Suck it, paladins

WOO! New beta push. After having not downloaded the last one because it was so minor, and had absolutely nothing of interest for warriors, THIS patch is a very very welcome change. Both the Arms and Fury trees got major changes that redefine what they're all about, but I'll save that for another post.

In addition, 4 new instances were opened - Utgarde Pinnacle, Halls of Lightning, The Oculus, and Caverns of Time: Stratholme. Obviously the last of those is highly anticipated, but the other three are level 80 followups to lower level dungeons in the same hubs. Expect a near future post with lots of screenshots and impressions of each, assuming they're playable. I'll also give Azjol-Nerub another go and see if it's still crippled by terrible encounter bugs.

But these aren't the real superstars of this latest push. Oh no, instead it's something much more gratifying.

A little background. For several builds now, Retribution paladins have been doing insane amounts of damage. If I remember correctly, I believe it's because Judgement of Command is applying twice while the target is stunned, meaning doing double damage. I can attest to be three-shotted as a 77 warrior (albeit in PvE gear) by a 74 Ret paladin several builds ago. 2k melee crit, 7k JoC while stunned, 5k Hammer of Wrath.

As you might imagine, paladins everywhere sprinted to their trainers to respec so they could run around like morons ganking everyone in sight. Not ALL of them, mind you, but certainly a whole fucking lot.

In what was probably an effort to fix this bug finally, Blizzard inadvertantly made a very different change for paladins in the latest push.

All I can say is: karma is a bitch.

More posts later detailing some of the new changes once I get this monstrosity of a patch downloaded and get in game.