"Paladins Are Changing ... More Than Any Other Class" - Blizz

Currently doing the rounds on various Blogs and Alpha Leak forums are the following quotes from the Alpha forums:

Complete Transcript here: "Quite honestly one of the reasons we saved paladins for last is because there is a lot we wanted to change with them. Paladins are changing probably more than any other class. The tiny little bit you heard at the WWI is just the beginning.

The discussion about a new healing spell was just to say yes, we think paladins need another healing mechanic. It isn't finished yet. We don't want to just hand them a thinly disguised druid or priest spell. We also want paladins to tank more actively and want retribution paladins to have a little better control over their damage without the bursts feeling quite so random. (And no, that's not all we're looking at).

It's all coming. It's just a lot of work. Try to stay positive. Everyone in the alpha was invited because they have a close connection to someone at Blizzard. You're here because we value your feedback."


Then someone asked why they didnt do paladin stuff first, if it required more testing, because they had a problem with not having enough time to test seals and judgements during the original beta. The reply was:

"That's a fair question. We knew we were going to make 3 pretty sweeping changes to classes in general that would all affect paladins. First we changed the way healing and damage stats work. Second, we changed the way party vs raid buffs worked. Third, we changed how much damage a tank is expected to deliver as well as reworking some of our itemization theories in general.

We figured it was easier to tackle those issues on comparatively easy classes like the warrior and priest before figuring out how we were going to have to change the paladin. Hunters got pushed to the back for a similar reason -- we were overhauling how their pets worked and needed to nail those changes first before figuring out their new abilities and talents.

We still feel like we're ahead of where we were on Burning Crusade with a more experienced team. So we're not yet panicked about having enough testing time."

Both posts were again by Ghostcrawler (he made a post earlier on that I put on the old WotLKwiki talking about making paladins more mobile healers and vaguely making ret and prot better).

It was posted by a long-time poster on the Official Paladin forums and comes complete with screenies of the Blue post (I won't post the guys name for fear of giving him any unwanted publicity). The next few weeks should be very interesting, neh?

Screeny1

Screeny2