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In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm well be making several changes to class talents and abilities across the board. While this list only outlines some of our plans for the paladin class, we want to give you a look at the new high-level abilities and an overview of how the new Mastery system will work with each talent spec.
New Paladin Spells
Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladins shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure's ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.
Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.
Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).
Next you will find a list of some of the paladin spell and ability changes, followed by our intentions for improving each talent tree for the release of Cataclysm. There will be further changes, but those revealed below should offer some insight into our goals.
Changes to Abilities and Mechanics
- Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.
- Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.
- Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.
- Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.
New Talents and Talent Changes - We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change were considering is lowering Divine Shields duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.
- We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.
- We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they dont feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.
- We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be more expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. Its intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.
- Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.
- Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.
- Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.
Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses
Holy
Healing
Meditation
Critical Healing Effect
Protection
Damage Reduction
Vengeance
Block Amount
Retribution
Melee Damage
Melee Critical Damage
Holy Damage
Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.
Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.
Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.
Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.
Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.
This concludes this Cataclysm preview for the paladin class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.
Somewhat lackluster changes were announced to the Paladin class earlier today. Many were expecting a sweeping overhaul of the class, making their trees more different and more dynamic. However, Blizzard has opted to leave them relatively unchanged.
The main changes are coming to the Holy Paladin. Their mana regeneration will now be based on spirit, bucking a trend as old as World of Warcraft where Paladins avoided spirit in favor of large mana pools, and more recently massively stacked Intelligence in order to benefit more from replenishment effects. Paladins will now possibly be free to stack spell power or haste like most of the other healing classes do.
Healing Hands seems kind of boring. If it does in fact turn out to be a slightly jacked up version of healing stream totem, then it is going to be far from game breaking. It does a little bit to address the lack of raid healing abilites of Holy Paladins, but probably not enough.
Blinding Shield is a cute gimmick ability and we'll have to see how it actually works in order to pass judgement on how effective it is. If it actually literally 'blinds' opponents in an area of effect, as in Rogue blind then it will be hilariously overpowered. There is just not enough information on how it works or what the blind effect will constitute to tell what this ability will be useful for.
Guardian of Ancient Kings is a limited duration summoned angel that behaves differently depending on your spec. As this ability will be baseline I don't expect it to be gamebreaking, it will probably be something along the lines of the Priest's Shadowfiend pet which is powerful but not overpowered.
Divine Shield will have a lower duration which I'm sure will please all the players that don't happen to play Paladins. In my opinion Divine shield is the main reason why Paladins have been so difficult for Blizzard to balance, and the main reason why they often seem one dimensional. It is such a powerful ability that balancing around it and the myriad of other ultra-powerful cooldowns that Paladins possess demands that they not get too many other abilities.
Really not much to see here with these changes, I expect that Paladins are going to be furious with the lack of imagination that went into their changes versus many of the other classes. Retribution Paladins particularly got very little here.
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