Judgements Of The Wise To Be Buffed?

There’s some buzz in the Paladin community right now because of just one change listed in the 3.1 patch notes. In a pretty rare instance, though not the first, a baseline skill is becoming a talent (the first time I believe was when Desperate Prayer, a baseline skill for all Human and Dwarf Priests, became a talent in the Holy tree). This time, Spiritual Attunement is becoming a a deep Protection talent.

While this change might not really affect Prot paladins too much, it’s a change that got Retribution paladins quite mad. It was one source of mana for them (after all healers don’t just heal tanks) and it also made Seal of Blood less useful, especially since the SoB glyph made SA more effective. Without SA, Seal of Blood/Martyr’s backlash damage is just some annoying thing healers have to worry about instead of giving healers some incentive for healing them since the pally would get more mana back.. Ghostcrawler came out to mention that they might buff the talent Judgements of The Wise to make up for this.

Spiritual Attunement is a great mechanic for a tanking paladin who needs the mana and gets it from taking damage.

For other paladins it just complicates balance. On Patchwerk you get no mana from it as Holy / Ret and on Sartharion it gives you just a ton of mana. So you’re either bone dry on one fight or drowning in mana on another, totally depending on raid damage.

The best knob we have for tweaking Ret mana return is to up Judgements of the Wise from 15% to 20% or whatever it needs to be. (Holy has Illumination.) source

A 5% benefit increase from JotW probably won’t cut it as far as making up for the SA loss is concerned. I’ve heard about ret paladins having mana trouble even with SA at their disposal. There are more changes coming for sure since they’ll have to tweak the SoB glyph to make up for the SA removal. Hopefully a change to SoB itself will also be in the works so healers won’t need to worry much and hopefully a more reliable mana regen mechanic too. Knowing Bliz though, We have reason to be quite pessimistic.