PTR Build [9074] Paladin Updates and Analysis.

A new PTR is up! Check out MMO-Champion for the latest news.

10 and 25-man sets are up on MMO-Champ too. Looks like the 10-man set is the White/Bronze recolour, 25-man is Purple/Red/Bronze (aka the ugly colour scheme).

Paladin Tier 8 Set Bonus'
* Paladin T8 Retribution 2P Bonus -- Increases the damage done by your Exorcism and Hammer of Wrath abilities by 10%.
* Paladin T8 Retribution 4P Bonus -- Increases the critical strike chance of your Divine Storm and Crusader Strike abilities by 10%.
* Paladin T8 Protection 2P Bonus -- Increases the damage done by your Seals by 10%.
* Paladin T8 Protection 4P Bonus -- Shield of Righteousness now increases your shield block value by 225 for 3 sec.
* Paladin T8 Holy 2P Bonus -- Your Holy Shock critical heals now also place a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock's heal amount over 9 sec.
* Paladin T8 Holy 4P Bonus -- Increases the damage absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10%.


Paladin Tier 8 Relics
# Paladin T8 Protection Relic (Sacred Shield?)-- Increases your block rating by 136 while Holy Shield is active.
# Paladin T8 Holy Relic (Resolute?) -- Increases spell power of Holy Light by 160.
# Paladin T8 Retribution Relic (Discord?) -- Increases the damage done by Divine Storm by 235.

Talents
Protection

* Spiritual Attunement has been removed from trainers and is now available in the Protection tree (Tier 7)

Retribution

* Swift Retribution now affects all auras.

(Source)

Ghostcrawler Quote on Divine Plea:

We'll discuss changing Divine Plea to just Flash of Light, Holy Light and Holy Shock. (Source)

This will help with Prot using LoH as an oh-**** button in Raids, aswell as deal with bugs whereby Earthshield and PoM heals don't also get hit for the 50% healing reduction.

Looks like that's it. I can't say I'm not disappointed. No substantial changes apart from SA finally reaching talent status, and certainly no Retribution changes to mana regen or DPS.

It will be very interesting to see how well Ret Tier 8 competes with Tier 7 on the set bonus', they should be better or equal but I don't have the math to hand to judge. Prot Set Bonus' are awful, especially compared to Warrior Prot T8. The Ret Libram looks decidedly poor (mainly because it is Divine Storm-based) measured against the Deadly Glad libram and perhaps even the T7 one after cooldowns and scaling is taken into account. The Prot (wooohooo, block rating *rolleyes) and Holy (yay overheal!) ones look to be almost downgrades from the ilvl 200 Librams.

Still, at least we know where Spiritual Attunement is going to sit. Funny really as it's not nearly as deep as I though it was going to be, holy builds with it and Holy Shock are still possible and may represent a gimmick build for gimmick fights.