My guess is that it means that a protection paladin will have Divine Plea ticking permanently while fighting, either by some spells refreshing it as you think, or just an innate bonus.

This is really helpful for getting mana when being an OT.

It also looks together with the announce nerf or removal of Spirital Attunement that it is what we'll be compensated with.

I look forward to see it on PTR, and some smarter mathemagician than me determening the impact of our mana with this buff and any potential SA nerf.

Let's be serious here. These changes are anything but thought through. Being able to silence your primary target 50% of the time with your normal threat rotation on top of being able to use Avenger's Shield on a group of 3 mobs every 30 secs for another silence plus the ability to interrupt once every 15 secs with Exorcism and once every 30 seconds with the stun is anything short of ridiculous for PvE.

So what, being able to silence a mob 9 secs in a pull without using anything bigger than a 30 second cooldown is balanced? I don't think so. Think about it, this trivializes alot of trash for one and trash is not going to stay as easy as it is now. Ulduar should have harder trash than Naxx (atleast I hope so, if it doesn't we'll have a bigger problems anyway) so what do you think they are going to do with this? Make all mobs silence immune so only interrupts work? That would be silly given the new buffs to Paladins. But on the other hand they can't make them suspectible to silence either or a Paladin would be ridiculously good for that trash.

If you had a choice of a tank for mobs that Arcane Flurry for ridiculous amounts of damage (think Tempest Keep and HoL) but are suspectible to silences, which tank is going to dominate this? (This being just one example)

Seriously, who here can justify these new changes to me with a good conscience that these changes were needed, are balanced and are good for the overall game design? Because frankly, I don't see it.

EDIT: I read over this again and it looked like I was completely against Paladins getting proper interrupts - I am not. I just think the way they are doing it is over the top and overshooting by alot. Why aren't they modifying Glyph of Exorcism to remove the damage component and put it off the GCD like a real interrupt instead (with AS keeping the silence).

A SA nerf would still leave retribution out in the cold unless somehow compensated in their tree as well. Now I personally rarely if ever have mana problems on any fight currently, but I hear of other ret paladins who do, and who knows what kind of mana strain we might come under in Ulduar. Personally I hope they consider rebuffing Judgements of the Wise back to 20-25% if the SA nerf is severe enough.

If i've understood this right, BoK is now an abillity trainable at the pala-trainer instead of an abillity from the talent tree? If so, i can remove the talent-points from the talent tree and bye the spell from the trainer instead?

Great. Was hoping something like this would come up soon since i can't see any reason for BoK to be anything different from the other blessings.

Remeber Divine Plea is a buff so if those things are critical you can /cancelaura at any time.

EDIT: Plea becomes Please!

It doesn't even have to be deep. Making SA the 11-point Prot talent would suffice. Prots would take it as a matter of course, PVE Retris would go from 0/10/61 to 0/11/60, but Holy Paladins would have to sacrifice 8% crit to take it.

That would be only new 25 man tokens and keep the 5-10 man ones? That is a good idea in my opinion as long as they add new loot to the 5-10 man badge vendors to.

I don't think they're going to add new loot to the current badge vendors. This is what I assume their plan is:

T7/10 - Emblem of Heroism
T7/25 - Emblem of Valor
T8/10 - Emblem of Valor
T8/25 - Emblem of Conquest
T9/10 - Emblem of Conquest
T9/25 - Emblem of Elitism (or nothing at all)

Any new gear is probably going to come from the Conquest vendor exclusively.

Unless they really didn't like tier tokens being purchasable with badges, they're sure to at least add t8/10 tokens to the Valor vendor.

Unless they plan on making tier set bonuses work like the arena set bonuses, and just be shared among the various tiers.

Ugh. I REALLY hope they rework new-Archavon to either:

A) Not drop best-in-slot gear (Deadly/Valorous in the current incarnation)
or
B) Drop set tokens instead of actual pieces.

The current system, while interesting in theory, is in practice endlessly frustrating, both because the chance of even seeing your class' items drop is the same as it was back in BWL/MC (everyone remembers how much fun it was to try and get their set when the boss only had a 10% chance per drop to be your class) and also because for hybrids, getting the actual SPEC of the gear you want is nightmarishly unlikely.

Example: Rogues have 2 sets, total, that can drop from archavon, which means that each loot slot has a 5% chance to be from the set you're looking to add to (say, Deadly Gladiator) - and if you only need one piece, each loot slot has less than a 2% chance to get it for you. This is the best case.

The worst case is a class with three roles in both PvP and PvE - say, a shaman. Assuming that they want, for example, restoration gear for PvE and elemental gear for PvP (one spec for each) then their chance of seeing an item from a favorable set is only 3% per loot slot, their chance of seeing a piece of gear from the exact set they want (Deadly Gladiator, say) is around 1% per loot slot, and the chance per loot slot of seeing the one, particular item that they crave (Deadly Gloves of the proper spec, for example) is around .33% per loot slot - or, shamans have around a 1.2% chance of actually getting the item they want each time they kill Archavon, while a one-role class like rogues will have a 6.7% chance of getting a particular item that they want each time they kill Archavon.

TL;DR: Archavon dropping set items instead of set tokens penalizes hybrid classes, whose chance of getting an item for their class is equal to pure classes, but whose chance of getting an item for their spec is much, much lower. If the droprates were changed so that each individual item had the same droprate, then pure classes would be penalized because their drops are comparatively so rare. The only fair way for Archavon's gear to be distributed is through tokens for both PvP and PvE loot.