Life of a Nin

We have already announced or suggested all of these changes would be forthcoming in the next minor content patch. I thought I would list them all in one place for ease of use.
Divine Shield: Penalty changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% instead of a attack speed penalty.

1) Divine Protection no longer causes an attack penalty. Divine Shield's penalty was changed to 50% less damage done by the paladin.

2) Sacred Duty: This Protection talent no longer affects the attack penalty of Divine Shield and Divine Protection, but grants additional bonus Stamina.

3) Avenging Wrath, Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Hand of Protection have a shared, 30-second cooldown. The Forbearance effect is no longer triggered by Avenging Wrath.

4) Judgement of Wisdom now returns a percentage of base mana instead of a percentage of max mana.

5) All mana drain effects now return a percentage of max enemy mana (making mana drains less punishing to paladins and other characters without large mana pools.)

6) Judgements of the Pure: This Holy talent now increases the damage done by Seals and Judgements.

7) All paladins receive a single-target taunt (name TBD) as a base ability.



* Hand of Protection will be castable on other players during the cooldown period -- just not on yourself (to prevent chain immunity)
* New Paladin taunt is called Hand of Judgement: 30 yard range, 8 second cooldown, and does a small amount of Holy damage as well
* The amount of base mana that Judgement of Wisdom returns is scaled to not be a nerf to "most" Holy Paladins. This means this change is likely a massive buff to Protection and Retribution mana return (as well as other low-mana classes such as Hunters and Enhancement Shaman).


Still not really happy with the 30s lockout on these, simply having it do a /cancelaura would have been much better in my mind (so they are truly mutually exclusive), and dropping forbearance to 1 minute, but nice changes.

The Hand of Judgement is awesome (if badly named), a ranged pull / tagging spell for Ret and Holy (though Holy doesn't really need it now), a taunt that works properly for Prot, and a reasonable range. Many people will say "why do we need this", and the answer is the edge case bosses and fights where "3 random mobs from target" isn't acceptable.

Mana returns and drains as a percentage is great, while I can see people saying "why doesn't fireball do x% damage then", the difference in health stacking is way smaller than mana stacking (and all classes can do it) due to the odd combination of Mana and no Int on some classes. Hopefully the next step is to give us a truly limitless resource system for Retribution and balance their damage around all cooldowns being filled (such that utility and healing drop dps rather than being in addition).

It is not a lot of love, but it is some much needed love, Paladins always seem to be that odd class with three specs at odds with each other, maybe soon we will see a Str -> Int / Spellpower for Holy, and we can finally see the class coming closer together as an in the Melee X.