Paladin Changes
We think Protection needs Spiritual Attunement for obvious reasons, so we are making it a deep Prot talent.
We don't actually like Holy and Ret having SA. It makes their mana regen depend too much on the encounter specifics. On fights like Patchwerk, they have no mana from SA. On dragon fights, they have a ton. That makes it hard to tune on our end because they are either starved in the first case or drowning in the second case.
We want to tune Holy through Illumination and Ret through Judgements of the Wise and let Prot use SA. All 3 can Divine Plea, but Prot can do it more often. (Source)
Spiritual Attunement
Spiritual Attunement is a great mechanic for a tanking paladin who needs the mana and gets it from taking damage. For other paladins it just complicates balance. On Patchwerk you get no mana from it as Holy / Ret and on Sartharion it gives you just a ton of mana. So you're either bone dry on one fight or drowning in mana on another, totally depending on raid damage.
The best knob we have for tweaking Ret mana return is to up Judgements of the Wise from 15% to 20% or whatever it needs to be. (Holy has Illumination.)
GC... you do realize that everyone in the paladin community is taking this as a promise you will buff jotw, right?
Such is my lot in life. We need to get some numbers for Ret mana after all of these changes and make a call at that time. I was just pointing out that we have plenty of knobs to tweak to balance the class without SA.
Remember, the goal here is not to nerf Ret mana. It is to make it more stable instead of varying wildly depending on the encounter. While encounters will always be different to some extent, when you look at the mana provided by SA on different fights, it can be pretty extreme. Ulduar balance is going to be tricky because we want the normal encounters to still be accesible to most raiders while the hard modes need to be balanced on a knife's edge. Having so much variation is just going to get in the way of that.
The Seal of Blood glyph will most likely have to be changed to accomodate this change. (Source)
