapon – Blade Ward *New Enchant* – Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.1, buff, holy, nerf, pally, prot

Protection

• Divine Protection: Cooldown reduced to 3 min.

The current CD is 5 minutes! This can be talented down to (2 points in Sacred Duty) 4 minutes but down to 3 and I’m assuming talented, it will be down to two minutes? That’s a HUGE change and very welcome!

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.1, buff, pally

The forum thread that this announcement was rather amusing to me, the way Eyonix basically just tells people to get over it and how it’s been like this for 4 years and then…cave.

The end result: 30 minute cooldown on hearthstones. Yay. Now I don’t have to worry about managing my in-game time any more than I’m used to.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.1, buff, hearthstone

• Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

Blessing of Kings being a baseline talent is AWESOME. This is something the pally community has been raving about for ages.

• Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.

Exorcism being used in my normal rotation? Currently, Exorcism only works on the undead. I think I’ll need more mana for that!

• Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.

Shield of the Templar causing Avengers Shield AND Shield of the Righteous to cause a 3s silence? That sounds OP to me, even if it is prot pally only.  My guess is that the CD on SotR will be increased a bit.

• Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.

Very nice change. My 5/58/8 (or the most popular 5/60/6) will have at least 9 talent points freed up (giving back 5 from kings and 4/5 from the 2H weapon specialization). Will the tree be given MORE bloat or will prot pally’s be able dabble more in the ret tree for some added damage (and therefore threat)?

• Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.

So now there is a 100% chance to keep Divine Plea going every time I hit someone/something with my shield? Why do prot pally’s need spiritual attunement anymore?!

• Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

This drops the CD of Hammer of Justice to 30seconds in itself, but there is another talent in the prot tree that further reduces the HoJ cooldown by 30s (for 3 talent points – but, with 3.1, will be only 1 talent point). This effectively gives pallys a 10second interrupt/stun. This seems overpowered (especially in PvP) to me and leaves me wondering what kind of nerfs HoJ will receive.

The only other change mentioned regarding pally’s is a huge nerf to Divine Plea. It’s impact on healing is being increase from a 20% reduction to 50%. The duration and cooldown remain the same however (source).

• Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
• In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.1, buff, nerf, pally, prot, protection

Protection

* Divine Protection The penalty has been removed.
* Divine Shield The penalty has been changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% in place of an attack speed penalty.
* Hand of Protection now Cannot be targeted on players who have used Avenging Wrath within the last 30 sec sec.
* Avenging Wrath now Cannot be used within 30 sec sec. of being the target of Divine Shield, Divine Protection, or Hand of Protection.

Retribution

* Judgement of Wisdom now give each attack a chance to restore 2% of the attacker’s base mana. (Old – 1% of the attacker’s maximum mana) *NERF to Holy pallys*
* Judgement of Light now also procs from ranged attacks.
* Seal of Blood now deals 27% of normal weapon damage. (up from 22%)
* Seal of the Martyr now deals 27% of normal weapon damage. (up from 22%)

Talents
Retribution

* Seal of Command now Gives the Paladin a chance to deal {0.45*Min Weap Damage+0.45*0.23*SpellPower} to {0.45*Max Weap Damage+0.45*0.23*SpellPower} additional Holy damage. (Old – Didn’t scale with Spell Power)
* Vengeance now stacks up to 5 times. (Up from 3)

Holy

* Judgements of the Pure now Increases the damage done by your Seal and Judgement spells by 5/10/15/20/25%, and your Judgement spells increase your casting and melee haste by 3/6/9/12/15% for 1 min.

Protection

* Sacred Duty no longer reduces the attack speed penalty on Divine Shield and Divine Protection. Rank 2 now increases total stamina by 8%. (Up from 6%)

The Glyph of Holy Light was buffed as well:

Glyph of Holy Light — Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 10 20 yards (up from 5 yards) of the initial target. (yay!!)

While this isn’t the holy pallys answer for an AoE heal, it’s better than it was. The old glyph, effecting everybody within 5 yards, barely covered other melee. If melee dps are positioned where they should be (behind or to the side of a mob), then that put them out of the 5 yard range of the glyph (generally speaking of course, that would vary by boss encounter). The buff to 10 yards makes this a must have glyph for all holy paladins.

Edit (12/15/08): Two other glyph changes were announced on mmo-champion.com:

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 Hammer of Wrath – Reduces the cost of Hammer of Wrath by 100%.  (Old – Increases the range on Hammer of Wrath by 5 yards.)

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: buff, holy, nerf, pally, patch, protection, ret

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.

Ranged, holy damage dealing taunt FTW!!! Finally!!!!! w00t!!

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: buff, pally, patch, ranged, taunt

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.

This is fine in my opinion. I’ve always thought it was too OP to bubble and run into a group and still be able to DPS completely.

2) Sacred Duty: This Protection talent no longer affects the attack penalty of Divine Shield and Divine Protection, but grants additional bonus Stamina.

Yay – more stamina! How could this ever be wrong, good change. This already provides prot pally’s with 6% more stam, I’m guessing they might buff that number to around 10%.

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.

While it’s nice to see that Avenging Wrath no longer causes forbearance,  having all of these spells share a cooldown with Hand of Protection is bad. Paladins lose a lot of utility if this change goes live!

4) Judgement of Wisdom now returns a percentage of base mana instead of a percentage of max mana.

This is a HUGE nerf for Holy paladins, since they are the only pally’s that gear with intellect. For prot and ret paladins, base mana = 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.)

This is a superb change for all of the mana-based classes with a low amount of mana *cough*ret pally*cough*. This is a PvP change.

6) Judgements of the Pure: This Holy talent now increases the damage done by Seals and Judgements.

This is a good change – I hope it significantly increases the damage by seals and judgements. This will help holy paladins solo and level much better.

7) All paladins receive a single-target taunt (name TBD) as a base ability.

This if f***ing awesome!! This is something that paladin tanks have been asking for for a very long time!

So for all of the changes going in, whenever they do go in, there is one major nerf (#4), one minor nerf (#3) and a slew of buffs!

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: buff, holy, nerf, pally, patch, prot, ret