So PvP paladins finally got whacked with the nerf stick like Blizzard promised. Two of our key arena abilities, BoF and BoSac got hit with the nerf stick hard (harder than my self-proclaimed biggest fan Kakushan's mortal strike), and BoF and BoP now come with shiny new "PURGEMEPRZ" animations. And to top things off, there is no sign of the promised retribution buffs.
However, the news isn't entirely bad. Blessings will be longer, some new PvP items will be added, and some long-awaited bug fixes will arrive. Here's a quick overview of all the paladin-related patch notes (Full patch notes can be found here)
General
• Resilience Rating: The reduction to the percent chance to get a critical strike now also reduces the damage dealt by damage over time effects by the same percentage.
Warlocks and shadow priests will now rape us slightly less, and rogues will get raped slightly more. However, this change is not sufficient to end the warlock/spriest 2v2 dominance (in fact, the inability to swap into resist gear will probably make these teams stronger).
• Pets are now affected by Paladin greater blessings.
Combined with the blessing duration increase, this should make buffing a raid much less tedious.
Druids
• Cyclone: Paladin Auras, Trueshot Aura, and Aspect of the Pack will now be automatically reactivated when Cyclone wears off of a victim who had one of the abilities active.
A long-awaited bug fix that should make cyclone much less of a pain in the ass.
Paladins
• Blessing of Freedom cooldown increased to 25 seconds.
• Guardian's Favor now increases duration of Blessing of Freedom by 2/4 seconds.
Huge nerf to BoF. Not a whole lot to say here, this makes BoF kiting much less effective, and makes purge much deadlier, since teammates will have to wait an additional 5 seconds for their snares to be removed.
• Blessing of Sacrifice now has a 1-minute cooldown.
Another huge nerf. BoSac is now considerably more vulnerable to purge/dispell, which makes paladins much more CC-able. In addition, it now has, at best, a 50% uptime. BoSac will continue to be a useful weapon in a paladin's arsenal, and it will still be capable of breaking CCs at clutch times, but it will not be nearly as powerful as it is on live.
• Blessing of Kings, Light, Might, Salvation, Sanctuary and Wisdom increased to 10 minutes.
• Greater Blessing of Kings, Light, Might, Salvation, Sanctuary and Wisdom increased to 30 minutes.
Raid buffing just got a lot less tedious.
• Hammer of Wrath cast time reduced to .5 seconds, global cooldown reduced to .5 seconds.
This will make HoW much easier to cast. If you've even played a tauren or a destruction warlock, you know how tough it is to interrupt a .5 second cast.
• Seal of Vengeance duration increased to 15 seconds. In addition, when Seal of Vengeance strikes a target that already has 5 applications you will cause instant Holy damage.
This will give a small boost to SoV, but SoV will probably remain below SoR in TPS. As reported here, the bonus damage is currently just a very small amount of your spell damage (~11-12%), so the damage increase is negligable, however, it is also not confirmed whether this is a bug or working as intended.
• Blessing of Protection: This spell can no longer be cast on others when stunned. It can only be cast on self (to break the stun) under those circumstances.
• Consecration will now properly hit large creatures.
• Eye for an Eye: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.
• Illumination: Paladins will now correctly gain mana from this ability if they sit down to drink right after a healing crit, and receiving mana from this ability will no longer cause a Paladin who is sitting to stand up.
• Redoubt: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.
• Reckoning: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.
• Righteous Defense: In some cases this ability would fail to work properly when the Paladin casting it had just been crowd controlled by a creature. That is now fixed.
• Seal of Righteousness: The tooltip for this ability has been improved. It now displays a different number for one-handed weapons and two-handed weapons, and adjusts to the speed of your current weapon. It displays a single number, rather than a range of numbers for different handedness and speeds.
• Seal of Vengeance: The damage from this ability will now stack properly when two different characters are applying Seal of Vengeance effects to a target.
• Judgement: The Judgement spells will no longer cause triggered effects to go off twice.
A variety of bug fixes and such, most of which are slightly beneficial, a few of which are slightly detrimental.
Priests
• Mass Dispel: The portion of this spell that removes immunity effects (Blessing of Protection, Ice Block, etc.), now has a chance to be resisted, and will display correctly to the combat log. It will no longer cause Rogues and Druids in Cat Form to lose stealth.
While I've been unable to test this myself, this implies that Stoicism will now apply to MD. More of a bug fix than a buff, but it still works in our favor.
Items
• Merciless Gladiator’s Barrier: This spell damage shield has been added to the arena vendor.
• Merciless Gladiator’s Redoubt: This healing shield has been added to the arena vendor.
These shields plug up one of the largest gaps in PvP itemization. All that is left is to add a better selection of trinkets and relics.
• Veteran’s Scaled Belt: Stats have been adjusted to correct budget.
• Veteran’s Scaled Greaves: Stats have been adjusted to correct budget
I haven't had a chance to check to see whether the budgets on these items have been adjusted up or down, I'll edit when I find out.
Finally, sap, poly, freeze trap, warlock fear, seduce, banish, and roots have had their initial durations reduced by 2 seconds, so that these CCs now go 10-5-2.5-immune instead of 12-6-3-immune. All other CCs are unchanged.
As mentioned earlier, promised ret buffs have yet to materialize in this patch either. Ret DPS is still a joke without absolute top-of-the-line gear (and even then it isn't very impressive), and PvP retadins are still handicapped by a lack of resilience (making them among the softest targets in the game) and they still lack the damage, CC, and useful group support abilities that would make them viable in top-level arena PvP.
And still, nothing has been done to address the tankadin situation. While warriors and druids are both top-tier MTs, using a paladin MT past karazhan pretty much guarantees slower progress.
The net result of all these changes is that paladins have been knocked down a notch or two on the PvP food chain (PvE, for better or worse, remains unchanged). I believe that we will continue to be a top class in 5v5, but our fate in 2v2 and 3v3 is less certain. Unlike the illumination changes, these nerfs are not designed to bring an out-of-control ability back down to earth, but to bring abilities that were reasonably balanced down to a lower level. And these are class-wide abilities, not talents, so all paladins will feel the effects of these nerfs. One can only hope that the promised ret changes will be damn good, because the PvP retadin is already on life support.
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