I spent some time last night with Hammersong, my retribution paladin, on the Lich King test servers.

My time was spent alternately saying “Wait, they took out what?” and “Oh my god, I’m an absolute wrecking machine now.” This the biggest overhaul of the class since the whole seal/judgment system was introduced in the original beta.

Let’s start with what’s missing. Sanctity Aura? Gone. Seal of the Crusader? Gone. Seal of Wisdom, Light and Justice? Gone, baby, gone.

The retribution talents are now devoted to, appropriately enough, the Retribution Aura. Instead of an aura that only boosts holy damage, useless for anyone but you and some priests, you get the regular retribution aura that, with talents, increases everyone’s attack and casting speed by 3%.

Instead of one Judgement spell, you now have three: Judgment of Light, Judgment of Wisdom and Judgment of Justice. As with the old Judgment spell, these unleash some kind of effect on the target depending on seal you have active. However, they also put an effect on the target equivalent to the old respective seal. That means less messing around with seals to get your target all set up and more hitting people in the face.

Here’s one more thing that’s missing: Blessing of Salvation. That’s right, the bread and butter of endgame raiding paladins is now completely absent. Now, instead of a spell that permanantly reduces threat, you get a one-time use spell called “Hand of Salvation” that rapidly reduces one person’s threat over ten seconds.

This is a drastic change, but it makes sense from a game design perspective. A spell that someone has to dutifully cast every half hour doesn’t make the game more fun for anyone. It’s better to just re-balance threat in the first place.

Next up: Repentance. This spell used to put a humanoid to sleep for six seconds, just long enough to cast a quick heal spell or catch up with a fleeing enemy. Now lasts one full minute, and it works on everything except beasts. Not only does this make ret pallys actually viable for crowd control, it means they’re about to become annoying as hell in one-on-one PVP.

Alliance paladins get Seal of Blood now, the self-damaging but tremendously destructive ability that used to let Horde pallys smoke their counterparts in terms of damage output. The Alliance version is called “Seal of the Martyr.”

For the support aspects of retribution paladins, they seem to have taken a cue from shadow priests. You help your team out by doing damage. The end talent ability, Divine Storm, heals 3 teammates for 20% of the damage it does. Another ability, Judgments of the Wise, restores mana to 3 teammates for 60% of the damage your judgments do.

Most importantly, as it stands, that Judgments of the Wise talent means you have no more downtime when you’re questing. When I’m doing huge critical hits with Seal of the Martyr, all 60% of that mana goes to me. It’s rare I end a fight with less than full mana, a welcome change for someone who used to have to carry around gallons of drinking water. One heal spell later, I’m ready to go again. I’m not sure this particular aspect of retribution paladins is going to make it to the final game, though.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the changes. Things have been streamlined and for the first time I actually feel like I’m playing the holy avenger Blizzard has always said I’m supposed to be.

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