Eyonix made  a large post today announcing the details of many of the changes they are making to gear in 4.0.  A lot of the changes we’ve already known about, but Blizzard is re-interating them here in official form and also offering a few more details.  I’ll go over the ones relevant to Holy Paladins below.

First, it sounds like it may be easier for Holy and Retribution paladins to do some tanking if necessary (probably not in raid content):

• Stamina - Because of the way we will be assigning Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before.  Health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes.
• Armor - The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth.
• Defense - Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.
• If you are a tank, you’ll have as much Stamina as you’re used to, though you may notice your tanking plate has a bit less Stamina than a comparable piece of DPS plate, since we tend to take the gem budget out of your most attractive stat.
• If you are a healer, expect to see a lot more Stamina.

These changes mean that we’ll see less of a difference between plate wearers (us) and other classes and also less of a difference between tanks and non-tanks.  Does this mean that a Holy Paladin who switches on Righteous Fury will be defense capped?  I’m going to say probably not.  The defense cap part of the ability will probably be a protection talent.  Even so, with more stamina and a closer armor value to tanks, it maybe be easier for a Holy or Retribution Paladin to tank some content, or at least take a few more hits than usual.  At the minimum, this means that we should see our health pools and armor to be a little more similar to our mail, leather, and cloth brethren and even to tanks than it is now.

There are some big changes to how mana and spell power works:

• Spirit - Come Cataclysm, this stat should only be found on healing gear. Non-healing casters will have other systems in place to regenerate mana, and we are designing special solutions for Elemental shaman and Balance druids who often share gear with healers (more on this below). Raid buffs that currently boost Spirit (such as Blessing of Kings) will only boost the primary stats of Stamina, Strength, Agility, and Intellect. We are also likely changing the five-second rule and other quirks of the current regen system.
• Intellect - Intellect will now grant Spell Power (more on this below). Intellect will also provide less mana than it currently does.
• Spell Power - Spell Power is another stat that you’ll no longer see present on most items. Instead, as mentioned above, Intellect will grant Spell Power. One exception is that caster weapons will still have Spell Power. This allows us to make weapons proportionately more powerful for casters in the same way they are for melee classes.
• Haste - Haste will become more attractive for melee classes by allowing them to recover resources such as energy and runes more quickly. Our intention is for Haste to let you “do stuff” more often.
• Critical Strike Rating - This will still appear on gear.  In general Crit will function similarly to how it does now.
• MP5 - This stat will be removed from the game completely. Holy paladins and Restoration shaman will be redesigned to benefit from Spirit.
• Mastery - This is a new stat that will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. It’s directly tied to talents, so what you gain from improving this stat is entirely dependent upon your class and the talent specialization you choose. We’ll talk more about specific Mastery benefits in the future.
• If you are a healer, expect to see all of your Spell Power converted to Intellect and Stamina.
• If you are a healer, expect to see spirit instead of MP5. You’ll probably be happy with Spirit, though, because mana regen is going to matter more than it does currently. Healing paladins and shaman will benefit more from Spirit than they do currently.

Its no longer speculation, Holy Paladins will definitely be using spirit on our gear in the next expansion.  Mp5 is being removed from the game completely.  Our current spell power is going to be turned into both Intellect and more Stamina.  This means that we should have a lot more Intellect on our gear (our current spell power + our current Intellect).  However, Intellect is going to grant less mana than it used to.  Its interesting that Spell Power is still going to be present on our weapons, which means we’ll need to do some math to figure out how much Spell Power each point of Intellect grants.  Also note that Blessing of Kings will no longer give a Spirit bonus.  One thing I didn’t quote in the post that is interesting is that Elemental Shamans and Balance druids will be sharing healing gear and will get a Spirit -> Hit Rating conversion talent.

I thought I’d make a point about Haste.  Blizzard hasn’t mentioned what haste will do for healers in this post, but previously they mentioned that, like Spirit, it may also increase mana regen instead of reducing spell cast time.  Maybe it will do both.  We’ll have to see how Haste will work in the future because this one is still a mystery.  Update:  Blizzard responded in a subsequent post that Haste will be staying mainly the same for casters, so we should still see the same affect from Haste on our gear as we do now. 

One thing they also mentioned that may affect us is that it will be harder in general to reach “caps” in Cataclysm, so we can probably assume it should be harder or impossible to reach the haste cap as well.  For Hit, Blizzard is doing this by changing the required hit in higher tiers of content.  In other words, if that happened today, you would need more hit to be hit capped in ICC than in Naxxramas.  I’m not sure how that will work for Haste, but maybe Blizzard is just making it more difficult to get to a 1 second global cooldown with Haste at level 85.  Or maybe haste will still have a cap and they aren’t changing it.  We’ll have to wait and see.

We’ll still be stuck being the only spec using healing plate.  Blizzard has said previously that they want everyone to be more encouraged to use their own gear (plate for Holy Paladins), rather than downgrading to a lower type (mail).  However, they haven’t mentioned anything about that in this post.  In fact, if the armor values are more similiar it seems like that encourages us to use mail healing gear even more than we do now.  We’ll have to see if Blizzard has anything else in store.  Maybe an Armor -> Spell Power modifier for us?  Update: According to Ghostcrawler we’ll be getting a small bonus to Mastery when we wear plate gear, so if you wear mail you’re essentially giving away free stats, or so he says.

 So, it sounds like the stats on our gear will be Stamina, Intellect, Haste, Crit, Spirit, and Mastery.  We’ll likely have Stamina, Intellect and Spirit on every piece with two of Haste, Crit, or Mastery on each piece of high-end gear.  Also, keep in mind the new Re-forging ability which will allow you to change one stat into another (at half the value).  Oh, I can’t wait for the theorycrafting to commence!

There’s a few more things of interest to note:

• Resilience - This will only affect damage done by players and critical damage done by players. It will not impact crit chance, mana drains, or other such effects.
• Spell Ranks - Spell ranks will cease to exist. All spells will have one rank and will scale appropriately with level. The levels at which you can learn certain spells are being changed in order to fill in some of the gaps, and we will be introducing some new spells to learn along the way as well.
• Weapon Skill - This stat will be removed from the game completely. Classes will start with all the weapon skills they need to know and will not need to improve them.

The resilience change is going to suck for us in arenas, particularly the mana drain part.  I’ve been really enjoying being able to eat mana drains in some cases while whacking a priest with Seal of Wisdom and have him go OOM first.  The spell rank change is nice but also interesting.  I wonder what new lower level spells paladins may get.  And the weapon skill change is nice as well.  That was an old mechanic that was has well over-lived its usefulness and fun and has just become a big pain.  No one enjoys leveling weapon skills.

I’m very interested in learning more about the Mastery stat and all the other new things Blizzard is planning for Cataclysm, and especially learning about the new abilities they have planned for paladins.  Its gonna be awesome!