Protection Paladin Buffs and Retribution Paladin Nerfs

Minor buffs to protection paladins, nothing too major though. The biggest and most unknown changes are going to be centered around retribution. There’s no denying that ret is currently out of control, so it’s definitely going to get beat with the nerf stick. I’m very interested to see what type of changes Blizzard has in store for the class, it’d be a real shame to see retribution nerfed back to nothing.

The ret changes will likely be introduced in the build following PTR 9038.

Blessing of Sanctuary
We like Blessing of Sanctuary as a buff you can put on anyone. However, we might do something like let it benefit the paladin more than other targets. (Self buffing gives a better result than buffing someone else.) Or we might just add more paladin mitigation somewhere else in the tree. That all assumes you are deficient. If 2-5% makes a big difference for you (I don’t think it will make that much of a difference, but for sake of argument), then buffing paladins 2-5% when they didn’t need it could also make the other tanks non-starters. We’ll keep testing it.

Shield of the Templar
Okay, here is one change you don’t have. Shield of the Templar now also reduces all damage taken by 1/2/3%.

Critical Block
Critical Block is something we’re still keeping our eye on. I’m not going to promise a paladin version, but it’s totally something we’ll consider if paladin blocking starts to fall behind.

Whoever said it, yes it’s absolutely going to be a challenge trying to get parity among 4 classes with totally different mechanics, and in some sense the warrior to paladin comparison is the easy one. But we don’t like having only one MT class, and we don’t like giving everyone very similar gear, talents and abilities to tank, and we don’t like the situation where you need a different tank for every fight because they all excell at certain types of encounters and suck at others. So the option we’re left with is to have 4 who are different but relatively equal.

Retribution paladins
I can’t imagine too many people think that DKs (Unholy I presume) and Ret Pallys are balanced. We won’t leave things like that.