Pally Changes

[Skandranon]

This is exactly what MJ is complaining about.  It's entirely valid.  But the issue isn't with Paladins.  It's with cloth itemization as a whole.  Among other things, at this point mages and warlocks become fairly trivial on the playground as their damage gets dwarfed by the melee classes and they are taken down so quickly its very upsetting - for the cloth classes damage ramps much faster than your effective hit point pool.  This has only been compounded by other changes such as the nerfs to fear and the other caster crowd control mechanisms.
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Well said, Savaughn. One of the core issues here is that in the current environment, cloth simply dies too fast. A single MS warrior with a decent weapon will carve up any caster in seconds; a rogue with good timing and Perdition's can burst over 3k damage when they double crit ambush-backstab. Everything a caster can do is easily countered by a MS warrior (with the exception of polymorph, which is, I believe, the only reason mages die slightly slower than warlocks and priests).

Blizzard needs to ask the question: why must cloth die so fast? Warriors and rogues burst more damage than casters on a regular basis, barring two-trinket-arcane-power tricks that only a few mages can do and even then once every three minutes. Nor do casters really have any advantage of range; hunters match our longest ranged spell exactly, rogues are invisible and warriors' melee range is essentially 25 yards with charge and intercept, which are teleports in all but name. With the form of damage most easily countered (resists, interrupts), the least damage, middling burst damage at best, and with escape skills that most other classes can be immune to, why must cloth classes also have the lowest survivability on top of that?

Nevertheless, that's what it is for now. And so the primary method of fighting becomes stacking on warriors and rogues (but really mostly warriors) to eliminate enemy cloth. And yes, paladins do counter this tactic somewhat. But the problem isn't with paladins; it's with the global conditions. Spellcasters should be able to do significant damage, and to burst significant damage. Because they can't, a plate healer matters against all the physical classes that PvP teams bring. I think with a significant mage/warlock, and maybe even priest/druid non-physical dps increase, the paladin's weaknesses will become more glaringly apparent.