Announced Paladin Changes in Patch 3.1

Always saving the best for last folks I was on the verge of tears of joy when I read this last night. (source)

• Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.
• Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.
• Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.
• Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.
• Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.
• Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

Kings is now trainable, wow, about damn time Blizzard. This means more free talents and 5 new talents to take it’s place on the tree.

Exorcism is going to be awesome to use now for all targets and an even better way to generate threat since it will be 100% crit on undead when tanking Naxx and other demonic undead things.

My shields can now SILENCE enemies and players!? Thank the heavens, please don’t take this out. There is no tool in the paladin shed to fight casters or even pull them into range without this.

Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced. Are they really going to free up that many talents for me? I think I might faint. I assume they’ll revert this to a degree but even if a few go through I’m happy.

The change to Guarded by the Light seems to be great in mana regeneration for me and with the upcoming nerf to the spiritual attunment (getting mana back when I get healed by somebody) this will play out nicely. All it means is that I’ll be able to keep divine plea running constantly if I need to.

Judgements of the Just PVP CHANGES! All that’s different is that I might take it to PVP but otherwise I still won’t for straight up tanking. I can live with that, a viable way to not drop 50g on respecs everytime I want to run around a BG and now I won’t be forced to be a gunner in wintergrasp since I can kill people better. Though with the diminishing returns on stuns I don’t imagine this will be a phenominal change.