Protadin ... To the Ground, Baby !

Ok, who doesn't already know that fateful sentence from Ghostcrawler at whatevercon after the release of WotLK and the ret paladin OP period.
Now it's all about protection paladins, or mostly, and Lay on Hands suddenly becoming too op to live. You can find the changes in the last patch on the PTR on Mmo-champion.
To sum-up here they are :

• 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)

There is a "balance" to the Sacred Shield nerf, but only for deep Holy Paladins (read not the arena spec).

• Infusion of Light: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 seconds.

This is added to the Divine Guardian / Sacrifice nerf, as you can read on his blog, the Suicidal Zebra explains the 80% nerf of the Sacred Shield for prot paladins.

It's clear that PvE protection paladins are the most affected by the Sacred Shield & Lay on Hands nerf. Holy Paladins regen via Glyph of Divinity will also be affected when they were casting Lay on Hands on themselves.
And now all paladins can't self heal themselves in arena/bgs via Lay on Hands.

As Rhidach is saying on his blog, I can't eat this change is not mostly arena/pvp related. And it severaly screws-up protection paladins ... and all levelling paladins btw.

It's been several years since we started saying PvE & PvP abilities should just be made different (as it's already the case for potions/food/etc...) so that PvP changes aren't that hard to balance if you take PvE into account (and vice-versa). But no, this is probably too much work ... sigh. Well done Blizzard.

edit :
In this post Ghostcrawler announces they reverted the Lay on Hands change ... but he's not promising anything about them not changing it again. Stay tuned for more paladin nerfing news.
And yes it's qquing but such changes are so deep towards the PvE balance that they can't just go silently. We're learning to play a class, we're fighting for spots in raids, esp as paladins were not good at all during the end of BC, either for tanking or healing or even not that good at dpsing. So we won't let our efforts go to waste without a fight, that's all.

Down with Yogg Saron

So I finally killed Yogg Saron (normal 4 watchers, no uberness here) this weekend. I'm a bit sad that it happened on my disc priest before my paladin, but I'm really happy to see the end of this epic fight. Yogg Saron is, for me, the best fight of Wrath up to now, it's 3 very different phases, there is a lot to do for everyone, and especially in 10-Man none is allowed to fumble as we can't tolerate one death or we won't get the enrage timer.

It's really hard to find enough motivated people to finish Ulduar now, but I happened to get lucky on my priest server. I got invited in a guild group extending its tag when they were on Yogg, they wiped on their first night and we wiped again all night on last Thursday. This Saturday, we went there again with nearly the exact same group, everyone knew the fight and we downed Yogg on our second attempt of the night, only our third time on Yogg phase3.
I was the healer of the brain team during phase 2 which is a lot of fun and rush (you don't have much time to think and I fumbled my first brain phases on Thursday). We barely killed him before the time limit though (only 15s remaining) and our tank had 6 adds on him at the end and survived (I love to heal good tanks).

All I can say is that I really like this encounter. It's original, well designed and it reminds me of C'thun :)

I used the BossKillers guide to prepare my raid nights, and it really helped me to not be surprised especially in phase 3 when these guardians hit to hard on the tank (thank you Pain Supression during the last seconds of the fight).

Rhidach's Heroic ToC guide

Not mine, I don't have enough gear to seriously try this one, but a complete and very detailed guide. It is specially tailored for protection paladins but full of tips readily usable as a holy paladin. just go read Rhidach's blog post on How to defeat heroic 10man Trial of the Crusader.
I seriously point you to this one, there are so many tips for a paladin that I didn't think of (not playing prot enough these days) I'm ashamed of my gameplay :P

Thanks a bunch Rhidach :)

Update note 20th November: I've compiled a more complete list, including Rhidach's guide, you can find it on Trial of the Grand Crusader (ToC Hard), Guides & Tips Collection

Waiting for IC ...

I don't know about you but I'm seriously waiting for Icecrown Citadel. Not that I've finished
all the content, I've yet to see Yog Sarron die, but that requires several evenings on Udluar and most people don't spend that amount of time on this raid anymore. Too much "free loot" on ToC (normal) or Onyxia or Lolaron to motivate much people about Ulduar.

I still think Ulduar is the best raid from WotLK up to now, despite it being too big, it should have been split in two raids as it was done all along BC. I still have some friends motivated by Ulduar hard modes and we're trying them from time to time, usually one or two nights a week when we are lucky enough to make our suicidal squad (Auriaya with all cats is a crazy fun mess of a fight to heal). If I find ToC hard mode mostly a "gear check", Ulduar hard modes are, at least for some of them, very entertaining.

The first news from the next raid Blizzard is giving us are starting to appear, and the first boss was tested on the PTR these last days (report on Mmo Champion). It doesn't seem super hard, as least on paper, I hope the normal/hard mode gap will be lower then ToC, and my wish is for hard modes to contain more abilities, more strategy than just be a gear check put over a normal difficulty boss.

I guess we'll all see that in IC, hopefully not too long from now, but even more hopefully nicely tested and balanced.