Well, the next never-ending round of ret nerfs is through and I can't say that I'm the least bit surprised. Sure we've been the laughing stock of The Burning Crusade and Vanilla WoW before that, but what the heck, why should Wrath of the Lich King be any different? Your friendly, neighbourhood dwarf will still be fighting the good fight. I will adapt, I will continue to dominate bad players of stronger specs, and I will continue to lose to just about anybody that really knows what they are doing with their class (that isn't a rogue, warrior, enhancement shaman, or hunter).

Anyway, I was thinking about these nerfs and what a difficult time Blizzard has had with balancing our spec. I mean think about it: we're a plate-wearing class with healing abilities, large burst damage, and stuns. That is going to be incredibly difficult to balance. If we have limitless mana as we effectively did for the past couple of weeks then there is never going to be any end to the QQ. The obvious solution is to address one or more of these issues. Blizzard just gutted our burst by around 15-20% and took us from having nearly limitless mana to real mana issues in PvP (and arguably PvE as well for that matter, do the math). That's certainly one way to do it, but not the one that I would have chosen. The real issue isn't that ret paladins have limitless mana (though that is something that should have been tweaked, albeit not the degree that it was) or even that we do really big burst damage. The real problem was that we did it while the person was stunned. Stunning someone and critting them for their life bar inside the stun just isn't fair. Especially when you take into account that we were able to heal up afterwards and negate any damage that they did to us outside of the stun.

What I would do to fix the paladin class is remove Hammer of Justice from the game and add something in its place. A spell interrupt with a relatively short cooldown perhaps? A short duration silence? There's a lot of options and they are all useful skills for all three specs (I can hear prot paladins licking their chops at the prospect of something extra to help with caster bosses), but none of them have the same game-changing implications in PvP that a stun does.

Personally I'd be inclined to revert every single nerf to the paladin class since 3.0.2 came out (that's right, all of them, even the Repentance nerf),change Hammer of Justice from a stun to a 3 second spell school lockout with a 10 or 15 second cooldown. Personally I'm okay with it being melee range, but it probably wouldn't be as useful for holy paladins then so making it have the same range as the old HoJ (10 yards) seems reasonable to me. Improved Hammer of Justice could tie a 0.67, 1.33, 2 second silence to the skill too. It would always silence the person when hit with it, but would also lock out the school or 3 seconds if you actually hit them during a cast (which would still be useful against holy paladins to negate bubble, basically). The benefit of the silence would be to give the paladin just enough time to hit someone with a silence and use one instant skill (be it a heal, a damage ability that was on cooldown when the silence was cast, or a repentance or something). Basically it would just buy the paladin a bit of extra time against classes with multiple damage spell schools (warlocks, mages, shamans, druids...).

Again, the issue isn't our burst, it's that we're doing it to people when they can't respond and even if they trinket they can't get away most of the time.