I'm playing int he beta, and I'll be honest, I am really not thrilled with the changes to paladins. My main on live is a paladin, and I have one of each class at 80. I've tried all of the classes at low levels and many of them at 80-85 in beta, and of them all, the most broken seem to be paladins and warlocks, and warlocks primarily because of what feels like number tuning problems, i.e., not systemic ones.

The holy power system is... okay, but it really does feel like a bolted on way to keep ret paladins from blowing people up in PvP, rather than a top-to-bottom designed system. It's still a very cooldown-based resource system, so there's a lot of downtime between attacks usually (I probably have a 1:1 used/unused GCD ratio over a long enough fight), and the damage is fairly anemic, although that could be just need a numbers pass to address. In addition, ret survivability is a lot lower. That's intentional and necessary, but it's tuned way too low now, in my opinion.

Prot is... it's really not good. Even ignoring the survivability issues (which I believe will get addressed), there's the fact that the new "rotation" is pretty crap. On live, we've got the 969 rotation, which is predictable but GCD locks us. I can understand wanting to get rid of it. However, it's been replaced with the kludgey holy power system and a new reliance on Avenger's Shield as a big damage attack. There's possibly more dead time in the prot rotation than there is in the ret one, but with the downside that I'm expected to make more decisions than ret while simultaneously watch more indicators. Ret has to worry about cooldowns, threat on its primary target and DPS, while also watching for 3 holy power, which can be generated randomly. Prot has to watch all of that, plus threat on secondary targets, his own health, and then make a decision between which of three abilities to burn holy power on, while also making sure that holy shield stays up (which usually isn't a big deal if you're using holy power whenever it hits three... which you're not always supposed to), and watching for Avenger's Shield procs (because using CS or HotR can refresh its cooldown). Hope you don't need to use AS for silencing a caster! You're going to be using it for threat. Oh, and while ret got an interrupt, prot still has to use the once-every-30-second HoJ, making it the only tank without a real interrupt. It really seems like a mess now.

Just about every class I've played seems like a marked improvement. Paladins do not. I wish they did, and I'd be lying if I said that some of the quality-of-life stuff didn't make me happy, but paladins on test feel really... bad isn't quite right, I know they'll be playable, but they feel really scattershot. I'm likely going to switch to my warrior for tanking and my shaman or mage for DPS. And that, frankly, makes me a little sad, since I've been playing a paladin as my main since vanilla.

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