Paladin 1.9 Talant Trees

[Kevin]

They're worthless #$%&ing filler.

Hits have "a chance" of reducing the targets strength and agility. I have to hope the mage freaking crits and and that it doesn't instantly kill me, because I still can't touch him unless he decides it'd be fun to use his staff.

Yay, retribution builds are now EVEN MORE DEPENDANT UPON THE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR. GOD HELP THE GAME IF PALADINS EVER CONTROL MORE THAN THEIR BLADDERS.

This isn't change. This is more garbage. What happened to the offensive ability on Divine Shield's timer? What happened to new auras? What happened to making the Trees actually effect gameplay? Reckoning is still the most reliable burst damage ability we have available, and it's a metagaming joke.
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Agreed

Yep pallies didn't really get buffed that much (and they didn't need a buff they needed fixes to DPS control and for the 3 trees to mean something).

Actually my 20 points in Holy can't get me improved Blessing of Wisdom anymore (though I can get 10% more mana instead) and I would rather have teh 6 more man per 5 than more mana for myself. I don't see our alliance having any paladins with imp blessing of wisdom now becuase holy shock still sucks and I'm not giving up all my soloing powering for it and 5% more chance to crit with holy spells and a longer lasting judgements that will only really matter in a couple of fights since you can melee whack most of the bosses to keep it up longer than 10 seconds anyway. I see Rags and Golemagg being the most affected by not having that talent.

Retribution as mentioned is even more reliant on the PRNG for doing damage. The skill changes make tanking easier but I don't think they make you a good enough tank to replace a warrior in high end raids but it might put them back up with bear from druids.

As a warrior I'm very much looking forward to playing with a paladin that has the new blessing of sanctuary. I block a lot and more damage is more aggro for me even if it is tiny. I love the improved thorns talent as a warrior and I prefer retribution aura over devotion most of the time when tanking as well (and if you can get improved thorns with improved retribution and watch mobs do 60 damage to themselves, opposed to 38, everytime they hit you it's just pretty).

The talent changes did help stop some of the PvP cheese of Bubble/Blessing or Protection (if you aren't getting hit by a lot of magic damage) by putting them on the same recently shielded cooldown.

But the changes to the base skills did more to diversify paladins than the talent trees do. Paladins will tank better because of skill changes the tree changes won't really effect that at all and they still won't be tanks in the end game instances unless you get a lot of threat out of that new self buff. I would have liked to have seen a protection talent that lets you judge a seal or something to work as a taunt. Sure put it at say a 30 second cooldown but put it in there for emergency snap aggro and give it to prot pallies so they are better tanks than other paladins. All other classes that do tanking at times have snap aggro skills (earth shock for shaman, it's dang near high enough aggro to count as a taunt and stoneclaw totem is a taunt as it puts the mobs on the totem for a little bit and gives you a chance to build more aggro on that mob which is all the warrior taunt does is put the mob on you for 2 seconds and lets you try and get more aggro than everyone else in that time).

The skill (not the talent changes) give paladins a little more control over their DPS but not much. But this was by far a worse talent rework than what hunters and druids got. You see hunters that use all 3 trees and use all the top tree talents. You still won't see holy shock paladins, you will only see Repentance on PvP paladins and you will still see most PvE paladins with 31 retribution and 20 holy but just no improved blessing of wisdom now.

Blizzard didn't fix any of the class complaints via talent changes (they did with hunters and with druids) they just gave us more of the same as far as paladins go and addressed some of the issues through skill changes but not many. There is a bit more DPS control from the changes to seal of righteousness and judgement of command, overall DPS is higher though it didn't really need to be and overall DPS of the 3 trees is a bit closer together than it had been (mainly because of the skill mechanic changes to righteousness). But they didn't do remotely what most of the paladins I know where hoping for.