Another hotfix has been applied to the game, this time to the paladin spell Holy Wrath which does AoE holy damage and provides a stun if the targets are Undead or Demon. The hotfix will apply diminishing returns to the stun effect so that Undead or Demon targets cannot be permanently stunned. It’s a pretty curious change on its own since it doesn’t really provide a drastic effect on first glance.
Lead Encounter Designer Daelo’s words pretty much provides the context of this change. He mentioned that this change will affect the difficulty of the Anub’arak encounter in the Trial of …read more

The Class Q&A feature in the WoW website was been rolling smoothly with quite a number already done. We’ve seen the ones for Shaman, Mage, Death Knight, and Warlock come out already. Now it’s time for us to see what Ghostcrawler and the development team has to say about the Paladin class moving forward. A lot of what they said in this Q&A aren’t really new if you’ve been following the PTR patch notes for patch 3.2 but I guess it’s nice to be able to hear straight from them why some changes were made.
For Holy Paladins, they talked about …read more

A lot of people would probably want to separate PvE and PvP as two separate worlds. But the sad reality is that PvP and PvE are both integral to World of Warcraft and cannot be separated. As a guy who doesn’t PvP all that much, I’m one of those guys who gets a bit ticked when something gets nerfed for PvP reasons and the spell has at least some use for PvE.. That’s the challenge in balancing not just among all the classes but for both PvP and PvE.
One of the changes is coming in the form of a hotfix …read more

ATTENTION ALL PALADINS!
If you’ve been doing some PvP and you’re Exorcism skill isn’t working, this is not a bug. There’s nothing wrong with your game or your interface. As the “Blues” in the forums would say, this is working as intended.
Ghostcrawler came out with quite a lengthy post earlier about this matter and he said that they changed the Exorcism skill with patch 3.1.1 so that it wouldn’t work on players anymore and they didn’t have time to inform us all about this ahead of time. Their excuse is that they weren’t sure if they could get the tooltip changes …read more

Finally the missing piece of the new Ret pally puzzle has been released. The new Seal of Blood glyph has been reworked. If you’ve been following this issue, the removal of Spiritual Attunement as a baseline ability caused some stir in the Ret pally community since Spiritual Attunement served a pretty important purpose for them. It gave healers more reason to heal through the recoil damage of Seal of Blood at the same time it gave them mana back from the heals they receive. Now that SA will no longer be at their disposal, Ret pallies needed some sort …read more

After all the ruckus about the removal of Spiritual Attunement as a baseline ability, which affects a Retribution paladin’s mana regeneration very erratically, the talk has shifted a bit towards their low damage output. Fortunately for all Retribution paladins out there, Ghostcrawler admitted that such just might be the case and he offered a possible solution too!

When all that is said and done, Ret’s PvE damage is still probably a little low. Buffing Divine Storm or allowing RV to benefit from Crusader Strike are two possible places to add more damage.
Note that I made no promises. These …read more

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 …read more

CM Eyonix has posted that they are changing Mana Spring Totem for Shamans and Blessing of Wisdom for Paladins. This is part of their effort to provide raid wide buffs just like other buffs for Wrath of the Lich King. Similar buffs do not stack and Blizzard is making use of this to further deal with the mana regen issue which they are nerfing in 3.1.
We are making a change to these spells so that their benefits are exclusive in patch 3.1.0. The buffs will be equivalent, but will no longer stack. Mana Spring will affect the entire raid instead …read more

When we look back at patch 3.1 in the future, we’ll probably say that’s one of the biggest patches in WoW history if not the biggest. By that I mean not only will it feature Ulduar and dual specs but it’s probably the patch with the biggest revamp to all the classes that’s not a pre-expansion patch or an expansion itself. We’re not just looking at tweaks here and there since we see some major changes just like the removal of consumable ammunition for ranged weapons and the changes to soul shard management system to name a few.
The latest patch …read more

Healers like myself have been cherishing the remaining time we have until the mana regen nerf is implemented since we are the ones most affected and targeted by the changes. The aim of the nerfs is to make mana conservation and management a big thing and not just rely on our regen to tide us over while we heal endlessly.
Ghostcrawler came up with more details about this nerf in a post in the official forums. Based on what he wrote, there’s some cause for celebration since the nerfs don’t seem to be as bad as we all thought. I won’t …read more