It never really occurred to me until recently how Goddamned monochromatic Paladin and Priest spells are for the most part. I've been playing those two classes the most over the past week or two, and really all my hotbars look like someone's obnoxiously bright chandelier. I am hammering away at people or healing them with various iterations of yellow light, like a painter who has entered their manic joy period. If an artist ever had one of those, anyway.
But beyond the aesthetics, I want to go over what I think the changes for Paladin and Priest mean to me. It's been months and months since I've raided, and longer still since I've even cared about raiding, so this is less of a perspective bent on endgame raiding and more focused on what Blizzard is supposedly catering to these days - the player who is not spending a whole bunch of time raiding. Note the careful avoidance of the now-loaded word "casual". You can't even say "casual" anymore without someone grousing about how it's a secret cipher for "bad player who blames a lack of time on their horrible ability" or "noble and secretly genius player who struggles against real world concerns to play". So in this instance, we're just talking about a relatively competent person (myself) who is somewhat burned out from WotLK and might be considering playing on a few-hours-a-week schedule given what we're looking at from Cataclysm.
For Paladins, I have to say the decision to give the class Holy Power is one I'm still not sold on. The horribly mismatched complaint that says Paladins are now like Rogues because Holy Power is points just like Combo Points is points so it's "the same thing" makes my inner ears bleed. But beyond that particular stupidity, the "ramp-up" that Blizzard wanted for Paladin confuses me. Really, there's not been an acceptable answer to the question of "why?" Why do you need this, Blizzard? Blizz has been pretty standard in their responses that both cover a broad range of answers (from "to tone down burst" to "to make them interesting!!!") and are vague enough that the answers themselves cover a wide range of logic that is cheerfully open to interpretation, allowing you to pick an answer that makes sense to you.
But really, Ret is still bursty, and had to have its damage increased since the Holy Power money shot wasn't cutting it. No Holy Power at the start of the fight for Prot is something that Blizz is now having to fix. And Holy only has one, arguably needless, use for it. In the end, I believe that Holy Power is going to be something of a metaphor for many of the class/skill/talent changes that went in with patch 4.0.1 - an attempt to make things a little more interesting and balance, which will have to be modified and tweaked until it's nothing but a new paint job for the exact same machine. With Paladins, building Holy Power is already becoming "do what you would have done anyway."
Looking at Retribution, the changes nagged on me for some reason I couldn't quite put my finger on. Blizzard had mentioned that they disliked how many specs felt GCD-locked: which is to say that they're frantically pushing something every global cooldown or they feel like they're falling behind. The problem with this is something I agree with. After all, it makes the game a repetitive bore that relies more on muscle memory than actual play, and it also means that class skills that might interrupt this rotation become seen as detriments rather than bonuses and extra abilities. So when I was told Ret would be on a system where you might count a beat or two between attacks, I thought that was pretty neat.
But in practice, it felt really somewhat boring, but again not in a way I could describe at first. Hit an attack, hit another attack... wait... hit another attack... wait... hit an attack, then Templar's Verdict. What occurred to me eventually was two things - Firstly, that Blizzard had said they disliked Ret's priority system of just mashing whatever short cooldown had just come available, but now Ret was such a proc-based build that you were still staring at your hotbars and wondering what just went off so you know how to react like a crazy game of Simon Says. Secondly, I realized that now that Ret had this breathing room to use abilities, they had really lost the two main things that were worth using - Cleanse and instant heals. Sure, cleanse is still there, but it's not very useful, and there is no instant heal now. So what are we doing with the extra breathing room? Waiting for short cooldowns and procs instead of seeing how you can help your raid/group/self in some fashion other than "hit palette swapped cultist #452 with large weapon".
I had a similar issue with Prot at first, but it went somewhat in reverse of how I explored it on Ret. With a tank, it felt annoying but somewhat necessary to have an attack to fill every. Single. GCD. Tanks are the only role that really is effectively fighting against both the enemy and his own group - by having to race the damage dealers on threat. So not having something to constantly push that threat lead made it feel very much like I was being... well, a bad tank. However, with a higher threat push put into each individual attack (and hopefully DPS who understand that threat is now supposed to be something that can be stolen from the tank), "saving" attacks to catch adds or waiting a beat or two to hit it at a more opportune moment puts a little more decision making into playing the role. Also, mana is almost a nil consideration for the build, as everything is put at a much lower cost unless you want to heal yourself outside of Word of Glory (hint: don't, just take the talent that refreshes Holy Shield when you use it). Prot just has a much better "feel" to it, without having to slot 5,000 buttons and having more umph behind each hit, it's actually a pretty decent solo pve build even when you're not AoE grinding.
To me, though, Holy has come away the real winner. While the build is having some serious issues at 80 doing raids, I could not care less if I was compelled to do so on pain of my own death. Exorcism with no cooldown has been a pretty big deal, because to me Paladin has been the only healer that was still stuck contributing absolutely nothing when not spamming heals. Other healers had (albeit shitty) casts to toss around, possibly even AoE to use. For Paladin, you had to run in, turn on Righteousness, and blow holy shots, consecrates, and shield of the righteous in turn to pull off maybe 1k dps. Now, you can just spam Exo, Holy Shock hits for a decent range more, and you just generally feel like what I imagine Blizzard has always tried to make the Holy Paladin - a traditional D&D Cleric. For the healing, the build does feel a little... lacking right now. With Holy Power really only dumped with Word of Glory, and Paladin's heals built around having spells that aren't available till 81+, you can definitely feel the shortfall. But I think Blizz has done a fine job of pulling Paladins back from "stack Int, spam Holy Light", though, and that's saying something.
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