Disclaimer: If you are sick of reading about paladin nerfs then stop reading right here and save your anger.

Ok now with that out of the way I will be getting into the meat of this post. Please understand that I love my paladin and the class as a whole. I've come to realize this over the years as I have played my paladin.

Throughout time Paladins have gotten progressively better, I will not argue this point because it is true. When you ask therefore what all the recent QQ about paladin nerfs in guild chat has been about its quite simple.

The title of this Blog was that just 2 weeks ago at Blizzcon, Ghostcrawler and Kalgan were asked what they currently thought about Ret. Ghostcrawler responded at first with "Into the Ground" and then a few pulses later said "Don't Nerf Me, Bro" in a manner similar to the University of Florida student last year. Finally Kalgan and Ghostcrawler agreed that Ret was currently where they wanted it to be. Note that the patch woud hit 3 days later, and the nerfs would start. Ghostcrawlers foreshadowing has begun to bite him in the ass.

The first and most obvious problem has been that MOST of the nerfs have been applied in hotfixes where at most we get a few hours notice (see last night with Avenging Wrath). I never even got to play with Divine Storm as holy damage on live, due to our server taking nearly the entire day to come up. So by the time I logged on the next day it had already been reduced, nor was I able to play with 10 second repetence in pvp.

Then we go to the ability Avenging Wrath which now every paladin had actually been using. This went from a spell you would only see in WSG zerg fests after the zerking buff to pick up or a tank getting initial aggro in pve to something that was seen often. First of all the ability was buffed, moved from +30% damage for 20 seconds to +20% damage/healing for 20 seconds. On top of that they away the spells ability to trigger forbearance, thus allowing all 3 specs of paladins to use it without having to worry about losing their defensive capability. So tanks could spam it when it was off cooldown for more threat, holy could spam it every cooldown for more healing, ret could spam it off cooldown for more damage.  Now again it causes forbearance like it did before. But instead of having forbearance for 1 minute like we did pre3.0 we have it for 2 minutes. So that is 2 minutes now after its used before your tank can blow shield wall (See Divine Protection) if he needs too, or its 2 minutes until your holy paladin can stand in a fire for Archimonde. For ret, it means they will probably never be able to bubble on a boss fight since we are able to reduce the cooldown for our Avenging Wrath to 2 minutes and while its up at least for now we ignore 50% of all damage reducing mechanics.

So this ability that was nerfed because of its PvP uses has now once again crippled PvE. And about PvE lets get more into how these nerfs affect that. When patch 3.0 comes out, protection is suffering yet another nerf as blizzard is reducing the damage and coefficients on EVERY seal and judgement other than Blood/Martyr. So therefore your tank will be doing less threat. Oh and your holy pally will be even less likely to spec holy, or at least to farm as their own soloing ability is disappearing.

Now I will move to say that Retribution was overpowered in the fact that we had been given so much +Critical Damage in our trees in 3.0. Crusader Strike was critting at 235% damage while Judgement and Divine Storm were critting at 245% damage. If our burst is really the problem why don't they just implement the nerfs to these 2 talents already. Both of these look to be a possible buff to pve damage but they are still on beta.

Which is another thing that drives me nuts, they are implementing more hotfixes (see Judgement of the Wise) without at times even having them touch beta. In fact Live has become the beta recently for all these changes. And while I am on Judgement of the Wise about this nerf. 15% of base mana on this ability really is gonna sting as paladins level where as the testing they want right now they can't get. WHY because ret paladins still have intellect on their gear be it from PvP gear or PvE gear. This in turn affects replenishment mana regen and Judgement of Wisdom mana regen (which is also being nerfed to 1% base mana from 2% of base mana and half the chance to proc). Therefore all this testing they want us to do we can't simply due to other items in game atm which we have no control over. BTW, the same people testing this on beta have us oom in a raid setting at 80 just using Seal, Judge, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm at about 4 minutes if you use Divine Plea (Lvl 71) every time this is up. Which means our damage gets nerfed again as we can't use Consecrate (long a staple of retribution damage) or Hammer of Wrath. Now I know "But, Dragon, you have Seal of Emo so you can use those abilities in pve," and while this is true, it means that we have to be healed in order to maximize our damage. But unlike warlocks and shadowpriests, we don't really get to pick when this damage occurs. Shadow Word: Death the Shadowpriest has a choice whether or not to press. Same for a Warlock's Life Tap. Ours is just always up, always taking damage on every swing. As far as the reaching side effects for pvp in this, 1 viper sting/mana burn/mana drain and we are useless. On top of this, with all spells being base mana now, it greatly limits the amount of Hand Spells or Heals we can toss in either PvE or PvP.

Finally there is also talk recently of Judgement of Justice being reduced to 10 seconds and that Sanctified Wrath will no longer give the ability to ignore damage reducing effects while Avenging Wrath is active. So we have 1 PvE nerf in the Sanc Wrath change and then 2 major pvp nerfs.

In conclusion, it feels that Blizzard just keeps shooting from their hips at the moment with their nerfs. Many of these are having far reaching effects into the land of PvE and to all parts of the class. We have yet to have the ability to test these in places other than live, and most of the paladin community cannot test all the changes at once since so few are actually in beta. Fewer now log into beta as we were all tryin to get our toons ready for Wrath. I would like to believe I can stay with both my paladins in Wrath, but with Blizzard's Knee Jerk, Shoot-From-The-Hip responses to the general outcry of the public, I am left wondering what they are gonna hit next. Meanwhile, all the other classes that people are complaining about, Mutilate Rogue/Mages, get with all their damage intact.

/EndRant