Patch 3.3 nerf batch 1

The patch notes do not look good for paladins these days.

First, we had the changes to Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian:

• Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin’s health below 20% now cancels the effect early.

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.

The tooltips for these two talents will be massive...
These changes have been called buffs or nerfs depending on who you talk to. For a raiding paladin, they are downright nerfs. The old version of the talents had much better damage absorption, but did require the paladin to bubble to not kill himself. The new version makes Divine Sacrifice without Divine Guardian (which is the most likely case for retribution paladins) a lot less useful.

What's the deal here? We have a damage absorption talent that cannot be used by a main tanking paladin, but still exists all the way down in the third tier in the tanking tree, which is hard to reach for both holy and (especially) retri paladins.

Apparently, this "raid wall" talent was too powerful and they had to move the raid wide part of the talent down to the fourth tier Divine Guardian (which earlier "just" increased the amount of damage absorbed by the then raid wide Divine Sacrifice), where fewer people will be able to reach it.

While these changes annoys me, they do not come close to the feelings I have for the following changes:

• Sacred Shield can now only occur every 30 sec. (Up from 6 sec)

• Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

• Infusion of Light now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 sec.

• Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)

Yes, you guessed it: PvE paladins get nerfed because of PvP. Again.

I don't PvP much with my paladin these days, but by looking at the number of PvP nerfs that has hit the paladins in WotLK, paladins must have been completely dominating the PvP scene (and still I don't see paladins dominating in the top-rated arena teams...)

The nerf to Sacred Shield makes it totally worthless for anyone except the holy paladin. As a tankadin, I often cast this on myself (if I don't have a holy paladin casting it on me) to reduce the incoming damage, but that is pointless now.

Actually, I don't even see the point to keep Sacred Shield as a baseline ability for paladins anymore, since it is useless without Infusion of Light, which is deep in the holy tree. If Blizzard wants only holy paladins to use this ability, then just put it in the holy tree and remove it as a baseline ability. Now the untalented Sacred Shield is a joke.

The nerf to Aura Mastery is clearly also a PvP nerf. It's the exact same nerf that Hand of Freedom got a couple of patches ago.

And then we come to my favorite "change": Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

What has Blizzard been sniffing this time? Gnomish Ultra Glue (c)?

Lay on Hands has saved by butt so many times, I cannot count them all. It has a looooooong cooldown, so I save it for those very special moments where my healer is dead and the boss is starting to chew my face off after I have been auto-ressed by Ardent Defender.

Removing the self-cast on Lay on Hands would remove one of the few tanking cooldowns paladins have. I have even suggested getting LoH off the global cooldown, so it would be a more reliable tanking cooldown....

What's the reason for this nerf?

PvP? I don't think so. You cannot use LoH in arena, and you will only be able to use it once in a battleground. That's hardly a reason for a nerf.

PvE? I can only assume that it is because of the extra survivability it gives paladins when they solo content. Is that really something you want to balance talents around? Or is it because raiding holy paladins sometimes use it to get mana back when they have the talent glyphed? We are still talking about an 11 minute (talented and glyphed) cooldown, guys!

I read a new post from Ghostcrawler where he says that they have removed the change to LoH in their internal build. That doesn't mean that we can rest assured that the change will not go live. It means that Blizzard considers this talent broken, and that they are not finished messing with it yet.

Personally, I don't like where these changes are going. I am also very tired of getting nerfed because of PvP.

Atleast Icecrown Citadel looks cool. Although I'm not exactly thrilled about that the first boss in there wipes raids by passing gas. Is Blizzard catering to the 6-year olds now?