I have no plans to buy or play MoP at this time (but who knows) and hadn't bothered looking at the prot pally changes or reading the TLDR of blue crap on MMOC.
I just read them. I actually think the removal of RD is a good thing (
and I was the one who proposed it, a while back). And I like that WoG is now off the GCD, like any other defensive CD, and that they brought back continuous consecration.
The rest of the changes make little sense and seem to lack cohesion. I don't like that they're basically turning paladins into three classes in one, restricting way too may core spells to one spec. It looks like they're trying to simplify the class/spec and reduce the number of keybinds required (which is currently much too high), but they're also doing a lot of things that make it pointlessly more complex.
Example, shield slam. What is the point of making the healing buff stack? Why not make that passive? The 3 sec damage reduction (from an ability with no cooldown that is used as part of the rotation roughly every eight seconds) is retarded and pointless and will make tank damage annoyingly unpredictable. Depending on where a tank is in his rotation, he will either get hit for 200k and live or 300k and die. This makes no sense.
Making Sanctity of Battle baseline may seem like a good or inconsequential idea but in reality it will be enormously annoying in raids, because normal raid lag + raid buffs = the rotation will feel really different and hokey in raids without actually giving prot paladins any benefit. This change causes prot paladins to now suffer a problem that has long afflicted ret paladins which is rotation staggering caused by uneven amounts of haste. I don't get why Blizzard made this ability baseline while making many other abilities spec-specific.
Same with Heart of the Crusader and Boundless Conviction. If the goal is to remove unnecessary abilities such as Sense Undead, why turn an active support ability that has no synergy with the rest of the class into a personal passive rather than remove it entirely? Why have a non-negotiable baseline ability that increases the resource pool, rather than just increasing that resource pool, period? I suspect the truth is that the programmers just suck and can't figure out how to increase the baseline Holy Power pool, so instead they add an ability that does that.
I think I would need to play these changes to see the overall impact. My initial impression though is that they overall make the class less elegant and more boring to play, and that they were produced by a collective decision-making process and not a few devs with a clear vision. Minor rant here, I strongly oppose collective decision-making processes and I despise that they have become the vogue in business and education.
