So i was in a 25 man Ruby Sanctum today and the Signet of Twilight dropped. I won the roll and the jackass raid leader by the name of Badpallie, confers with the other morons in his guild and they decide that its not a main spec roll for a feral tank and give it to the next highest roll, a rogue. The excuse was that I should be using a defense ring because typically they have more stamina. My counter argument was that agi and crit are more beneficial to me (savage defense procs off crit and the absorption amount is based off AP) than adding a lousy 200 hit points. I also argued that EVERY piece of druid tank gear is the same as druid cat gear and the only difference is how you gem it, stam for tanks of course, ArP or Agi, depending on your build for cat dps. Am i out of line here? Seems to me that if blizzard puts agi and stam on EVERY piece of gear for druid tanks and has since the release of Wotlk, without changing it once, that the ring should be mainspec roll for me.

I jumped on PTR to check things out...alot of stuff is still very rough. Imp only has fireball and bloodpact at the moment. Burning embers is pretty damn nice, though. Imp feels like it contributes alot more DPS now. I tried the new infernal and doomguard...they don't last very long now, although it seems like the DG casts pretty slow so I'm not convinced he is the better option unless melee-ranged guardians are a no-no. No glyph vendor so it's hard to check things out on that side. Conflag must be bugged...it was only hitting for 562 dmg non-crit. Wtf?

Definitely hard to retrain your rotation. Imp Imp instant-soulfire procs alot, although the innate aura-mod kinda helps you notice it is available. The soulshard ability is still rough...it only impacts about 6 or so spells currently. I didn't have a DM mod running, but vs. the raid target dummy my crits and regular nuke hits definitely seemed alot lower then I'm used to.

Edit: Someone beat me to it.

First of all - greetings everyone! Regular visitor for a long time - first time poster.

I think one of the blue posts I've read on mmo-champion nicely describes the reason for some of the changes applied to our class:

This is a very common line of argument we see from players, especially healers. It runs something like "I use all my heals. I seem to be a pretty good healer. Therefore only using a few heals makes you a bad healer." It should make you a bad healer (if our numbers are appropriate) but often it does not. Often those 1-2 spells can take you 90% of the way there and the additional heals used my more savvy players only adds 10% or so optimization on top of that. You might have been a better paladin for using all of your toolbox, but the fact is that even very mediocre paladins could heal just fine using only those two buttons. That's not what we are going for. If you're used to using a variety of spells, then this change won't affect you much.

Myself I haven't set my foot of PTR so I don't have a personal touch to what's going on there, but from what I've gathered, Holy Shock combo use became the default go-to heal which wasn't intended by dev's, so no surprise really that it's been struck with a nerf-bat.

My concerns are more tied to mana regeneration mechanics, spells and so forth, it's not looking good from a readers only standpoint. Don't get me wrong, I'm not affraid of any challenge, looking out to Cata with a big smile, because it will separate diamonds from rocks by the sound of it, but at the moment if I understand correctly Paladin healers aren't doing too well.

I've played WoW for 5 years now, maybe even more, lost track really, on and off but for a long time, twice had longer breaks for many months, but always came back, greater majority spent healing as a Holy Paladin, in vanilla as a human, come BC made a draenei, so I've seen and personally played us at our highiest and lowest. From vanilla times where all we could do was to spam Flash, beacuse 3 Holy Lights already sent us to a brink of OOM, to where I am today, where I'm not even concerned for mana for 95% of the time (across the board gemmed with +10INT +5mp5 - with food and flask at 720~750mp5 in combat while casting, + other classes influences).

Not even going to search for valid answers on blizz forums, overrun with trolls and whiners, but from your point of view, or maybe personal experience, where are we at the moment on a scale from 1 to 10?

edit: Also - is it just me - or our talent trees in their current form, hint at Holy meant to help with damage dealt in fights? Instant Exorcisms at no cost, from I've managed to put together on talent calcuators, something around +60~65% to Holy Shocks damage if specced correctly, +crit to damaging moves etc