Update:  Sacred Shield, Lay on Hands, and Infusion of Light Changes below have all been removed.  You can see the new changes in my new Patch 3.3 changes post.

A few paladin changes are showing up in the Patch 3.3 PTR Patch notes.  These changes will affect Ret and Prot Paladins the most but will also affect us Holy Paladins somewhat.  Keep in mind though that this is the PTR and Ghostcrawler has specifically said that these are probably not the final forms of these changes.

• Sacred Shield: The damage absorption effect from this ability now triggers only once every 30 seconds.
• Infusion of Light: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 seconds.

What this means is that Sacred Shield is unchanged for Holy Paladins.  However, it means Sacred Shield will only proc once per cast for Prot and Ret Paladins.  We’ll still be able to put our FoL HoTs on a prot pally who has self-cast Sacred Shield, but the absorption affect is going to be much smaller than it used to be (and it was already small in the first place).  Ret and Prot Paladins lose a lot of survivability in PvP with this change.  Ghostcrawler doesn’t sound confident that this is the final form for the Sacred Shield nerf, but there probably will be a nerf of some kind to the spell in Patch 3.3.

• Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

This is a huge change for all paladins if it goes through to the Live Realms.  Prot paladins in particular use this spell often as an emergency button to keep themselves alive.  Us holy paladins use it on ourselves as a free mana potion.  Ret Paladins use it in non-arena PvP to stay alive.  Leveling paladins use on themselves when they get into sticky situations.  Lay on Hands has been there for us since WoW launched, its one of those class defining spells.  To limit it to only be used on others is a huge change an iconic spell.  In fact, this change was so unthinkable, it was created as an April Fool’s joke by Blizzard in the Patch 1.11 Evil Patch Notes.

Fortunately, this one hasn’t shown up yet on the PTRs, and if we’re lucky, it may never show up.  Ghostcrawer says,

“I wouldn’t worry too much on the Lay on Hands change at this point. I don’t want to promise we won’t change the spell for 3.3, but our intent was to revert the others only change before it went out to the PTR, which is why we didn’t patch note it. We have already changed it back on our local builds… we’re just not sure a Lay on Hands change really accomplishes much from a balance perspective, while it feels bad to lose such an iconic ability. We just don’t think the bang for the buck is there on this change, which is why we reverted it. But I’m not going to promise we won’t touch it“

So, it sounds like the Lay on Hands change may not make it into the game at all if we’re lucky.

Update:  Ghostcrawler has made a good point about how Lay on Hands is over powered.  Powerful abilities on long cooldowns are still OP.  Lay on Hands allows some Ret Pallies to instantly heal themselves for 25,000+ health and some Prot Pallies to instantly heal themselves for 50,000+, which is OP regardless of the long cooldown.  For example, if they gave Prot Warriors the ability to do 50,000 damage instantly on a 90 minute cooldown, everyone would agree that it was OP.  It would make them too powerful when the cooldown is up.  Lay on Hands essentially does the same thing. 

We can probably expect a change to the ability in Patch 3.3, probably a shorter cooldown with a smaller affect.

• Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)

This is a nerf and it sounds like its a solid one that will almost definitely make it Live.  So now it will only give us 6 seconds of Interrupt Immunity and only 6 seconds of more powerful resistance auras.  I guess Blizzard decided that 10 seconds was too long.

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.

This a change to the already earlier change to this talent made in the PTRs.  The key text here is that the duration has been changed to 6 seconds flat, no matter how long Divine Sacrifice lasts.  This is definitely a nerf from both the current version and the earlier PTR version except in those cases where all of the damage would have taken place in the first 6 seconds anyway.  I discuss this more in my updated post about the Patch 3.3 Divine Sacrifice changes.

According to Ghostcrawler, the jist of these changes is to change the paladin from being a “one-man army,” able to play offensively, defensively and heal without say the stance changing or shapeshifting or sometimes event talent specialization required of other classes.  He says that many of the balance problems they have with the paladin class are because of that core issue.

To me, it sounds like they are targetting Retribution specifically, since that is the spec that is most like the “one-man army”, having  decent damage, survivability, and healing ability.  I just hope that if they reduce Retribution’s survivability they also increase its damage or utility.

Overall, these changes aren’t a huge deal for Holy Paladins, but we’ll have to wait and see what the rest of the PTR brings.