The Recent Nerfs

People need to calm down.

I know its hard to accept, but Ret was overpowered on Beta. Other classes could see it. Rets could see it. I could see it, as both holy and ret, on the giving and receiving ends of the stick. 

JotW nerf

Rogues and Warriors have limiting mechanics. A warrior can't walk up to you and hit you continuously with 5 Mortal Strikes. A rogue cannot walk up to you and smack you with 5 backstabs. They have to walk up to you and then wait for their rage to build up before they can deal out the pain. Paladins could walk and bam bam bam, repeatedly. They had to curb us somehow, the mana is our limiting factor. 

Also, I don't buy the mana burn argument. If the priest or warlock is able to mana drain you, you and your partner are doing something wrong. Between repentance, hammer of justice, knockback and partner assist these two should never be pumping endless mana burns into you. And even if they do manage to, you divine plea stun judgement and bam you're back to half mana. I repeat, if you're getting mana burned to death, your partner and you need to get better at co-ordinating with each other. BGs dont matter, they're fair play for anything. A priest can walk up and mana burn you, but you can walk up and 4 shot him while hes drinking.

Judgement Nerf

Burst damage was too much, as i said. Nerfing judgement was probably not the best way to do it, but it got the job done. Blizzard has said that they'll bring holy and prot damage back up when the ret numbers are in, so calm down. Your damage will be back. 

All the arguments about "omg i can't level as holy now" are foolish. Apparently you somehow managed to level 1-70 as holy with the old judgement system and this was not a problem? Leveling and farming as holy is infinitely now than it used to be.

Avenger's Wrath nerf

Its understandable. Its not fun going 100->0 when you're stunned. Its just as boring to die 100->0 while your opponent is immune. There should be some decision process between the two, not point and fire. Its not fun getting killed by it, and personally I can't imagine how it would be fun killing with it. What's the point of the hunt, if there's no challenge to the chase?

Finally, a word to all,

CALM DOWN

From the point of  view of a holy paladin, I have been impressed with Blizzard's attempts to revitalize the paladin class. Playing on beta, i could FEEL the difference of utility, power and mobility compared to TBC. We have more toys and more choices to make now than we did ever before. Blizzard has done a tremendous job shaping up the new paladin, across all specs. Each of our specs has undergone a massive overhaul greater than almost every other spec. The only spec that even comes close to how much of an overhaul we got is Boomkin, which has had its tree trimmed up and down. 

Even with the recent nerfs in the past 2 weeks, we have received HUGE buffs going from TBC to Wrath, proportionally much bigger than any other spec in the game.

Introductory Post

Everybody seems to want one of these, so here is my introductory post. I'm a finance/international busines student in NYU with great interest in ancient history, particularly military. I always was interested in wars of blood and steel and my first WoW class was a warrior. Eventually I fell in love with holy paladins, and even though I tried other things including hunter, shaman and priest, I would always end up coming back to paladins. I have leveled one dwarf paladin to 40, human paladin to 60 in vanilla. In BC i rerolled blood elf paladin because my girlfriend wanted to be BE (lolgurls). I've been playing holy on that character since his creation, 60 days played of nonstop healadinning. Something about healing has always clicked in with me. My first inspiration came while watching videos back in vanilla titled "battle medic" by a paladin who's name escapes me by now, but I've always healed as holy. I tried holy priest, and somehow the mechanics did not go well with me, I simply love the playstyle of slow big heals, since they allow me to look around and experience the fights and feel rawr.

However, with the WotLK coming out, protadins (which is what my gf played) lost their touch and special feel, so we've decided to try and have her play warrior instead. Being a girl, she wanted to be pretty (lolgurls) so we decided going human (i refuse to be a squid).

So now we're leveling holydin and prot paladin, which is a new experience to both of us, since so much has changed since we levelled dual paladin back in summer '07. New talents, new mechanics, new spells, refined dungeon loot and reworked healing->spellpower and speeded up 20-60 questing all are factors that we are interested in experiencing. (Not to mention that leveling holy is a completely different animal than it was 4 months ago, with blessing of light being built into holy light and the excellent glyphs that we get.)

So here is a preview of the characters
Toulouse-Human Prot Warrior
Profs-Blacksmithing, Mining

Amiens-Human Holy Paladin
Profs-Jewelcrafting,Enchanting

So far leveling is really interesting. The changes to judgements are great, its a noticeable difference having a strong judgement of light this early in the game. Also, the wotlk talents+spells went live when we were around level 12, its incredible how there was a noticeable change in Toulouse's aoe tanking ease. Before we'd have trouble with 3 mobs, only doable if she would tabsunder very fast. Now, you just charge in and thunderclap spam and you're good to go.
Exciting times.