Ask the noob

[Kevin]

You know I just looked at the pally builds and think that just from first glance at the talents, a shockadin build looks about the same viability and damage as a ret build. It has a BUNCH more crit added to it than current, JotW is accessible to holy shock, illumination works on holy shock, so you alleviate a lot of the mana issues that ret has that way. Plus JotW is more MP5 for holy shock simply because you actually will get INT on your gear instead of wearing mostly warrior gear.

If I were you, I'd be transferring a pally and just play around with this spec because it's currently pretty trash in 2.x, but the changes to 3.x look to make it solo, raid and potentially even arena viable with the right team. Something like that would be fun to test out. For the first time I'm looking at pally talents going "man, I could level my pally from level 10" (then I think of how much time that would take).

I've got my pally over there now and I've got him spec'd like this. Based on the character screen stats look good. Since I've hit 70 with Taki now and I figure his experience from this point forward will be very similar to any toon that transfered at 70 I'll be playing my other toons more now and I'll get back to you on it.