Secrets of Ulduar...
With 3.1 came the age of the dual-spec. For the first time, you could choose two completely unrelated specs and swap between them at will with a fee each time. For those paladins who had been swapping between specs every weekend for pvp, raiding, or dungeon running, this meant a lot less cash spent in the long run on respecs. While the up front cost may have seemed a bit pricey, but that was only about 5 weeks worth of respecs for me and I've used it much, much more than that.

Those that had wanted to try healing or tanking suddenly had the opportunity. Also, those that wanted to play in arenas and PvP more often also had that option. This suddenly created a lot more diversity in the paladin population with people suddenly trying roles and aspects of the game they normally shied from.

Also with 3.1 came a new attempt to try and balance Seals of Blood/Martyr. They made the seal procs do more damage and the judgement procs do less damage as a way to reduce some of retribution's burst potential. This averaged out to the same amount of damage-ish in the long run, but instantly nuking your opponent with a big Judgement right off the bat wasn't as much of an option.

Forbearance which had been raised to a three minute debuff at the beginning of Wrath was reduced back down to two minutes. There was much rejoicing.

Sacred Shield, an ability that was quickly beloved by most paladins was nerfed so that it could only affect one target at a time. Paladins had started the habit of just keeping holy shield rolling on their entire raid and healing in between. This wasn't what the developers had envisioned and was quickly squashed.

This was also the patch for talents becoming skills and skills becoming talents. Blessing of Kings which has been a long-standing protection tree talent was turned into a level 20 skill available from any paladin trainer. At the same time, Spiritual Attunement which was a passive skill available from trainers became a mid-tree talent for protection to keep it away from holy and retribution. There were issues in certain raid encounters where holy paladins were able to regenerate considerable amounts of mana by using Spiritual Attunement. Retribution also was gaining mana from this tactic, but the effects weren't as noticeable. To prevent this from being something players would intentionally try to exploit, they tossed it deep enough into the protection tree that tanking paladins still had access, but that was it.

A new talented skill in the prot tree was Divine Sacrifice. This was designed to be a raid-wide version of Hand of Sacrifice allowing a paladin to help reduce the raid's incoming damage. This skill quickly became popular in high end raiding guilds and was dubbed the 'raid wall' as a sort of raid-wide Shield Wall.

As another quality of life change, all paladin auras were extended to a default range of 40 yards. Being as holy paladins used to have a talent that did this, they reworked the holy talent to instead be a skill called Aura Mastery. This allowed a holy paladin to buff everyone affected by their Concentration Aura to be immune to silence and interrupts for a short period of time. If the holy paladin wasn't using Concentration Aura, then it would instead just double the effect of whatever current aura they had active. One of the amusing side effects of this was it boosting Crusader Aura and essentially creating a speed boost when mounted. Also, Improved Concentration Aura was changed so that you didn't actually need Concentration Aura to be the aura you were using to gain the talent's secondary effects.

The other paladin trees also had changes to their auras. Improved Devotion Aura's effects were no longer bound to only Devotion Aura and allowed a protection paladin to choose a resistance aura without losing the Tree of Life-esque raid-wide healing buff. Sanctified Retribution also received the same treatment for the damage increase bonus for ret paladins. This allowed a lot more freedom in aura assignments and allowed for more choice in what to pick for each fight or even each phase of the fight.

Exorcism, which had been changed to an instant spell at the beginning of Wrath suddenly had its limits on types of targets removed. This was done to help make sure that paladin dps from Naxxramas would continue into Ulduar (which lacked the abundance of undead that Naxxramas featured). One issue that popped up quickly after the patch landed was that this increased retribution's damage burst potential in PvP once again. Instead of working it into a rotation like the developers had thought, players were hitting the instant cast on the way to their target thus gaining a little more damage before they were in range for any of their other skills. A hot-fix was released that prevented this skill from being used on other players and quickly relegated it back into the world of PvE.

Everything was pretty much quiet for the next few minor patches. Exorcism was changed to not affect player controlled creatures to match its own hot-fix. Hand of Freedom's duration was reduced from 10 seconds down to 6 seconds. Blessing of Wisdom was buffed so that it didn't keep getting wiped by Mana Spring Totem in parties.

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It