You Should Proabably Expect Some Kind of Nerf SoonFollow

Paladins too defensive in PvP
I'll add it's also a problem where paladins as a whole are too defensive and not just the Protection spec ones. You see people describing fighting a Retribution paladin as a three phase boss fight. You might get them down, but then they can reset the fight with Lay on Hands. You get them down again and they bubble and heal. Compare this to an Arms warrior -- do they do great damage in PvP? Yes. Are they invulnerable? No. It's cool for paladins to care more about healing than do warriors, for I hope obvious reasons. However, if you are up against a Holy paladin, you should know that one of your greatest challenges should be dealing with their capacity to heal. If you are up against a Prot paladin, you should be concerned with their capacity to take hits. If you are up against a Ret paladin, you should be concerned with how much damage they should deal. You should not, generally, be nearly as concerend about the Prot's ability to self-heal or the Ret's ability to tank you.

I said this recently, but to reiterate, for most of the other hybrids, picking a role in a fight is much more of a commitment. Sure the Arms warrior can go Defensive Stance and put on a shield, but that doesn't turn them into a Prot warrior. Nobody is super concerned about Feral druids shifting out to heal. We had big problems with DKs earlier being able to tank and deal damage with the same set of tools, but that's in a better place now. Shaman maybe the only other class besides paladins that are able to shift on the fly from dps to healing, but with their mail armor and lack of major defensive cooldowns they just don't feel as hard to kill. (Source)

Don't nerf me bro!
This is just “don’t nerf me, bro” talk. We have been so gentle with paladin nerfs because we’ve been so concerned with returning to lolret, that paladins as a class are still very powerful in end-game LK in both PvE and PvP. Yes, it’s not fun to be nerfed. We get that. There is very little evidence we have over-nerfed paladins at any time in the past couple of years. There is plenty of evidence that we haven’t nerfed them enough. (Source)

You can't use LoH in arena, so what does it matter?


Also getting a paladin to pop LoH is better than making him bubble hearth.

As it stands now, your defensive and healing and damage is just too good in any spec. And that makes you incredibly strong.

Ret is just too strong in battlegrounds against everything. In any melee battle they will win through self healing, burst and least amount of damage taken. When fighting ranged they have tools to stay in melee range and destroy them within seconds. If I were to nerf ret for battleground balance purposes, I'd look at art of war, judgement of light, sacred shield and lay on hands at the least. Also being able to chase down a mage while spam cleaning between hand of freedoms is just stupid. It is near impossible to get an actual cast off against melee in this game, and judgements hit as hard as frostbolts.

So in other words, you want them to be holy damage rogues, amirite?

I'm sorry, but you can only push the nerf argument so far. Pallies...are intended to be hard to kill. They're intended to be an extremely high survivability class. That's the whole ethos behind paladins in World of Warcraft. That's why, instead of adjusting the base healing on LoH, Blizzard preserved the mammoth instant heal and just tacked on Forbearance if you cast it on yourself. THe enormous issue was that in TBC, Blizzard spent so much time skirting the damage issue under the auspices that, "We can't stick to the lore of the class and have them highly survivable and give them good damage output because that would just be too OP."

As a result, you ended up with an entire talent tree that was aptly labeled "lolret". You know how you deal with rets in BGs? You focus them down. Get them to blow their big instant heal early so that for the next 15-20 minutes, all you've got is their bubble to deal with. There are now at least two classes I can think of off the top of my head that can pop a pally bubble. But the BG duelists have to do everything one on one, right? And ret pallies are @#%^ing hard to kill one on one, aren't they?

No.

sh*t.

That's the class. That's what Blizzard wants for the class. So learn, adapt, and overcome, or bugger off.

I don't have a problem with giving Paladins a burst tree with low survivability. They have two with lower damage and the ability to outlast, already. No reason to have THREE survivability-based trees.

And ret's survivability isn't limited to one on one. I've watched them stand up to 3 DpS and just pick them off one-by-one. And these players weren't terribly geared.

How do you propose to fix the Ret issue then, Aurelius? Because them having such huge pasive mitigation (at least 45% physical resist for all but the absolute lowest geared 80), and then having the defensive CDs is a huge problem, if they are going to have high damage AND healing as well. And their damage is just amazing atm. I have yet to be disappointed by a Ret Paladin in a group, including the fresh ones.