Late last night while we were all in bed Blizzard left a patch on the PTR. For those of you who haven't read the patch notes yet, both documented and not, Blizzard is still trying to ease the level up experience for newer characters. This includes changing where certain skills and abilities are gained as well as changing what gear characters start with. For paladins, they've reduced the cost of the lower skill ranks of several skills. All of this seems to be preparation for Cataclysm when they expect people to level some of the new class/race combinations as well as the playable Worgen and Goblin races.

HOLY
Holy Shock/Holy Light/Blessing of Wisdom/Consecration/Exorcism/Greater Blessing of Wisdom/Holy Wrath/Flash of Light/Blessing of Wisdom: Mana cost of their lower ranks reduced.
While this is something that won't be noticed by those of you raiding Ulduar and the Argent Tournament, it should help out those trying to do Wailing Caverns or Scarlet Monastary as mana can sometimes be an issue at lower levels. As Holy Shock, Holy Light, and Flash of Light are all included, this should make it easier on those of you trying to level as an instance healer.

More after the break.

PROTECTION
Avenger's Shield/Holy Shield: The mana cost of their lower ranks reduced.
Having leveled as a protection paladin, it can be frustrating sometimes with mana problems of not enough attackers or not being able to keep Divine Plea active. Hopefully, this will help with that and allow the leveling paladin a little more leeway when using abilities. Also, the mana reduction for Consecrate mentioned above in the Holy tree is nice as that is a large resource drain even when you've got multiple attackers to help keep your mana up.

RETRIBUTION
Seal of Corruption: Deals [13% of AP + 6.5% of Spell Power] instead of [15% of AP + 7.8% of Spell Power]
While this might look like a 15% damage reduction on the skill according to Ghostcrawler, it isn't. Seal of Corruption's tooltip has been incorrect for a while and they're just fixing it. Seal of Vengeance, on the other hand, had the correct tooltip and didn't need to be changed.

Blessing of Might/Greater Blessing of Might/Hammer of Wrath: The mana cost of their lower ranks reduced.
The Hammer of Wrath part of this change will be fairly helpful while leveling. Otherwise, Blessing of Might usually shouldn't be enough of a mana sink that it causes problems. There is also a lack of any seals or judgements in the list. We've still got a couple months before we'll see 3.3.0 on the live realms, so it's possible more skills will be added to the list.

Overall, nothing all that exciting yet for Paladins on the PTR. Hopefully, we'll see something more interesting than tooltips and leveling skills. Also, some Holy tree love would be nice... maybe... please?

Tags: ghostcrawler, holy, paladin, pally, patch-3.3, patch-3.3-changes, patch-3.3-wow, protection, retribution, seal-of-corruption, seal-of-vengeance, SealOfCorruption, sealofvengeance, world-of-warcraft-patch-3.3, wow-3.3-changes, wow-new-patch, wow-patch, wow-patch-3.3, wow-patch-news

Filed under: Paladin, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Leveling