Quick Update on Avenging Wrath and General Prot Issues.

It's good to see that the Dev's aren't resting on their laurels with the release of Wrath and patch 3.0.3:

TLDR---> Avenging Wrath suggestion to put it on a shared 30 sec CD with Divine Shield was a great one and would make everyone happy and prevent the bubblewings crap...lets do it!

That last part is still the plan.

There are limitations to what we can hotfix. Those are essentially server-side changes. Changes to your client require an actual patch. Patches, sadly, are much more difficult to do. That doesn't mean it isn't important to us. It just means we have to test patches very thoroughly. Breaking everyone's WoW is almost always a lot worse than whatever bug or issue we were trying to fix.

We will patch this before the first major content patch (Ulduar AKA 3.1).
(Source)

I'm still not convinced that this choice is necessarily the best option, especially if they go ahead and reduce all damage whilst Bubbled by 50% which was discussed earlier in the same breath. Equally it still introduces a lock-out for DS meaning that AW simply becomes unlikely to be popped in PvP rather than never popped. Removing Forbearance dependence from AW entirely and simply knocking down damage while DS is up by 50% seems like a more elegant solution. Questions about how DS, DP, AW and HoP will to interact still remain, but can probably sit on the back burner until Blizzard firmly propose a solution. Hopefully this will be soon, rather than "soon™".

With regards to Protection's still missing 11pt talent and fallible taunt:

There are several similar threads on Prot paladin issues so forgive me for only responding to this one. My thanks also go out to other players who have tried to respond here.

I will comment on a couple of things --

Righteous Defense -- We're not sure yet if we want to change this ability (possibly through glyph) or just add a normal taunt (for free -- not the 11 point talent). Both designs have their advantages.

Health -- While I do think the "huge differences" between warrior and paladin health pools are a wee bit exaggerated, we do have an opportunity to provide paladins with a little more health when we change Divine Protection and Divine Shield. The benefit of Sacred Duty to remove the attack speed penalty will be unnecessary with this change, so we thought we might add additional Stam to this talent instead. (The cooldown could stay the same.)

We're keeping a close eye on tank performance in general as players start to run the Northrend instances.

--


We'll look into the JoL issue. (meaning that JoLight may be unintentionally inflating Paladin Threat, presumably for both Prot and Ret).


--

We have no fallback taunt, and we can not taunt mobs or bosses. We can only taunt the players. Here is an example that happened to me just a little bit ago. I was tanking Brutallus, and when I hit my RD to take him back from the other tank..at that moment he targeted and cast burn on someone and then went back to targeting the other tank. This blew my RD as it cast it on his burn target not the other tank. So I could do nothing about it as we have no fallback taunt until my cooldown came back.

We think this is one of the strongest reasons to go with a new ability – paladins don’t have a ton of snap aggro abilities at the moment. We're working on something now but it's too early to announce it yet.

(Source)

Still no news on the details of any new PvP utility nor an 11pt Prot Talent, just that it is in the works. My guess is that a new mini-patch for tooltip changes and bugfixes, including the change to AW and DS, will be online on or before the 16th of December in preparation for Season 5. The Ulduar Content Patch (3.1) is probably pencilled in for mid-to-late January and will likely contain the missing talents in each class tree as well as PvP and PvE balance changes. Having had a month of Season 5 and more time for the PvE Raids they (and us) will be in a much better position to assess relative DPS levels and PvP class viability.