There is an absolutely EPIC thread going on right now dealing with Prot Paladin theory, in which Ghostcrawler has discussed the thought process behind the paladin changes in Cata. Here is the latest:
process behind the paladin changes in Cata. Here is the latest (Source):
Here is the current design we have in our local builds. It might not appear in the next beta build, but could be the one after that. There's also a chance we will have changed it again before you get a chance to try it.
Holy Shield is a 15% block buff with a 20 sec duration. It no longer has stacks and can be overwritten to refresh its duration. It is caused by both Shield of the Righteous and Inquisition. You can Crusader Strike -> Shield of the Righteous over and over if you'd like, but the Shield of the Righteous will hit for much less without 3 stacks (it will hit softer with <3 stacks than it does today, more like TV does in the beta). Likewise, Inquisition will fall off pretty quickly without 3 stacks (with 3 stacks it lasts 12 sec for Prot and 30 sec for Ret), so there is some motivation to go for the longer buff.
The idea is that you can use Shield of the Righteous for single targets or use Inquisition to buff a larger variety of abilities when AE tanking. Furthermore, if you ever let Holy Shield drop off, you should be able to get it back up pretty quickly at full strength.
There is a chance we will allow Word of Glory to also proc Holy Shield, but we're very concerned about the right way to play becoming to just spam heals on yourself. We still don't want you to have to keep up both Inquisition and a 3 stack Shield of the Righteous at once, because we think that crosses the line into being too maintenance-y, and once you can do it, you'll feel like you have to do it.
So, in the current model, Holy Shield is a buff that is maintained by casting SHoR or Inquisition that lasts 20 seconds. Its stacks were removed, and now it is a flat 15% block as long as it is up. Let's look at how this change will effect our rotations.
Crusader Strike is our HoPo generator and has a 4 second cooldown. So, we should be able to hit a 3 HoPo SHoR every 16 seconds (which will reapply the Holy Shield buff). Even if we miss one of our Crusader Strikes, we should still be able to reapply our Holy Shield with a 3 HoPo SHoR just as it is falling off (at the 20 second mark).
If, we miss two out of three Crusader Strikes, then we have to make that interesting choice that Ghostcrawler keeps talking about...mitigation vs. threat. We could go for mitigation and and just cast a 1-2 HoPo SHoR (less threat) to make sure our Holy Shield doesn't drop, or we could go without Holy Shield for ~4 seconds, and wait for our 3 stack of HoPo to hit our SHoR for more threat.
Also, Inquisition is in the Prot mix, but much more limited than the Ret version. For Prot Paladins, Inquisition will last for 4 seconds per HoPo to a max of 12 seconds. Inquisition will also put up the Holy Shield buff. So, Ghotscrawler's idea is that we will cast SHoR when tanking single targets, and cast Inquisition on when tanking many targets (since Inquisition would buff the damage of our AOE damage abilities).
This is a further refinement to the "different rotations for single and multi tanking" mantra. Instead of just replacing Hammer of the Righteous with Crusader Strike, we will now also replace SHoR with Inquisition.
After modeling out our possible rotation, there is something that I think still need work...Crusader Strike is a 4 second cooldown, but the GCD (as we all know) is 1.5 seconds, so we end up losing .5 seconds out of every 5 in order to cast CS as soon as it is available.
I also thought that we had too many free GCDs, and as such, we needed some other ability to be a "filler" ability (akin to a warrior's Devastate).
But then I remembered Holy Wrath. We are going to want to hit this every cooldown to make sure our physical damage reduction debuff stays up on our target(s).
I actually am really starting to like how the rotation is shaping up.
What about you guys?
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