"To the "Scorched" Ground, Baby !"

You'll have to pardon me the reference to this now legendary (more than epic) phrase from Ghostcrawler, adapted for Cataclysm. I read the info on MMO Champion this morning, and even though I'm not playing my Holy Pally lately, it still made me sad for all of you that are reading this blog.

Holy Paladin Nerfing 101

Stage 1 - Destruction of the ToR build/gameplay: Holy Light will not give Holy Power anymore when cast on your Beaconed target.
The ToR buile was based on generating as much Holy Power as you could for as cheap as you could to use Word of Glory as often as possible. This gave you a good amount of "free" healing as long as you kept your rotation up (HS/HL/HL/WoG ...repeat). As I said before this was a mean of mimiccing what has always been the Holy Paladin effectiveness: longevity during encounters. It was used with all our other tricks (like going to melee and hitting a boss when you could to generate mana) to try keeping your mana up during a raid. When other healing classes are based on their mana going down and then blowing big cds to get it up again, Holy Paladins are based on trying to "free heal" as much as they can to stay roughly at teh same mana level during all an encounter. We have few mana regen abilities, so if our mana goes down, it is hard to get it up again, and we want to be able to burst heal if needed, so we have to keep it as high as we can during a whole fight.
What does that mean? It means that, if shit doesn't happen during a raid, a Holy Paladin playing
correctly will stay at a very high mana level during a whole raid encounter. That is what blizzard is "reproaching" us, that paladins finish a fight with 90% mana too often ... so yes, you're just all
playing too well my friends, you whouls be clumsier with your gameplay and blizzard would then let us live :P

Stage 2 - Light of Dawn healing is reduced by 40%
They could have just halved it, but it's "only" 40%, what a joke. LoD was not strong enough before being linked to Holy Power. when they changed it they buffed it and removed the CD, not enough testing on their side clearly, but to nerf it that strongly two weeks after ... must have been a serious missjudgement on their side.

In the end what do I think of all that?

I don't bother much, mostly because I'm playing shaman now, and also because I've seen too many of these nerfs. My grin is ... you know what? Arena season 9 is starting at the same time ... and Bliz is, once again, trying to convince us that these changes are because of PvE, when I directly see them targeted as PvP nerfs.
Call me a cynic, think what you want, I hate how PvP always influence PvE balance. We've asked them for a looooong time now to separate how abilities work in PvE and PvP so that they can do whatever they want with PvP without influencing PvE balance. But they are not doing it (I accept it's hard to code especially for "world pvp") and it still pollute the PvE experience of everyone.